Culture as Utopia: From the emancipation of the masses to Democratic exclusivity
The muac in context
According to Slavoj Žižek, the principles of modern architecture have become the ideological basis of the considerable amount of spaces that have been recently created and that are devoted to culture, especially to contemporary art. Examples are: The Milwaukee Art Museum (Santiago Calatrava), the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Frank Ghery), the Center of Contemporary Arts in Cincinnati (Zaha Hadid), the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem (Frank Ghery), the Prada Art Museum in Milan (Rem Koolhas), etc. These spaces share some characteristics and at the same time diverge from their predecessors from the 1970s, which were museums conceived as factories, containers and disseminators of culture. Specifically, the Centre Georges Pompidou also known as Beaubourg (Paris, 1977) and the Cultural Center in Sao Paulo (Brazil, 1979). These institutions were inspired by leftist cultural politics that considered culture as emancipatory. Their purpose was to make art available to the masses and thus, they were devoted to the dissemination of culture with a pedagogical mission. Looking back, however, it becomes evident that these spaces were from the beginning factories of cultural obsolescence, trapped in their own self-referentiality, with conservative politics and collections that were gathered and geared toward nationalist advancement. Moreover, different from 18th Century museums, which were dedicated to contemplation and to the exhibition of the historical memory of the visual arts, these “postmodern” museums live in the temporality that is proper to Late Capitalism: they exist at the speed and immediacy that has precisely transformed culture into a commodity. If modernist museums were envisaged resulting from a priori classification systems and constructing cultural histories based on universal and objective knowledge, the postmodern museum presupposes a spectator who is a “navigator” or a “cartographer” submerged into a myriad of signs and references with the task to decipher them and to create subjective narratives. From the modern to the postmodern institution we can also observe a change in the status of the work of art. Whereas modernist museums invented objects’ “exhibitionality,” extracting them from their original context and transforming them into museographic showcases embedded in a narrative, postmodern museums posit art (material or immaterial) as objects of “subjective truths” coexisting with the “real” and with “everyday life.” (A pioneering case is evidently Marcel Duchamp’s readymade).
In 1977, Jean Baudrillard compared the incipient “cultural production” with the production of simulacral reality. Using Beaubourg as a case study, he described it as a void-producing machine of hyperculture, a space that, differently from traditional museums, lacked memory and real culture. For Baudrillard, Beaubourg was the simulacrum of the cultural values that had been precisely exterminated by its external architecture of nets and tubes, circuits and ventilators (by Renzo Piano). In his view, Beaubourg was an incinerator of cultural energy that was devouring contents, a vacuous space toward which the masses, up until today, line up to “experience culture.” Finally, for Baudrillard, Beaubourg achieved the “culturalization of the masses,” by which he meant, that they had been transformed into circulating fluxes inside transparent spaces fused with visibilities and signs, giving leeway to the elimination of the production of meaning (in common).
Debatably, the recent cultural spaces enlisted above share certain continuity with Beaubourg’s politics of “cultural production,” insofar as they consider the spectator as a navigator or cartographer; they also tend to make a transparent symbiosis between the inside and the outside, that is, they fuse the architecture of the space with its content. This coincides with recent phenomena such as the worldwide privatization of cultural production, the proliferation of art fairs and biennials as instruments of diplomacy and/or projects of urban rehabilitation, with the critical domestication of artists, with the transference of symbolic power to curators and collectors and with the transformation of art objects into luxury objects for consumption. One can note that the emancipatory potential and the pedagogical mission that inspired the CCSP and Beaubourg, have been supplanted by the dogmatic principles of postmodern architecture fueled by a politics of visibility and of the creation of “polyvalent spaces.” In other words and as Žižek put it, the postmodern architectural principles of juxtaposing heterogeneous principles with multiple perspectives and incompatible materials, along with the modernist principle of breaking through paradigms and accepting new forms of seeing, have been captured by the politics of culture, crystallized in the form and content of the new museographic institutions. Museums, galleries and industrial spaces reflect the predominant ideology: As white cubes they are “neutral” spaces that express the coexistence of antagonism, freedom of speech and “difference” in opinion. Thus, in the past years, we have seen an important proliferation of spaces dedicated to the staging of democracy, reflection and dialogue and to facilitating meetings between the public, artists and academics. Conceiving the museum as a cultural forum, these spaces are also geared toward capturing cognitive labor and to producing cultural surplus value, seeking to promote the link between art and life that is precisely nourished by contemporary art, which has become the synonym of culture.
Taking these phenomena into account, a local (but not singular) study case is the MUAC (the University Museum of Contemporary Art within the National Autonomous University in Mexico City). Designed by the architect Teodoro González de León, it was inspired by a differential repetition (or creative citation) of the Contemporary Art Museum of the 21st Century of Kanazawa in Japan, by the architect Kazuyo Sejima. It could be said that the architectural language of the MUAC combines modernist traits with postmodern features, all reflected in its institutional politics. Its modernism is manifested in its verticality, functionality and sobriety. This last principle is linked to the belief that the greater the capacity to do away with adornments in aesthetic expressions, the more sophisticated the civilization. The museum’s diagonal walls and circular plant are foreign to the angular modernist orthodoxy, and its monumental exterior façade reminisces older “white elephants” disguised in transparency.[1] Moreover, its imposing interior and its warehouse-like exhibition spaces remind us of the gallery interiors in Chelsea, New York. The exhibition halls are enormous and necessarily armed with sophisticated controls, movable walls and huge hallways and lobbies. These characteristics are the lingua franca of global museography, as they have the purpose of facilitating the transnational exchange of exhibitions. We must also take into account that if the cultural spaces mentioned above are characterized by the principle of postmodern asymmetry, which reflects the idea of social equality without vertical hierarchy, simulating democracy and veiling the actual class hierarchy – which is horizontal and asymmetric – the MUAC’s monumental modernism reflects the local oligarchic brand of Neoliberal democracy: vertical, conservative and sober.
In her article “MUAC: Un año de creación” for the UNAM’s magazine (October 2009), Ester de la Herrán describes the brief history of the museum. Centered on the politics of the institution, it only mentions in passing the museum’s collection – of Mexican art from 1952 – and chooses not to address the shows that were exhibited in its inaugural year. Ignoring the content itself, the text makes evident that the museum has embraced with great enthusiasm the postmodern technique of culturalization of the masses, as it proposes less regulations in the interpretation process, giving “freedom of intellectual circulation” to the spectator and transferring to him/her resources for aesthetic speculation; it also envisions its architectural space as a site for sensorial experiences (for its disoriented and stunned “user,” Disney-style). Furthermore, confusing the notion of “values” with “concepts,” MUAC follows an ideal of museum grounded on three oxymorons. The first one is, “vanguard institution,” founded on the legendary Mexican misunderstanding of Trotsky, and previously crystallized in the idea of “institutional revolution.” The second is “democratic exclusivity,” grounded on the fantasy that art is for everybody and addressed to everyone. The third is “realist utopia,” based on the museum’s goal to be coherent with its surroundings and with reality, taking into account “the future realistically.” Apart from the oxymorons, the principles of MUAC are inspired in another troubling confusion between information, knowledge and cultural production, as it seeks to “disseminate culture at the very speed in which knowledge is produced and information is transmitted.” As we have seen, this Neoliberal tendency to promote de-historization and to obliterate memory (except for the selective emphasis on certain traumatic memory that is ceaselessly evoked to justify another genocide) was a tendency inherited from the postmodern museums. Moreover, the institutional policies of MUAC exercise post-Fordist methods of cultural production as: “Given that the museum seeks to attain the capacity to give surplus value to work that is produced geared toward the good of the community and of society, the goal of the museum is to accumulate intellectual capital effectively, to mix individual talents and fragmented knowledge.” MUAC’s politics are also aligned with trendy aesthetic theories – the equivalent of the Washington Consensus in cultural production. Amongst others, the aesthetics of relationality and participation of Nicolas Bourriaud, who considers the viewer to be a co-protagonist, user and active element in the production of meaning. The notion of participatory subject moreover, is the basis of contemporary democracy under capitalism of accumulation. MUAC policies seek also to “transcend the limits of the museums’ space in order to discover, with a professional gaze, other means of encounter with the community and with society.” By accounting for the professionalization of the aesthetics of intervention and social engagement, a discrete cognitive work division is furthermore established between the artist or curator (posited as expert or professional) and the spectator-consumer-user.
Without being able to distinguish knowledge from information, aesthetic experience and communication or design from subjective experience, or politicized art from social work, MUAC’s institutional politics apply methods of corporate management to cultural production such as administration, interaction and synergy (and perhaps downsizing as well?). Without veiling its awareness of its role as a transmitter of official ideology, they aim at “circulating concepts or cognitive structures from which it becomes possible to potentially frame museographical objects, in order to subsume them under a particular point of view.” This of course, with “social responsibility,” and creating “meaningful experiences” in a “harmonic and malleable space.” Envisaging the museographic space as a territory and as a fertile ground bears Deleuzean resonances – another reference to the cultural equivalent of the global Washington Consensus – the same goes for the idea of creating exhibitions based on concepts or on the creation of concepts, and on the emphasis on provoking multisensorial immersive experiences (Here they probably have in mind Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s expensive stunning toys). Their politics of conceiving the spectator-user (here: body-without-organs) as an entity that will travel in the fertile territory of the museum is also Deleuzean; thus, like a line of flight, the subject shall map out meanings and enjoy the museum’s vanguardist-scientific “plateaux.” And evidently, harvesting individual meaning and living valuable subjective experiences.
The politics of culture as emancipatory utopia from the 1960s, which, as Baudrillard indicated, managed to disorient the masses by making them navigate through and map out an overwhelming traffic of signs, meanings and references, has become a sort of form of “soft” neoliberal modulation (as a way of indoctrination), crystallizing in an incipient and oxymoronic “democratic exclusivity.” This is reflected in the local particularities of the structural elements of the Neoliberalization of cultural production in Mexico. Specifically, in the distinction between producers and consumers of culture, which is indisputably based on class divisions. There is also the gradual transference of the Nation-State to the private sector – according to its website, MUAC works with donations and subsidies from corporations like Cemex, Jumex, Zimac, FEMSA, Televisa, City Express Hotels, Aeroméxico, Comex, Teletect and from individuals such as Miguel Alemán Velasco, Alfredo Harp Helú, José Luis Chong, etc. In this manner, the interests and worldviews of the oligarchy are visualized and reinforced by the artists-enterpreneurs, whose creative platforms are based, for example, on superfluous and formulaic tensions between “usefulness and beauty,” “copy and original,” “conceptual sociology” and “the poetry of the everyday,” seeking to deliver cultural-sensorial-conceptual surplus value.
These alarming developments in the cultural panorama are precisely the antithesis of culture. A definition of culture provided by Baudrillard is, culture as the site of the secret, of seduction, of insinuation and of symbolic and ritual exchange. Culture (or what is “authentic”), according to capitalism, however, is that which is about to be captured either as a commodity or as a consumer niche – see the case of culture from Oaxaca – or as a tourist destination (exclusive or for the masses). The Neoliberal tendency to understand culture as the production of social relations and meaningful experiences that is taken up by MUAC, makes of this institution both an alibi and a mirror-reflection of the ongoing social implosion, political deterrence and cultural fissuring. Paradoxically, the museum is erected in front of a square that functions like a monument to public space; however, the enunciation that the institution projects into the social field is that of selling an idea of Mexican culture that is disconnected from the socio-political reality. As an interactive space, it is not organic but pre-destined toward a goal, which is that of being a unitary space devoted to the exercise of “cultural experiences.” Its deceitful interior vacuity transforms the spectators into an automated mass circulating aimlessly, playing at cultural stimulation and consuming culture. With these users swarming inside a space shared with the unitary body that governs it, a body that is made up of patrons, donators and culture experts, the oxymoron of “democratic exclusivity” is laid bare. Finally, MUAC fulfills the national bicentennial desire to project a sophisticated, autopoetic and singular image to the outside, simulating local cultural values adjusted to consensual values at the global scale. At the same time, it turns cultural producers into executives of culture and the art object into renewable and disposable contents, destroying real live culture and diffusing power by way of the discrete neutralization of the critical and visionary potential of art.
Irmgard Emmelhainz, Mexico City, December 2009.
References
· Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations VI: The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence,” URL: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-simulacra-and-simulation-06-the-beaubourg-effect.html.
· Ester de la Herrán, “MUAC: Un año de creación,” Revista de la Universidad de México (October 2009).
· Slavoj Žižek, Conference No. 2: “Architectural Parallax” from his Masterclass: Notes Towards a Definition of Communist Culture, at the Birkbeck Humanities Institute, London, June 15th, 2009. URL: http://mariborchan.com/2009/06/16/slavoj-zizek-architectural-parallax/
[1] In Mexico, “white elephant” is the term used to designate official cultural projects that seek to represent a party’s or a term’s progressive and engaged cultural politics. These museums, libraries, monuments, etc., are commonly known to be instruments of official publicity campaigns, and a recent case is the “José Vasconcelos Library.” Created during Vicente Fox’s regime, it was forced to close shortly after inauguration due to its bad architectural design and cheap materials that were damaging the library’s holdings and making it unusable. The roof’s leaking was also harming Gabriel Orozco’s site-specific intervention, Matrix móvil, currently on display for the artist’s retrospective at MoMA.
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