modernism and the museum revisited

Modernism and the Museum RevisitedAuthor(s): Douglas Brent McBrideReviewed work(s):Source: New German Critique, No. 99, Modernism after Postmodernity (Fall, 2006), pp. 209-233Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27669182 .

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Modernism and the Museum Revisited

Douglas Brent McBride

The Museum as Mass Medium

When the Museum of Modern Art in New York was promoting its recent

$800 million capital campaign, MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry argued that

the once-rarified institution of the art museum had become a mass cultural phe nomenon. "Once seen as elite, these institutions enjoy broad, popular appeal," he claimed.1 The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis was just as emphatic in

promoting its $80 million expansion. "The metaphor for the museum is no

longer a church or temple," Walker director Kathy Halbreich wrote in a public statement, "but a lively forum or town square."2 In fact, her institution offers

striking evidence for a radical change in the social character of art museums.

For years, the Walker's After Hours series turned its gallery spaces into a hot

spot for singles until late on Friday night. The next day, couples unloaded

kids for children's programming and lined up to play miniature golf in the

sculpture garden, after navigating the mirrored labyrinth along the way. What

would a time-traveling modernist make of this scene? It recalls the amuse

ment parks they loved, not the museum they loathed. That institution was a

Special thanks to Katherine Arens, Sabine Hake, Andreas Michel, William Rasch, and Janet Ward

for reading drafts of this essay. 1. Glenn D. Lowry, "The State of the Museum, Ever Changing," New York Times, January 10,

1999. Cf. Lowry's lucid and articulate contributions to the volume Whose Muse? Art Museums and

the Public Trust, ed. James Cuno (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 2. Kathy Halbreich, "Director's Statement," January 26, 2003, expansion.walkerart.org/dir_

statement.wac.

New German Critique 99, Vol. 33, No. 3, Fall 2006

DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2006-016 ? 2006 by New German Critique, Inc.

209



210 Modernism and the Museum Revisited

mausoleum where the nineteenth century "put the art of the past to death," as

Theodor W. Adorno once said.3

A century after modernists promised to destroy it, the museum sur

vives and even thrives, while modernism finds itself relegated to the museum.

Of course, there is a causal relationship between these facts. MoMA and the

Walker exist only because of modern art, and their promotion of modernism

contributed to its triumph in the twentieth century. Andreas Huyssen has

observed ironically that "the musealization of the avant-garde's project to

cross the boundaries between art and life has actually helped to bring down

the walls of the museum, to democratize the institution, at least in terms of

accessibility."4 Hence MoMA and the Walker each made glass walls, a sym bol of democratic transparency in modern architecture, the central feature of

recent expansion projects. This gesture indicates one way that modernism

transformed the museum, as museums embraced modernism and assimilated

its critique during the twentieth century. In this regard, Huyssen's analysis of the contemporary museum as mass

medium offers a valuable point of reference to revisit the modernist critique from a postmodern perspective. In promoting the idea that the museum has

become a popular social space, Lowry cited Huyssen to draw a contrast between

"the solitary pursuit of looking at a digital reproduction of an object in cyber

space and the social experience of seeing the actual object in a museum."5 This

argument represents a surprising reversal of Walter Benjamin's influential

analysis of cinema as a mass medium. In particular, Benjamin contrasted the

social alienation of solitary museum viewing with the intersubjective experi ence of viewing a film en masse.6 One premise of my revision of the modern

ist critique is that Lowry's assessment of the art museum's new social status

is essentially correct: the individualization of media consumerism, on the one

hand, and increasing socialization of museum space, on the other, has turned

Benjamin's analysis on its head. This historic change raises significant ques tions about the museum's status as social space, which a revision of modern

ism's critique can address today.

3. Theodor W. Adorno, "Val?ry Proust Museum," in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (London: Spearman, 1967), 177.

4. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York:

Routledge, 1995), 20.

5. Lowry, "State of the Museum."

6. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," in

Selected Writings, trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni

versity Press, 2003), 251-83, esp. 264-65.



Douglas Brent McBride 211

The conceptual frame for my revision is derived from Michel Foucault's

concept of heterotopia. In a lecture titled "Of Other Spaces," Foucault analyzed the nineteenth-century museum as an example of a social space he contrasted

with the concept of utopia, a nonplace. A heterotopia, on the other hand, is a real

site that functions as a kind of countersite, an "effectively enacted utopia in

which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted."7 Since the founding of the first public collections some two centuries ago, museums have always

represented, contested, and inverted the social order beyond their walls. The

modernists of a century ago attacked the museum of their day for not address

ing this social function in a critical way. Instead of representing the diversity of

society, art museums enshrined the taste of a narrow elite. Instead of contest

ing power, they celebrated royal privilege. And instead of inverting social con

ventions, they disciplined visitors in acceptable behavior.

In contrast to the cloistered sterility of museums, the expressionist gen eration that came of age in 1910 saw in the social and sensory exuberance of

amusement parks a glimpse of the emancipatory social unity they hoped to

establish with the popularization of aesthetic experience. What they failed to

foresee was how industrial production, corporate management, and commer

cial marketing would forestall the emancipatory potential of mass culture,

although each factor was essential to the success of amusement parks at the turn

of the twentieth century. The process of cultural commodification did not

stop at the museum door. Indeed, the industrialization of museum economics

critiqued by Hans Haacke and Rosalind Krauss has reached a level that makes

it difficult to think museums offer resistance to the commercial sphere of cul

ture today.8 To begin understanding the museum's social status as mass medium, I would like to review a historical instance in which a museum won a mass

audience by opening its halls to modern art.

Modernism, a Museum, and the Masses

The National Gallery in Berlin is a monument to an age in which museum

building was synonymous with nation building. Its genesis (1862-76) coin

cided with Prussia's wars with Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France

(1870-71) that anticipated German unification in 1871. Its completion marked

the culmination of a process that had begun eight decades earlier, when the

7. Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 24.

8. Cf. Hans Haacke, "Museums, Managers of Consciousness," in Unfinished Business, ed.

Brian Wallis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 60-72; and Rosalind Krauss, "The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum," October 54 (1990): 3-17.




opening of a public museum in a former palace (the Louvre) by a revolution

ary government led other, less revolutionary regimes to also promote the iden

tification of a people with a state by establishing national museums of art.

Friedrich August Stiiler's design, a historicist version of a classical Greek

temple, was meant "to celebrate the fusion of national culture, patriotism, and dynastic power."9 However, in implementing its project of employing a

German culture to create a German people, the royal house had only a lim

ited idea of who constituted the people. Standing before the imposing facade

of the National Gallery, it seems difficult to dispute the claim that it "rarely, if ever, occurred to the middle and lower classes to enter these forbidding pan theons of art, which they took to be the exclusive preserves of the ruling and

governing class."10 To clarify whose preserve this was, Kaiser Wilhelm I had

an equestrian statue of his father positioned amid the steps leading to the upper

gallery (fig. 1). The stage was set for modernism's conquest of the museum when Hugo

von Tschudi was appointed director of the National Gallery in 1896. Tschudi

began his tenure by overhauling the collection, which documented nineteenth

century German painting, and buying recent art with little regard for the insti

tution's patriotic function. His acquisition of French impressionists led to a

public dispute with Wilhelm II that made his resignation, submitted in 1908,

inevitable.11 When the first expressionist periodical, Der Sturm {The Tempest),

began publishing in 1910, it initiated a campaign to rehabilitate Tschudi and

challenge the establishment that opposed him. "In this country, first-rate muse

ums, universities, and barracks thrive and industry blooms, while creative spir its die of thirst," R. Laudon wrote in Der Sturm in May 1910. "Only those who

see patriotism in praise for the royal family, progress in government decrees, or social perfection in the development of a military caste enjoy the beneficial

glow of an establishment sun."12 All this changed within a decade, when war

and mass mobilization demolished the old order.

9. James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to

the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 113.

10. Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 202.

11. Sabine Beneke, "Hugo von Tschudi?Nationalcharakter der Moderne um die Jahrhundert

wende," in "Der deutschen Kunst": Nationalgalerie und nationale Identit?t, 1876-1998, ed. Clau

dia R?ckert und Sven Kuhrau (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1998), 44-60.

12. "Hier k?nnen vorbildliche Museen, Institute, Kasernen wachsen, die Industrie kann bl?hen,

aber der schaffende Geist sucht vergeblich in diesem Lande Quellen f?r seinen Durst. . . . bei uns

genie?t nur das Gl?ck offizieller Sonne, wer Patriotismus in Verherrlichung der Dynastie, wer

Fortschritt in Beschl?ssen der Regierung, wer soziale Vervollkommnung in der Entwicklung einer

Milit?rkaste sieht" (R. Laudon, "Ein deutsches Dankgebet," Der Sturm, May 12, 1910, 81). All

translations in this essay are mine unless otherwise noted.




Figure 1. National Gallery in Berlin, inaugurated 1876, photograph 1902. Courtesy

Landesarchiv Berlin, with permission

After the Kaiser abdicated in November 1918, one of Tschudi's succes

sors, Ludwig Justi, requested the use of a former royal residence as an exhi

bition hall and began purchasing works by expressionists. When this annex

of the National Gallery opened in August 1919 with a floor dedicated to

works of expressionists who had attacked the museum a decade earlier, it

became the model for subsequent museums of modern art.13 Justi sealed the

13. By comparison, MoMA opened in 1929; the Walker, which was founded in 1927, began

focusing on modern art only in the 1940s. MoMA's first director, Alfred Barr, identified the annex

of the National Gallery in Berlin as a model for his own institution at its founding (quoted in Alfred

Hentzen, "Das Ende der Neuen Abteilung der National-Galerie im ehemaligen Kronprinzen

Palais," Jahrbuch Preu?ischer Kulturbesitz 8 [1970]: 24-89). It should be noted thai the idea of

museums of modern art was not an invention of the twentieth century. The patron who donated the

original collection of the National Gallery in 1861 suggested in a letter to the Prussian monarch

that it be used as the basis for "a national gallery that could display the full development of modern

painting" (Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World, 112).




enshrinement of modernism in the museum when he canonized Max Pechstein

with a solo exhibit in 1921. Pechstein had joined the first expressionist collec

tive, Die Br?cke, in 1906, had started the New Secession after the Berlin seces

sion had rejected expressionist entries in 1910, had seen his work hung in the

first Sturm exhibit in 1912, had become a founding member of the Soviet-style

Working Council on Art in 1917, had acted as first chair of the November Group in 1918, and had produced propaganda posters for the Social Democratic gov ernment in 1919. In an epitaph published in Der Sturm shortly after Tschudi's

death in 1911, Pechstein predicted that the confidence the former National Gal

lery director had shown in his generation of expressionists would be confirmed

within six decades.14 As it turned out, it took less than one.

In the revolutionary atmosphere of the postwar period, attendance at the

annex surpassed that of all other Berlin art museums combined, including the

main house of the National Gallery. Critics complained that the masses only came to tramp through a former palace and gawk at the oddity of abstract art.15

This criticism suggests that the behavior of the crowds in the new annex offered

a contrast to the sanctified air of the museum, evoking instead the hubbub of

a carnival. More than a century after curious crowds streamed through the

Mus?e Central des Arts, which opened in the Louvre in 1793 on the anniver

sary of the extension of universal (male) suffrage, the image of the carnival

continued to haunt the public museum as its chaotic, curiosity-seeking, popu list other. Reports of art aficionados in the nineteenth century are replete with

sensational accounts of outrageous behavior by visitors to galleries, especially in London, where museums made sincere efforts to bring the lower classes into

contact with fine art and fine society in the hope that both might offer morally

uplifting models for the unwashed.16 As connoisseurs seeking contemplation found themselves jostled by noisy, smelly crowds, the temple became a rally

ing cry for limiting access. One German critic called the merriment he saw in

galleries blasphemous and compared contemplation of art to prayer. "Picture

galleries are commonly regarded as fairs at which we can judge, praise, or

14. Max Pechstein, "Hugo von Tschudi," Der Sturm, January 1912, 750-51.

15. Alfred Hentzen, "Die Entstehung der Neuen Abteilung der National-Galerie im ehemaligen

Kronprinzen-Palais," Jahrbuch Preu?ischer Kulturbesitz. 10 (1972): 9-75. See also Kurt Winkler,

"Ludwig Justis Konzept des Gegenwartsmuseum zwischen Avantgarde und nationaler Repr?senta

tion," in R?ckert and Kuhrau, "Der deutschen Kunst," 61-81.

16. Andrea Whitcomb cites one contemporary source that described a group of "country peo

ple" who pulled up chairs, unpacked provisions, and picnicked in a hall of the London National

Gallery hung with great masters (Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum [New York:

Routledge, 2003], 25).



Douglas Brent Me Bride 215

condemn new wares in passing, while they ought to be temples where, in serene

and self-effacing silence and in solitary exaltation, we may admire the great

artists," he lamented.17 Museums responded by erecting barriers that made it

unlikely the lower classes would stray inside. As Carol Duncan documents, these barriers could be as subtle as evoking the aura of sacral space or as blunt

as setting hours that excluded the working classes.18

A Culture of Gravediggers Foucault pointed to another innovation of nineteenth-century bourgeois cul

ture that constituted a heterotopia of infinitely accumulating time and thus

presented a counterpart to the modern museum. This social space also occu

pied a central place in the modernist imaginary because it served as modern

ism's preferred metaphor for the museum: the cemetery. In the first futurist

manifesto of 1909, which Der Sturm published in German translation, F. T.

Marinetti promised to free Italy "from the numberless museums that cover

her like so many graveyards."19 Foucault observed that Europeans first began

17. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar, trans. Edward Mornin (New York: Ungar, 1975), 70. It should be recalled that the Erste Internatio

nale Dada-Messe in Berlin of 1920 turned the image of the fair with its suggestive evocation of the

absolute commodification of art into a polemical program. For more on the Berlin dada fair see

Bruce Altschuler, "Dada ist politisch: The First International Dada Fair, Berlin, June 30-August 25,

1920," in The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the Twentieth Century (New York: Abrams,

1994), 98-115.

18. Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge, 1995), 56. In his influential history of museums, Germain Bazin observed that the sacralization of museum

spaces coincided with their opening to the masses: "No longer solely existing for the delectation of

refined amateurs, the museum, as it evolved into a public institution, simultaneously metamor

phosed into a temple to human genius. As either artists or aristocrats, the early connoisseurs felt

at home with art. On the other hand, the 'general public' experienced a sense of admiration that

eluded expression when it was exposed to the fruits of genius; out of this confrontation arose the

notion of art's transcendent worth" (The Museum Age, trans. Jane van Nuis Cahill [New York: Uni

verse, 1967], 160). Pierre Bourdieu's research in the 1960s confirmed class-differentiated perceptions of the art museum analogous to Bazin's analysis of the nineteenth century. According to Bourdieu,

79 percent of the working classes associated the museum with a church, compared with 49 percent of the middle classes and 35 percent of the upper classes. Bourdieu concluded that art museums

maintain social distinctions by reinforcing "for some the feeling of belonging and for others the

feeling of exclusion" (Bourdieu and Alain Darbel with Dominique Schnappe, The Love of Art: Euro

pean Art Museums and Their Public, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman [Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 19901, 112).

19. Umbro Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos (New York: Viking, 1973), 22. Marinetti's mani

festo was excerpted in several German newspapers shortly after its publication in Le Figaro, but

the first complete translation was probably that of Hans Jakob (writing under the pseudonym Jean

Jacques): F. T. Marinetti, "Manifest des Futurismus," Der Sturm, March 1912, 828-29.




building suburban cemeteries after Napoleon banned burials in churches and

churchyards as a hygienic measure at the turn of the nineteenth century. Until

that point, Europeans treated their dead not as individuals but as occupants of social stations, as reflected by the hierarchy of possible burial sites centered

on the church, in the heart of the city. This hierarchy began with the charnel

house, where the masses of bodies lost their last traces of individuality. Then

there were permanent tombs for the privileged few inside the church. This

category was divided into simpler tombstones with inscriptions and more elab

orate mausoleums with statuary. Only after European culture became secular

ized did it develop a cult of the dead. "In any case, it is from the beginning of

the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his own little box for

her or his own little personal decay," he observed.20 As Europe banished its

dead to the city periphery, the cemetery constituted an alternative city where

the individualization of death parodied the rise of bourgeois subjectivity. Like

the heterotopia of the modern museum, the heterotopia of the modern ceme

tery represented, contested, and inverted the social order of the metropolis. As early as November 1910, a contributor to Der Sturm had taken Mari

netti's metaphor and transformed it into a full-blown poetic conceit. In "Antiken

Rummel" ("The Antiques Racket"), Heinrich Pudor criticized the obsession

of art collectors and patrons for the old and outdated to the detriment of the

vital and new. "Our culture is regressing. We look for treasures among the dust

and dirt of extinct cultures. We don't live, we study. We don't create, we dis

sect. We poke about in the graveyards of history, looking for artworks and

documents, and build museums for the corpses of bygone cultures," he wrote.

"A culture of gravediggers."21 In actuality, Pudor's metaphor was already

shopworn in his day. The analogy of museums to mausoleums can be traced

to the French Revolution, when Catholic clerics protested the removal of reli

gious art from churches to the Louvre. It refers to the fact that museums cre

ated the modern concept of autonomous art by removing objects with a spe cific social function from their originary context (religious cult) and placing them in a new one (art museums). According to James Sheehan, the mauso

leum trope persisted in discussions among museum curators throughout the

20. Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," 25.

21. "Der Geist wendet sich r?ckw?rts. Im Staub und Dreck abgestorbener Kulturen suchen wir

nach Sch?tzen. Wir leben nicht, wir studieren. Wir schaffen nicht, wir sezieren. Die Totenfelder der

Menschheit werden nach Kunstwerken und Dokumenten abgesucht, und f?r Kulturleichen bauen

wir Museen. . . . Totengr?berkultur" (Heinrich Pudor, "Antiken-Rummel," Der Sturm, November

24, 1910, 308).




nineteenth century.22 Pudor concluded his critique of museum culture by

demanding that the museum's walls be breached so art could be reintegrated into life. "All of life must overflow with art. This most essential aspect of life

production, generation?must put its stamp on all of life, especially everyday

experience. Everywhere, this aspect of life must creatively reassert itself."23

The first prominent expressionist architect, Bruno Taut, provided a post

script to Pudor's satirical comparison of museums to cemeteries after the

mechanized carnage of World War I had turned Flanders into a mass grave

yard. In a piece titled "Die Vererdung" ("Dust to Dust"), published in Die Tat

{The Deed) in January 1917, Taut castigated the inability of Europe's "boring

graveyards" to deal with the existential experience of death. In particular, he

pointed to the contradiction inherent in burial practices that impede decompo sition. "We give back to the earth what belongs to the earth and yet refuse to

give up the wish for preservation," he observed.24 Taut argued that the wartime

phenomenon of mass graves had transformed the magnitude of this cultural

schizophrenia and made its continued observance unconscionable. Cremation

did not offer a solution, Taut added, unless urns were abandoned and ashes

scattered anonymously. His arguments were aimed at destroying the bourgeois

concept of the individual, which had resulted in a sentimentalized cult of the

dead. If the war's mass graves made this problem apparent, then perhaps their

example suggested the solution. In the field, economic necessity had elimi

nated the luxury of expending limited resources on caskets or urns. Instead,

corpses were wrapped in cheap cloth, whose ephemeral quality accelerated

rather than slowed decomposition. Civilian society should take its model from

the field, Taut argued, and redirect resources toward the efficient processing of

human remains into humus.

According to Taut's plan, the humus won from industrial production

employing modern technology could be utilized to plant gardens of the dead

22. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World, 51. The museum as mausoleum trope was

given new currency by Friedrich Nietzsche in the second of his Unfashionable Observations, "On

the Utility and Liability of History for Life" (1874). In critiquing the nineteenth-century obsession

with history, Nietzsche warned European culture that it must learn to forget as well as remember if

it did not want to become "the gravedigger of the present" (Unfashionable Observations, trans.

Richard Gray [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995], 85). 23. "Das ganze Leben m??te ?berflie?en von Kunst. Dieses Wesentlichtste, das Produzieren,

das Erzeugen, m??te unserem ganzen Leben bis in den Alltag hinein den Stempel aufdr?cken,

all?berall m??te es sich neu gestaltend regen" (Pudor, "Antiken-Rummel," 308). 24. "Man gibt der Erde ihr Eigentum zur?ck und l??t doch von dem Gedanken der Konser

vierung . . . nicht" (Bruno Taut, "Die Vererdung: Zum Problem des Totenkults," Die Tat, January

1917,918).




(Toteng?rten) that would present death as the condition for life, in contrast to

the decadent necrophilia that had characterized bourgeois culture. "Of course, the cult of individual graves will be completely eradicated," he argued.25 So, too, the traditional funereal architecture in marble. Taut's gardens demanded

a new architecture, one that could be both festive and dignified, light and airy, in contrast to the marble architecture of tombs. Here Taut returned to an idea

he had been promoting for years: the use of glass as a primary building mate

rial. Delicate and yet strong, translucent and yet reflective, glass came to sym bolize the negation of bourgeois subjectivity and the creation of the social

solidarity of which Taut and other expressionists dreamed, as his contribu

tion to the Werkbund Exposition of 1914 in Cologne demonstrated.

Learning from Luna Park

When Taut's self-stylized Glass House (fig. 2) opened to the public with the

inauguration of the Werkbund Exposition in May 1914, it immediately became apparent that the structure had never been intended to serve as a human

dwelling. Indeed, its interior lacked any accommodation whatsoever for cook

ing, washing, or sleeping. Its inclusion in the exposition, which received only belated and conditional approval from the Werkbund and even less support from the industry whose products it promoted, had been predicated on its

status as a public-relations pavilion for glass producers.26 In fact, Taut had con

ceived the edifice as the first expressionist museum, in the sense that it was

designed to house expressionist artworks and simultaneously be an expres sionist artwork, as he had explained in a manifesto published three months

earlier in Der Sturm. "The ideal architectural construction, which would itself

present the new art of our day, must announce itself in a viewable built work," Taut demanded in the text titled "Eine Notwendigkeit" ("A Necessity"). "Let

us collaborate in constructing this magnificent built work! A built work that

is not just architecture; in which painting, sculpture, and all other arts con

tribute to the construction of a great architecture, in which architecture is

itself cancelled and absorbed within the other arts."27 Taut maintained that

25. "Der Grabesindividualismus freilich wird gr?ndlich ausgemerzt" (Taut, "Die Vererdung," 921). 26. Bettina Held, "Kleine Glashaus-Chronologie," in Kristallisationen, Splitterungen: Bruno

Taut s Glashaus, ed. Angelika Thiek?tter (Basel: Birkh?user, 1993), 168-72.

27. "Das ideelle Architekturgeb?ude, das heute schon die neue Kunst darstellt, mu? sich einmal

in einem sichtbaren Bauwerk kund tun. . . . Bauen wir zusammen an einem gro?artigen Bauwerk!

An einem Bauwerk, das nicht allein Architektur ist, in dem alles, Malerei, Plastik, alles zusammen

eine gro?e Architektur bildet, und in dem die Architektur wieder in den andern K?nsten aufgeht" (Bruno Taut, "Eine Notwendigkeit," Der Sturm, February 1914, 175).



Figure 2. Bruno Taut's Glass House at the Werkbund Exposition of 1914 in Cologne.

Courtesy Werkbundarchiv Berlin, with permission




technological advances in the mass production of building materials had cre

ated the conditions for turning architecture into art, and vice versa. "Glass,

iron, and concrete are the materials that offer the new architect the media for

this transfiguration and take him beyond the field of pure material and utilitar

ian architecture."28

Indeed, Taut's Glass House was built almost entirely of translucent glass

bricks, with an iron superstructure to support and articulate the colored glass

panels that comprised the dome, and a pedestal made of reinforced concrete.

Like Stiiler's National Gallery, Taut's expressionist museum cited the temple as building type. But Taut's model was not the Parthenon but the pagoda-like towers of Luna Park, a modern amusement park located blocks from his archi

tectural office in a western suburb of Berlin. Luna Park had been founded in

1904 at the western terminus of Berlin's most posh avenue, the Kurf?rstendamm, at the Halensee commuter-rail station. The central complex grouped around

the park's dining terrace (fig. 3) presented a colossal caricature of the National

Gallery, complete with monumental steps, columns, and two enormous statues

of tribal warriors mounted on elk, comic parodies of the equestrian statue of

the Prussian king that oversaw the museum's entrance. By the time Taut began work on his Glass House, the amusement park included a roller coaster, carou

sel, waterslide, Ferris wheel, and cinema.29 Twin towers set on columns, each

presiding over five flights of steps, flanked the dining terrace. The crowns were

made of colored glass that was lit from within to create festive beacons of

light. Taut appropriated this technology for his Glass House, which was like

wise lit from within at night. A cascade of water split the twin flights of steps that can be seen leading to the tower pictured in the photograph reproduced here. Taut copied this technology as well, designing a water cascade for the

lower level of his Glass House. At the foot of the cascade, he installed a kalei

doscope to project moving images onto the glass-tiled walls, in yet another

citation of an attraction at Luna Park.30

Taut initially complained that his Glass House had been banished to

the periphery of the exposition grounds, until he realized that this marginal location put his expressionist museum in proximity to an amusement park

28. "Glas, Eisen und Beton sind die Materialien, die dem neuen Architekten das Mittel f?r

diese Steigerung bedeuten und ihn ?ber das Gebiet der blo?en Material- und Zweckarchitektur

hinausf?hren" (Taut, "Eine Notwendigkeit," 174). 29. Gerald R. Blomeyer and Barbara Tietze, ". . . gr??t Euch Eure Anneliese, die im Lunazauber

schwelgt. Luna Park 1904-1934, eine Berliner Sonntagsarchitektur," Stadt 29, no. 4 (1982): 32-37.

30. Cf. the detailed photos of the interior in Adolf Behne, "Gedanken ?ber Kunst und Zweck,

dem Glashause gewidmet," Kunstgewerbeblatt, n.s., 27, no. 1 (1915): 1-11.




Figure 3. Luna Park in Berlin-Halensee, opened 1904, photograph 1920. Courtesy

Landesarchiv Berlin, with permission

already located at the site. As he later wrote in a text promoting building with

glass, the involuntary exile represented a happy instance of serendipity because

it reflected his alienation from the arts-and-crafts nostalgia of the Werkbund

and his fascination for the "hubbub and entertainment" of amusement parks.31

Expressionists like Taut made it clear that Luna Park, with its bright lights, motorized attractions, and promise of social contact represented their idea of

modernity better than temples to the art of the past. The owners of Luna Park

reciprocated this enthusiasm by commissioning Pechstein and two other art

ists to design new facades when the park reopened in 1920 after its wartime

use as a military hospital and meat-canning facility. The result was an expres sionist theme park.

Tony Bennett sees the modern amusement park that appeared at the turn

of the twentieth century as an intermediary site located between the previous

31. Bruno Taut, "Glaserzeugung und Glasbau," Qualit?t 1, nos. 1-2 (1920): 9.




century's museum and traveling fair, which Foucault saw as opposites that

established antithetical heterotopias in the way each opened contrasting paren theses in time. According to Foucault, the universal survey museum of the

nineteenth century typified the heterotopia of infinitely accumulating time, which derived from the modern tendency to think of space in terms of exten

sion. By contrast, the traveling fair, which occupied an otherwise vacant site

once a year, exemplified the heterotopia of fleeting or festival time. In his

elaboration of this distinction, Bennett points out that the scientific museum

of the nineteenth century distinguished itself from the older model of the curi

osity cabinet by distancing itself from the sideshow atmosphere of the carni

val. He concludes that the museum came to see the carnival, which presented the abnormal and the deviant, as its "own prehistory come to haunt it."32 When

modern amusement parks began making the festival time of the fair a perma nent feature, they likewise purged themselves of the more grotesque aspects of

carnival culture (what Foucault described as "wrestlers, snakewomen, fortune

tellers") and assimilated the archival logic of museums. At the same time, amusement parks retained the air of festival time by offering popular enter

tainment, leisure, and the temporary suspension of social convention. Each

category refers to an aspect of modern sociability that expressionists observed

in the garish crowds that frequented amusement parks but found missing in

museums. "Oh gaudy world, you Luna Park / You tipsy freak show, / Watch

out!" George Grosz warned readers of an expressionist review in 1918.33 In this

early example of poetic montage, which included inserts of snippets from

advertising slogans and popular songs, Grosz suggested how Luna Park acted

as a heterotopian space to represent, contest, and invert all the other sites beyond its boundaries.

The Utopia of Glass Walls

Apart from Luna Park, Taut found inspiration in the futuristic ideas of Paul

Scheerbart, a science fiction writer whom the editor of Der Sturm once called

"the first expressionist."34 As Taut drew plans for his Glass House, Scheerbart

was already at work on a programmatic book titled Glass Architecture, which

was published by Der Sturm in 1914. Scheerbart concluded his treatise by pre

dicting that the introduction of glass architecture would "completely trans

32. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge,

1995), 3.

33. "Ach knallige Welt, du Lunapark / Du seliges Abnormit?tenkabinett, / Pa? auf!" (George

Grosz, "Gesang an die Welt," Neue Bl?tter f?r Kunst und Dichtung, November 1918, 154). 34. Herwarth Waiden, "Paul Scheerbart," Der Sturm, December 1915, 98.




form humankind."35 His advocacy of building with translucent glass involved

an implicit critique of the Mietskasernen, or rental barracks, where Berlin's

working-class population was crowded into dark, unsanitary, and occasion

ally windowless rooms in the rear wings of tenement houses.36 Scheerbart's

solution consisted of exploding the closed floor plans of Wilhelmine-era flats

and rendering windows superfluous by constructing exterior walls of trans

lucent glass bricks. He dedicated his book to Taut, the builder of the first

Glass House, and Taut reciprocated by asking Scheerbart to compose whim

sical mottos to be engraved around his glass dome. Scheerbart's mottos, like

many later dada poems, consisted of rhyming couplets in Knittelvers, a tra

ditional verse form used in children's rhymes, as this example demonstrates:

"Das bunte Glas / Zerst?rt den Ha?" (The colorful glass prism / Destroys

antagonism).

In the revolutionary aftermath of the war, Adolf Behne, the theorist of

expressionism in architecture and secretary of the Working Council on Art,

propagated glass architecture as "the best medium for turning the European into a human."37 The experience of living in a glass house would be discom

forting, he admitted, but he insisted that Europeans needed to be torn from

the coziness of their bourgeois interiors, which he described with the word

Gem?tlichkeit. "Away with Gem?tlichkeit^ Behne exclaimed. "The human

being begins where Gem?tlichkeit ends."38 A decade later, Walter Benjamin offered a gloss on this idea that illuminates its radical impulse. "To live in a

glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence," he wrote in an appraisal of French surrealism that explicitly referred to Scheerbart's program. "It is also

an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need."39 In a subsequent

35. "Das neue Glas-Milieu wird den Menschen vollkommen umwandeln" (Paul Scheerbart,

Glasarchitektur [Berlin: Der Sturm, 1914], 125). 36. The classic document of the socialist critique of the rental barracks is Werner Hegemann,

Das steinerne Berlin: Geschichte der gr??ten Mietkasernenstadt [sic] (Berlin: Kiepenheuer,

1930). Walter Benjamin summarizes the issues nicely in a text written for a children's radio broad

cast, "Die Mietskaserne," in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schwep

penh?user, vol. 7.1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 117-24.

37. "Das Bauen als eine elementare T?tigkeit vermag den Menschen zu verwandeln. Und nun

ein Bauen aus Glas! Das w?rde das sicherste Mittel sein, aus dem Europ?er einen Menschen zu

machen" (Adolf Behne, "Die Wiederkehr der Kunst" [1920], in Schriften zur Kunst [Berlin: Mann,

1998], 57). 38. "Fort mit der Gem?tlichkeit. Erst dort wo die Gem?tlichkeit aufh?rt, f?ngt der Mensch an"

(Behne, "Wiederkehr der Kunst," 59). 39. Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," in

Selected Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1999), 209.




reference to Scheerbart's ideas on glass architecture, Benjamin commented

that "glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also the enemy of posses sion."40 Radical modernism aimed to raze the wall that bourgeois society had

erected to separate the private and the public, in order to negate the personal in the political, as Taut's manifesto against individual graves clearly demon

strated. This impulse inspired the idea of glass architecture as the symbol of a

transparent society in which each person enjoys access and no authority can

hide from public scrutiny. This was the function of glass walls: to collapse the

personal and the private in absolute social transparency. A half century passed after Taut's experiment in building a translucent museum before one of his

colleagues built a fully transparent one.

After construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 isolated the National

Gallery in the eastern half of the city, a member of the Bauhaus generation was

commissioned to build a new one for modern art in the West. In his design for

the New National Gallery, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe embraced the temple motif of the original while rejecting its nineteenth-century obsession with his

toricist literality. Instead, he stripped the temple as building type down to its

essential elements (pedestal, roof, and columns) and translated each of these

into the industrial vernacular of a modernist machine aesthetic. When the New

National Gallery opened in 1968, its most striking feature was a wraparound,

glass-curtain facade that revealed the absence of load-bearing walls (fig. 4).

By exposing the art inside to social life outside, Mies's glass walls negated the

modern concept of autonomous art, which had been predicated on isolating art

in the museum, as Douglas Crimp observed.41 A half century had passed since

the National Gallery admitted modernism to its halls. Now modernism had

breached the museum's walls, from the inside out.

Mies's groundbreaking design represented a vindication of modernist

ideals in the second half of the twentieth century, but it also served as a marker

of modernism's limitations. Mies's glass museum gave material expression to the democratic ideal of social transparency, but it also preserved the gap between art and life by reverting to the semiotics of the museum as temple. In

fact, Mies viewed his design as a prototype for absolute architecture freed

from social utility.42 To achieve this he used an oversized pedestal as a bastion

40. Walter Benjamin, "Experience and Poverty," in Selected Writings, 2:734.

41. Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 303.

42. Sonja Hildebrand, "Design and Construction of the New National Gallery," in Mies van der

Rohes Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin I Mies van der Rohe's New National Gallery in Berlin, ed.

Gabriela Wacher (Berlin: Vice Versa, 1995), 6-31, esp. 12.




Figure 4. The New National Gallery in Berlin, inaugurated 1968, author's photograph 2002

to isolate the museum and force pedestrians to see it as a solitary monument.

His glass walls signaled democratic accessibility, but they also negated the

hall's function as a space for exhibiting oil paintings, since they deteriorate

when exposed to sunlight. Mies solved the problem of where to display paint

ings in a museum without walls by designing hanging panels that could be

positioned at will. But he could not satisfy the concerns of curators about the

effects of sunlight and was forced to add curtains that reinstated the visual

barrier. Today, curators rarely bother with using the glass hall as an exhibi

tion space and instead hang works in the more controlled environment of the

subterranean galleries located inside the pedestal. The haphazard retrofitting of the glass hall as a lobby with coat checks only accentuates the absolute

order of the mausoleum-like galleries below. Mies's dream of social transpar

ency, of undistorted communication, which was obtained through the sym bolic effacement of the medium itself (the walls that enclose and thereby con

stitute the museum), yielded a singularly intransitive result. Paradoxically, Mies's




monolithic glass temple reproduced the socially alienated logic of the museum

it sought to overcome.

Ifs a Mall World after All

In retrospect, modernism's conquest of the museum, symbolized by the ded

ication of the New National Gallery in 1968, had the effect of relegating each

institution, modernism and the modern institution of the museum, from the

realm of lived experience to history. In other words, it marked the end of mod

ernism and the modern museum alike. Rather than point the way to the future, Mies's glass temple to art recapitulated and completed, in the full, Hegelian

sense of the term, two centuries of museum design. This museum to end all

museums was itself born ripe for the museum, at the very moment modern

ism was being eclipsed by a new cultural paradigm. The future was unveiled

when the prototype for all postmuseums, the Centre National d'Art et de Cul

ture Georges Pompidou, opened in Paris-Beaubourg in February 1977. At first

glance, the glass-and-steel assemblage looked vaguely recognizable, like a

recombinant version of Mies's glass museum. But where Mies's industrial aes

thetic was restrained minimalism, the externalized guts and skeleton (color coded tubes, vents, turbines, steel frame) of the Centre Pompidou were all gar

ish, postmodern excess. The parts Mies had left out were reassembled here, but not as a temple. To realize the French president's vision for a multiuse, cultural complex for the masses, born in the wake of 1968, Renzo Piano and

Richard Rogers adapted a building type invented two decades earlier: the self

enclosed shopping mall.

The technological innovations that had made enclosed malls viable were

air conditioning and escalators. The Centre Pompidou, or Beaubourg, as it is

commonly known, was one of the first museums to integrate both. It was not

the first time a museum borrowed technology from a retail merchandiser, how

ever. Nineteenth-century museums copied the display technologies of Parisian

department stores, including glass cases and cupolas for overhead lighting, even as the city's grands magasins imitated the contextualized display meth

ods of museum exhibitions to sell wares.43 Nor was the analogy of the mall and

the museum exhausted with shared technology. A visitor to Beaubourg could

engage in many activities enjoyed by shoppers in a mall: buy a book, have a

bite to eat, or watch a film. Piano and Rogers called Beaubourg 's main public

43. Whitcomb, Re-imagining the Museum, 21. It should be added that Parisian department stores patterned their vitrines after the glass cases Catholic churches had employed for centuries to

hold the relics of saints.




area the "forum," but the mezzanine area where visitors socialized around a

sunken pit looked less like a Roman marketplace and more like the multi

storied atrium of Southdale, the first enclosed shopping mall, built in a Minne

apolis suburb in 1956. In fact, the activities pursued in museums today paral lel those at malls. As the editor of Building the New Museum commented two

decades ago, museums now double as community centers, schools, movie

houses, and shopping centers.44 Today this list would have to be expanded to include dining, concerts, travel, and a service that Beaubourg pioneered: child care.45 A recent New York Times piece on the contemporary art museum

described the institution in terms that made it sound like a mall. "It offers

great shopping, tempting food, and a place to hang out," a title shouted in bold

faced type.46 Today, art museums draw on the insights of mall design to shape

gallery as well as retail spaces in order to direct sight lines and maximize traf

fic flow.47

One of the first critics to recognize that Beaubourg represented a varia

tion on a shopping mall was Jean Baudrillard. His denunciation of the museum's

popular success (attendance topped twenty-five thousand a day, or eight mil

lion a year, as he composed his critique) is laced with a cultural pessimism that

belies a deep melancholia for modernism's failure as a Utopian project. It is

telling that the metaphors he mixed to describe the museum (machine, office, amusement park, laboratory, train station, refinery, factory, supermarket, ware

house) were indebted to the modern imaginary, as if he lacked a catalog of

postmodern references. Today it is impossible to miss the fact that Baudril

lard was describing a mall. "The people want to accept everything, swipe every

thing, eat everything, touch everything," he said of the crowds' behavior.48 As

he pointed out, the most valuable commodity being marketed at Beaubourg

44. Suzanne Stephens, introduction to Building the New Museum, ed. Suzanne Stephens (New

York: Architectural League of New York, 1986), 9.

45. One result of these changes is that a third of the space in a museum today is used for exhib

iting art, compared with 90 percent in the nineteenth century, Robert Venturi claimed when pre

senting his design for an addition to the London National Gallery ("From Invention to Convention

in Architecture," RSA Journal, January 1988, 89-103). Judith H. Dobrzynski reports that store

space in American art museums increased by 29 percent during the 1990s, while exhibition space

grew by just 3 percent ("Art(?) to Go: Museum Shops Broaden Wares, at a Profit," New York Times,

December 10, 1997).

46. Judith H. Dobrzynski, "Glory Days for the Art Museum," New York Times, October 5, 1997.

47. Margaret Crawford, "The World in a Shopping Mall," in Variations on a Theme Park: The

New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 1992), 3-30, esp. 29-30.

48. Jean Baudrillard, "The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence," trans. Rosalind

Krauss and Annette Michelson, October 29 (1982): 10.




was sociability. The masses not only come to see and interact, they come to

become the masses, he argued, again, describing the social dynamic in a mall.

This is where Baudrillard's critique of modernism set in. In its celebration of

crowds and popular culture, modernism revitalized the Enlightenment principle of extension. In theory, modernism believed that social, political, and economic

rights could be extended to include everyone, much as the modern museum

believed it could expand to contain the entire world. May 1968 put the lie to the

dream of extension by parodying it, Baudrillard argued, and what followed was

not cyclical retrenchment but implosion. Evidence could be seen in Beaubourg's

glass facade, which acted not as a window but as a mirror, in which "everything societal is imploded and ground up" in simulation. "Thus this concave mirror:

it's because they see the mass(es) inside it that the masses will be tempted to

crowd in," he argued. "It's a typical marketing device from which the whole

ideology of transparency draws meaning."49 One need not share Baudrillard's apocalyptic despair to accept his argu

ments about how postmodern architects like Piano and Rogers were using

glass and the way it differed from the Utopian investment of Mies and other

modernists schooled in the International Style. In fact, the use of glass facades

in the recent MoMA and Walker expansions has relieved Baudrillard's analy sis of its cultural pessimism and turned its critical insights into a program.

Unlike Mies's glass walls, whose illusion of social transparency masked the

commodified status of the art displayed within, the glass facades of the MoMA

and Walker projects act like display windows to advertise the goods available

inside. As Baudrillard's analysis suggests, the commodity displayed in these

windows is not art and the promise of aesthetic contemplation but people and

the promise of social contact. This is the promise implied in the statements of

Lowry and Halbreich cited earlier. Social contact is the most valuable com

modity shopping malls have to offer when competing with big-box stores and

Internet retailers, and it is the commodity that MoMA and the Walker are

offering, as well. As the New York Times piece cited earlier remarked, "Much

museum going is not about art at all. It's simply social."50

The Medium Is Material

Apart from doubling the size of MoMA, which now engulfs the better part of a block in midtown Manhattan, Yoshio Taniguchi's expansion and renova

tion completed in fall 2004 reinstated two key design elements the former

49. Ibid., 9.

50. Dobrzynski, "Glory Days."




Figure 5. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, fourth expansion at the museum's

present site completed in 2004, author's photograph 2006

facilities had lacked: skylights and views to the exterior. After years of not

having functional windows, the museum is now dominated by a five-story tall, transparent glass facade that overlooks its sculpture garden on Fifty fourth Street (fig. 5). Unlike Mies's wraparound glass wall, which effaced

itself and disappeared, Taniguchi's facade makes no attempt to hide its status

as a wall. Instead, it serves as the museum's face to the world, an interface

that allows the heterotopia constituted inside to communicate with the social

environment on the outside. This is a gesture none of the modern museums

examined earlier risked: neither Mies's invisible walls, nor Taut's translucent

walls, nor the windows that punctuated St?ler's stone walls gave the impres sion of establishing communication between the museum's interior and its

environment. And yet in MoMA's case, the symbolic gesture toward social

engagement appears curiously halfhearted. The view of Fifty-fourth Street

shows that MoMA has turned its gaze away from the street?the most public of spaces in a city?to survey its sculpture garden, which is hidden from the




street by a blank wall that pushes pedestrians to hurry by. Unlike Taniguchi's meticulous restoration of the museum's historical facades on Fifty-third Street,

which documents MoMA's evolution and creates a sensually stimulating pan

orama, the wall that screens the sculpture garden presents a visual affront to

any who travel or reside on Fifty-fourth Street.51

In contrast, Jacques Herzog's design for the Walker expansion that opened in 2005 has rotated the museum's face away from its former entrance to the

north, which overlooked the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, to survey an

eight-lane freeway, directly to the east. This move has restored the Walker's

original orientation along the confluence of Lyndale and Hennepin Avenues

while making the Minneapolis skyline the backdrop for the view from the

horizontal glass facade that encloses the "Link" that connects Herzog's wire

mesh-clad, deconstructionist "Cube" with Edward Barnes's minimalist, red

brick "Box," built in 1971. The Walker's symbolic embrace of its noisy and

smelly environment is not a literal statement of social transparency, however.

The glass facade's division into a lower, transparent section that offers unob

structed views of the street and an upper band of frosted glass that is translu

cent foregrounds the wall's status as a boundary that separates the heteroto

pian space of the museum from its social environment, even as it facilitates

communication between the two. As if to emphasize the medium's material

ity, announcements of events are projected by light onto the translucent band at

night where they can be seen by motorists, in effect transforming the museum's

display window into a billboard.

Inside, the spatial organization of MoMA and the Walker demonstrates

each museum's commitment to maintain the promise its display windows have

made, as each has dedicated a considerable amount of its valuable space to pub lic areas intended primarily for socializing. Like Beaubourg, the spaces of these

museums as mass media do not recall the halls and rotundas of nineteenth

century museums but rather the atria and arcadelike passages that articulate

spaces in a contemporary mall. The analogy of museums and malls points to

a substantial transformation in the ordering of space that separates our age from that of the modern, according to Foucault's fundamental premise in "Of

Other Spaces." Where the classical symmetry of exhibition halls and rotun

51. The wall separating the sculpture garden from the sidewalk along Fifty-fourth Street does

not represent an innovation of the recent expansion and renovation project, but it is worth noting that alternative design proposals came up with solutions for eliminating the wall, such as using the

garden's current site for a new construction and relocating the garden to the roof. For a critical

overview of the design process at a moment when its outcome was not certain see Victoria New

house, Towards a New Museum (New York: Monacelli, 1998), 148-61.




das in nineteenth-century museums, such as Schinkel's Altes Museum in Berlin

(1822-30), corresponded to the modern tendency to think of space as extension, the decentered and diffused spaces that constitute an atrium, combined with

the network of streets, bridges, and escalators that link retail sites in a self

enclosed shopping mall, reflect the postmodern tendency to think of space as

the relational articulation of sites. According to Foucault, it was the spatial logic of extension?conditioned by modernity's obsession with time?that enabled

the universal museum to create the unilinear historical narratives that were

constitutive for modern museum culture. In contrast, our day no longer thinks

of space as a void to be filled with objects, but as the relational articulation of

discrete sites in a network, tree, or grid. This principle privileges proximity and proceeds according to a logic of juxtaposing that is guided by the ques tion: "What type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human

elements should be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given

end[?]"52 While MoMA curators minimized Taniguchi's plans to articulate gal

lery spaces directly off the five-story, sky-lit atrium in order to maximize wall

space, the balconies and bridges that provide views from each of the superior levels and the proximity of escalators all contribute to the impression of an

austerely designed, minimalist mall. The most significant innovation that

resulted from Taniguchi's implementation of a relational logic of articulation

can be seen in the fifth-floor galleries that house MoMA's core collection of

late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century paintings and sculptures. Although the exhibits in these galleries are organized according to the same monologic narrative of modernism's heroic evolution from Cezanne to Picasso that made

the former museum's rigid spatial organization the object of criticism,53 the

rooms are now cross-articulated to allow visitors to construct alternative nar

ratives. The museum's overall organization is still governed by medial segre

gation and compartmentalization, however, which inhibits interaction across

art historical boundaries. In its internal organization, the Walker, too, sug

gests the adaptation of mall design. The use of an enclosed passageway, which

includes a lounge and gallery, to connect Herzog's wing with the existing structure, replicates the "dumbbell" design that is the standard configuration of a shopping mall: two anchor stores connected by an internal "Main Street"


53. Cf., e.g., the critical comments of Arthur C. Danto in Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual

Arts in Post-historical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), as well as the

work of Duncan, Crimp, and Krauss cited earlier.




articulated by smaller storefronts. In contrast to MoMA, however, the internal

organization of the new Walker suggests a programmatic strategy of juxtapos

ing heterogeneous media. This principle can be seen in the integration of

working laboratory spaces among exhibition spaces (an idea originally pro

posed by Taut in Der Sturm) and the opening of the theater space in Herzog's extension to the viewing of daytime rehearsals for evening performances as

works in progress.

In contrast to the Utopian ideal of social transparency, which corre

sponded to the modern tendency to think of space as extension, the only par

tially transparent facade of the new Walker expansion offers a cipher for how

contemporary museums as mass media can open spaces for the negotiation

and articulation of difference. The modern ideal of transparency as a means to

erase boundaries and achieve absolute inclusivity had as its flip side the denial

of difference: a denial of the constitutive contingency and opacity of social

relations, of the interference of the material medium in the process of commu

nication. In the case of the Walker's facade, it is the opacity of the medium and

not its transparency that paradoxically makes the museum's engagement with

its social environment possible.

The Contemporary Museum as Heterotopia

Museumgoing has always been a social experience. What has changed since

modernism began its conquest of the museum is that this experience is per ceived less as a matter of social distinction, in the exclusionary terms critiqued

by Pierre Bourdieu,54 and more as an opportunity to practice social subjectiv

ity. This does not mean that everyone enjoys equal access to every museum or

that everyone views museums as a preferred medium of social contact. Mod

ernism's dreams for mass culture as a medium of emancipatory sociability would have envisioned the museum as a mass medium (a pulsating mall, say, as opposed to a silent mausoleum) as Utopian space. If extension is seen as

the logic governing modern social relations, then the idea that everyone will

eventually be included not only among the consumers but also producers of

mass culture seems realistic and attainable. Baudrillard was correct to call this

dream a delusion.

If we no longer share modernism's hope for mass culture as a medium

of emancipatory sociability, does this mean we must forgo critical interest in

the social quality of museums as mass media? This is where the idea of het

erotopia can offer a nonutopian model for discussing museums as mass

54. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard

Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).




media in terms that retain a critical edge. Foucault's remark that the spatial order of a heterotopia contests and inverts the order beyond its boundaries, even as it represents it, suggests that the heterotopia's representational func

tion transpires in a less than transparent way. Indeed, Foucault argued that

the representational function of heterotopias unfolds between the poles of

illusion and compensation, neither of which suggests transparent correspon dence. "Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more

illusory," Foucault explained. "Or else, on the contrary, their role is to cre

ate a space that is ... as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is

messy, ill-constructed, and jumbled. This latter type would be the heteroto

pia, not of illusion, but of compensation."55 As Herbert Marcuse argued in a

trenchant critique of culture as compensation, the modern museum fulfilled

a quintessentially affirmative rather than critical function, by providing a ref

uge of order and repose to compensate for the lack of political rights and

solidarity that determined life outside its marble walls.56 The question is

whether museums can also perform a critical function by ordering their het

erotopian spaces according to principles of ironic inversion that juxtapose distant and incommensurable positions in a way that exposes the hegemonic

regime in place outside their walls as nothing more than a contingent articu

lation of heterogeneous demands that can be rearticulated around an alterna

tive vision of society.57 This model of the museum as a heterotopian mass medium would offer

the possibility to address many of modernism's concerns about the affirmative

social function of the modern museum. One quality that distinguishes a hetero

topia from a utopia is the former's cacophony of diverse voices. This conflict

laden cacophony contrasts with the universal histories narrated by modern

museums. It will never yield the Utopian unanimity of a self-transparent soci

ety. But it is an essential condition for a democratic society, which museums

as mass media can help create by reflecting on and actively engaging with the

way they represent, contest, and invert the order in place outside their walls.


56. "The museum was the most suitable place for reproducing in the individual withdrawal

from facticity and the consolation of being elevated to a more dignified world" (Herbert Marcuse, "The Affirmative Character of Culture," in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J.

Shapiro [Boston: Beacon, 1968], 131). 57. This concept of hegemony was developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hege

mony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985) and

has been given its most complete theoretical treatment in Laclau's On Populist Reason (London:

Verso, 2005).



modernism and the museum revisited

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