“Surely it will not be long before we see the collections from this part of the world move from ethnographic to fine arts museums to take their place amidst the antiquities of Egypt or Persia and the works of medieval Europe.”1 These are the words that Claude Lévi-Strauss used in 1943 to express his hope that the indigenous objects on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York would be reassigned—potentially to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tellingly, it was not an art historian that called for a reclassification of these objects but rather an anthropologist and ethnologist whose writings were crucial to the development of structuralism.
More than sixty years later, the museum continues to be seen as the cultural memory of society, and its organization continues to be based on established genres, disciplines, and divisions; the objects and experts that populate these institutions also adhere to these sometimes rigid categorizations. Keeping consistent with the conventions of the field, museums of modern art are similarly organized into specialist departments maintained by specialized professionals. These structures—which in fact are not always logical and often go against prevailing considerations or trends—primarily serve to reflect historical and contemporary power relations and hierarchies in art.
As the world has been reshaped by globalization during the past two decades, several important museums have stepped up their efforts to abandon previous Eurocentric and North American biases. This process of rethinking existing hierarchies goes hand in hand with expansion and is associated with a deliberate archeology of previously marginalized art producers. At the same time, in this attempt to enrich exclusivity through inclusivity, art forms in new media—including those that are ephemeral and process-related—are increasingly being factored in. Moreover, in an art history previously imagined as a consistently linear sequence of developments, new cartographies with numerous byways and hitherto neglected art practices have since been rediscovered to create a more complex, diverse, and comprehensive image of art. At the same time, intense debates on decolonization and restitution have been conducted, sometimes with radical recommendations coming as a result.2
Despite this impressive process of expansion, why do we continue to experience the institution of the museum as frozen, as it were, in its scholarly and economically based structures, as not flexible or modern enough? As art and culture is constantly evolving, why does it remain such a major challenge to reconcile existing concepts of acquisition and musealization with progressive art research and museum work? What forms and structures do museums have to adopt, or to what extent do they have to fundamentally change to accommodate new art forms—art forms that, in some cases, starkly contradict methods of classification, preservation, and communication, and run counter to notions of ownership?
In 1959, Gustav Metzger authored his first manifesto, “Auto-Destructive Art.” In a few short lines, the artist described his concept of an art form that was suitable for the post-World War II era: self-destructive art with a lifespan “varying from a few moments to twenty years.”3 Metzger’s ideal work of art would not be considered complete until the “disintegrative process” had concluded and the piece had subsequently been removed from its site of origin and disposed of. Metzger illustrated the art he declared to be “primarily a form of public art for industrial societies” through several lecture-demonstrations ranging from computer-controlled, self-destructing public sculptures and acid painting on plastic to projections of liquid crystals. One of his most radical projects was Years without Art 1977–1980, which he began in 1974 with the intention to devote himself to theory instead of art from that point onward.
There are few art forms that call themselves—and the institutions that house them—into question in such a radical way. However, recent history has shown us that works conceived as acts of self-destruction can still ultimately find their way into museums.4 In the case of Metzger, it was the artist himself who repeated his first lecture-demonstrations of acid painting multiple times so that they could be captured on film and preserved for posterity.5 The presentation of historical documents, props, and other components alongside the reconstructions of works—ideally, produced in collaboration with the artists themselves—can create a broad means of communication while also raising topical questions. Unlike “conventional” art objects, here priority is given to the narrative potential of the objects and documents. The acquisition and possession of art objects are superseded by narrative sovereignty, which is in turn dependent on the access to and permission to use these images and documents. In the case of Gustav Metzger, who held no image copyright to the photographic documentations of his auto-destructive works, the compilation of a retrospective narrative about his works was a relatively elaborate process. A large number of reconstructions of works that were produced in the course of his exhibitions ultimately found their way into important museum collections by way of sale or donation. Yet in view of their content, which is highly critical of capitalism, it seems paradoxical that their purchase and presentation has only come about through a process of regular and exclusive legal transactions.
With respect to conventional registration methods alone, the acquisition of works of art based on ideas and concepts can prove to be a challenge. This was certainly the case when French conceptual artist Daniel Buren sold a piece to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1981. The art historian Anne Rorimer describes how the purchase of the work Up and Down, In and Out, Step by Step, A Sculpture (1977) led to disagreement among the museum staff because the customary collection label could not be permanently attached to the site-specific installation, which is physically extant only for the respective duration of its installation. An agreement was ultimately reached: the inventory number would be attached to the concept itself and would appear in the purchase file so that the acquisition would comply with the museum’s usual rules.6
In 1971, the lawyer Robert Projansky drew up “The Artists Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement,” or the “artist’s contract” for short. Projansky’s contract was written at the behest of art dealer Seth Siegelaub for the purpose of putting down details about the purchase of works of art and the rights of use of artistic concepts in writing. It primarily concerns giving artists a certain measure of control even after the sale of their works, in particular where exhibitions and publication are concerned. The contract also marks out a so-called resale right (or droite de suite), which grants artists a specific share of the profit if their work is resold.7 Under this sort of agreement, artists are to have a financial share of the sale of their works in the form of royalties, making their works of art comparable with works of literature, music, or theater. This contract puts works of visual art—and the terms of their monetary exploitation—on the same level as the performance or interpretation of a theatrical or musical work. However, a work’s one-off character, historically a hallmark of visual art, was deliberately disregarded in the artist’s contract. Instead, forms of duplication, publication, and resale are converted into capital and continuing income for the artist.8 Despite the controversy over the practicability of the artist’s contract, which, among other things, is rumored to have discouraged potential art collectors from acquiring works of art, artists like Hans Haacke and Adrian Piper continue to use the artist’s contract as a template to create their own sales documents (which are to some extent folded into their respective practices).
American artist Dan Graham intensified this departure from the principle of rarity in favor of duplication through the mass media. Graham was a gallerist for several months in the mid-1960s and actually wanted to become a writer.9 He saw “all systems of context in the art system” as “part of the social-economic (which in part determines a psychological) framework,” which, in the case of the newspapers and magazines that he worked within, were dependent on the medium and its readership.10 Beginning in 1965, Graham developed a number of magazine works in which he created a short circuit in the traditional circulation of works of art. One of the most well known among these works is Figurative (1965), a sales slip or receipt like the one that would normally be handed to a buyer at the end of a purchase. The editor responsible for its placement in a 1968 issue of Harper’s Bazaar coincidentally printed Figurative as an objet trouvé alongside advertisements for tampons and bras. In contrast, Graham’s work Schema (1966) takes shape as a self-referential poem that has to be created by the copyeditor or the editor according to the respective specifications and conditions of the print medium, changing based on the conventions of typography, layout, format, and so on. In both of these works, the condition of publicness (and publication) becomes a constitutive part of the artwork; in some cases this lack of “direction” inherent in these works means that they can be executed improperly.11 Graham views these works as “ads,” subject, as other advertising is, to the particularities of the advertising system. Today, there are typescripts, drafts, and a few original pages from magazines of these pioneering works in several museum collections.12 According to an agreement with the artist, the work Schema described above can again be “performed” in the pages of newspapers at any time.
A similar development took place in video art, with artists seeking out new forms of distribution. In response, artists organized and founded their own institutions, including Electronic Arts Intermix in New York, Video Data Bank in Chicago, and Montevideo in Amsterdam. Interestingly, some of these organizations share similarities with commercial agencies. To this day, single-channel videos from the early period of this medium are generally not sold as unique specimens or in limited editions; rather, specific licenses are issued for money with various rights of use for the lifespan of the respective videotape. Should that which has long since been accepted for video art not be similarly feasible for art objects?
Indeed, the establishment of the medium of video in art also spawned a movement in the opposite direction. Concurrent with emerging video forms, which manifest as video installations, double projections, and so on, some chose to classify these works as limited editions, allowing for conventional transactions and sales at high prices. This artificially created shortage is actually paradoxical under technical conditions that allow for the unlimited duplication of artworks without any loss in quality whatsoever. In the system of distribution and use described earlier, works are housed and controlled centrally, and the costly preservation of the tapes is thus shared. In this other system of limited edition sales, the cost of preservation is passed onto the individual collectors. In the case of limited editions of works of video art, the artists also usually retain so-called artist’s prints—similar to prints of graphic art—and are therefore not reliant on loans from their private collectors and public museums when presenting them in major shows, even if all of the editions have been sold. If a collector only has in-house display rights, as is often the case, ownership of the work is tantamount to a trophy; possessing it serves no purpose outside of a closed system. Thus the responsibility of preserving works of art for future generations—a responsibility historically assigned to the public museum—is made obsolete. Efforts were made in a number of projects to improve this situation. These include collective purchases of particularly costly works or groups of works in which know-how is shared,13 all the way to entire collections being shared by a consortium of museums. The New Art Trust, which allows MoMA, SFMOMA, Tate, and the Bay Area Video Coalition access to video work from the Kramlich Collection in San Francisco, provides a prime example.
Performative arts such as dance and theater have developed their own structures largely independent of the conventions and laws of the art business. From the outset, they were not based on sale, purchase, and conservation, but rather on the licensing and the performance of works. Along with performance, of course, comes the business of required rehearsals and training necessary personnel. Those interested in preserving works of dance or theater have faced similar questions as those that are asked in relationship to ephemeral and process-based forms of art: How do we save documents, props, costumes, and so on, and what role do these objects play? What are the rights of co-authors and other participants? However, a fundamental characteristic distinguishes works of performative art from works of visual art: performances of these works that are constantly represented and reinterpreted by the performers and those staging them.
“My wish, to see this Piece, this Theme shown by Ladies and Gentlemen with more life experience grew with time even stronger,” writes the German choreographer Pina Bausch about her piece Kontakthof, which premiered in Wuppertal in 1978.14 In 2000, “we were ready,” and Bausch “found the courage, to give Kontakthof to elderly people over ’65.’”15 Unlike the original version performed by her company more than twenty years earlier, in this iteration Bausch decided to perform this piece with “People from Wuppertal. Neither Actors. Nor Dancers. Simply people from Wuppertal.”16 Eight years after that she reinterpreted Kontakthof once again, having it performed by teenagers. Instead of insisting on concrete casting patterns and rigid choreographies, Bausch opened up her piece to multiple generations and to people who were not professionally trained; in doing so, she shifted the time-related component of interpretations directly into the production itself.
The Museum of Modern Art’s acquisition of Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions (1960–1961) provides a relevant recent example.17 The acquisition agreement includes the right to the reconstruction and exhibition of the objects as well as their performance. This also involves the regular training of the performers, something that should be viewed as part of the museum’s obligation to keep the work alive. The Dance Constructions, which are seen as prototypes of Minimal Art and were originally performed in the early 1960s within the scope of “concerts,” no longer exist physically; since the resumed interest in these works, however, they have already been reconstructed multiple times. Physical components of the Dance Constructions have been produced in cities including São Paulo, Madrid, Salzburg, Bonn, and New York, and a large number of dancers and artists have been trained to perform the works. With this purchase, however, MoMA now has the exclusive rights to the performance and the presentation of the Dance Constructions. An exception to this is the work Huddle (1961), a performance from this series that does not require any objects and which the artist considers to be a part of “the commons.” Only the future can show how often this group of works will be available to the public and whether future borrowers will be able to meet the requirements for the performance of these works—standards that are higher now than ever before.
With globalization and media-related expansion, economic conditions play perhaps an even larger role in the development of contemporary museum collections and programs than they did before. Extensive research trips to distant countries and the realization of media- and performance-based art pose financial challenges to all museums; generally, only the largest institutions have the sufficient financial and staff-related means at their disposal to take on this kind of work. Add to this a growing interest in experimental, transgressive art of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, and an increased awareness of previously underexposed artists from regions such as Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Arab countries, and the result is that important works from the art history of certain countries are not accessible in their own museums. Instead, these works are gathered by and concentrated in major institutions in cities like London, Paris, or New York. Today, the struggle for the necessary resources to preserve interdisciplinary art, let alone to transact additional purchases, is overtaxing many institutions. Even many of the groundbreaking institutions that helped write this history through their innovative exhibitions and collections policies now struggle to keep up. Even though it was often not the large institutions that assumed a leading role in the presentation and mediation of demanding works of this kind in the moments of their making, artists rarely pass over the opportunity to sell their works to an internationally prominent museum in an art capital.
In fact, new and interdisciplinary forms of art using the body and/or new technologies were often developed outside of the established institutions, with artists creating new structures for their production and communication in a kind of emancipatory act. In relation to its commitment to dance and performance art, the Museum of Modern Art often invokes the dance archive they acquired in 1939 and the Department of Dance and Theatre Design it operated for several years.18 Even younger institutions like the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Tate Modern in London, or the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis can look back at a relatively long and intense examination of performance-based art. The systematic assembly and collection of performance-based and ephemeral art is nevertheless a relatively new phenomenon. The classic structure of museums was simply overwhelmed by new, interdisciplinary forms of contemporary art, and institutions have had to take this changed reality into account when considering their acquisition and exhibition policies.
Should this hypothesis—that the content-related reform process of these major museums ultimately leads to a scarcity of opportunities for small and medium-sized institutions—prove to be accurate, we will have to conclude that media-specific hierarchies that once dominated art have been merely transferred externally to create a hierarchical relationship among institutions instead. We need to examine whether new genres and disciplines can be integrated into institutional structures that were developed on the basis of completely different art forms. The question therefore remains as to whether the concept of the museum—and the notions of ownership and rights that are inherent within this structure—can actually be uncoupled from its original hegemonic conditions. And if it is possible, we must ask whether or not the museum runs the risk of losing its authority and its identity. Similar to Gustav Metzger’s “break from art,” perhaps museums should take some time to consider and process these questions, and determine how future collections and know-how might be shared within and between institutions.
Notes
1 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1982), 9. In the book, Lévi-Strauss quotes from his article, “The Art of the Northwest Coast at the American Museum of Natural History,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 24 (1943): 175–82. The Northwest Coast Hall of the AMNH was opened in 1899 “as the first museum exhibition to value indigenous cultures on their own terms, not in relation to Western cultures.” For a full history, see “Northwest Coast Hall,” American Museum of Natural History, accessed November 26, 2018.
2 On this, see the French government’s most recent plan for the restitution of museum objects from the former colonies: Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics (pdf),” November 2018, accessed September 24, 2019.
3 Gustav Metzger, “Auto-Destructive Art,” reprinted in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, eds. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: UC Press, 2012), 470.
4 A major retrospective of Metzger’s work, History History, took place at the Generali Foundation in Vienna in 2005. It was accompanied by a publication that also presented the artist as an activist in his environment. Numerous exhibitions of Metzger’s work followed.
5 After the first demonstration of acid painting in his studio in King’s Lynn in 1960, Metzger performed it again that same year at the Temple Gallery in London. He repeated his performance in 1963, and this time Harold Liversidge documented the event on film. Further demonstrations took place in the second half of the 1990s to coincide with several exhibitions.
6 Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 251–52.
7 The resale right has been regulated by law in all of the European Union countries since 2001.
8 On this, see Maria Eichhorn, “Introduction,” The Artist’s Contract (Cologne: Walther König, 2009), 12.
9 Graham ran the Daniels Gallery in Manhattan from December 1964 to June 1965 and again for a brief period in 1970.
10 Dan Graham, “Magazine/Advertisements,” For Publication (Los Angeles: Otis Art Institute, 1975), unpaginated. Reprinted in 1991 by the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
11 Within the scope of a project organized by museum in progress, a Vienna-based arts organization that uses newspapers and magazines as exhibition space, my task was to implement Graham’s Schema for the Viennese daily paper Der Standard. The correct calculation of the components cited in the matrix, which have to be repeatedly recalculated until the text is complete, was a major challenge for me.
12 I was able to purchase several of these works by Graham during my tenure as the director of the Generali Foundation in Vienna. The Museum of Modern Art in New York also has works from this period, purchased as part of the Daled Collection. Notably, MoMA holds a number of handwritten drafts of Schema that were worked out by various people.
13 Matters in Media Art is an informational resource that provides one example of resource pooling.
14 Pina Bausch, “Kontakthof with Ladies and Gentlemen over ‘65,’” accessed March 24, 2019.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 This was a major acquisition project that I initiated during my tenure as chief curator of Media and Performance Art at MoMA and which was ultimately realized by my successor, Stuart Comer, with Ana Janevski. In 2014, I organized a retrospective with Simone Forti at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, for which the artist trained students at the SEAD (Salzburg Experimental Dance Academy). Unfortunately, because of MoMA’s preference, I was not able to purchase this group of works (an option would be to create limited editions) and instead bought drawings and a hologram of Huddle.
18 In 1939, MoMA accepted the donation of a dance archive from Lincoln Kirstein, the cofounder of the New York City Ballet. In 1944, the archive was renamed the Department of Dance and Theatre Design and was renamed once again as the Department of Theatre Arts before being officially dissolved in 1948. In 1956, the original research materials were transferred to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
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