Museum memories can be of two kinds. You can either remember the visit in terms of the spectacular architecture, what you bought in the museum shop, ate in the café and what the city looked like from the rooftop, the welcome relief of sky, natural light and cityscape after working through floor after floor of art and spotless minimalism. (Fun, with a touch of eye-ache and weariness.) Or, you close your eyes and think about a museum, and what comes back to you is a work of art that has somehow made life different after you have looked at it. Only later do you think about how well it was housed and shown and lit, and how gently you were informed about it, and how lovely it felt afterwards to walk out into the city that had made such an experience possible.
The shift from the old Tate to the Tate Modern seems to me to epitomize this difference in my own memory, especially when I try to remember the Rothko Room. In the old Tate, I remember the Rothkos and in the new one I remember the room. It is only something very big by Louise Bourgeois or Anish Kapoor (the spider or Marsyas), or a mega-show of a great artist (Picasso/Matisse, Gerhard Richter), that could override the impact of the building. Art must wrestle with the angel of architecture.
I suppose this sort of thing began with the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and somehow it is only modern or contemporary art that must be subjected to this competition. You can feast your eyes all day on Las Meninas without having to notice how the Prado was built. But then, Velázquez’s imperial patrons put their own grand palaces around his paintings, even when he chose to paint the court dwarfs. So, it is important to think about the power of architecture, and the architecture of power, in relation to both early-modern and modern art. How does that power shift, and why, as monarchy gives way to democracy? In our own times, who mediates the relationship between the power of architecture and the value of art? How is this mediation related, in turn, to the power of the State, the power of private funds, and to the cultural, civic and economic life of a city?
With these questions floating about in my head ever since Calcutta, or Kolkata, started planning its own museum of modern art, it was reassuring to attend a recent “academic meet” that pondered, from different points of view, what kind of modern art might be put inside KMOMA, which, by all accounts, promises to be an architectural marvel. Everywhere in Venice, during the biennale last year, were immense posters of the opening of Zaha Hadid’s Stirling-Prize-winning MAXXI, Rome’s national museum of the 21st-century arts, after 11 years of planning and building. The splendid building — somewhere between a Piranesi prison and a futurist shopping-mall — dominated the poster, in which, on closer inspection, you would be able to see not a single work of art and scarcely any human beings. But the “academic wing” of KMOMA’s advisory board seemed well aware of the perils of such magnificence for the makers, viewers and keepers of art.
Two sets of questions emerged as primary during the discussion, both of which demand intellectually rigorous as well as specifically trained, practical thinking born out of solid experience.
First, the meaning and implications of each of the letters of the acronym: the K, the two Ms and the A. Is Kolkata simply a place, or does it define and determine something more than merely a location? Will this be a museum of the modern art of Kolkata, or a museum of modern Indian art that happens to be located in Kolkata, or a museum of modern art from the whole world located in Kolkata? How would, say, Baroda, Delhi or Chennai be part of the cultural geography of KMOMA? Then, what is modern? What is the difference between the modern and the contemporary? Would a museum have to do a different kind of historical thinking when it chooses to call itself a museum of modern, rather than contemporary, art? What would be the definition of art for a museum that is located in a fundamentally unequal society, where the ‘folk’ arts and crafts are part of living traditions of creativity and labour practised alongside, yet at a vast social distance from, the ‘art-world’? Thinking through each of these questions is crucial because that would determine what the museum collects, commissions and shows, how it shows what it shows, and to whom.
Second, when a museum is being planned and people sit around a table asking these necessary questions, what is the relationship between academic thinking and practical action — between, say, art history and museum-making? What is the relationship between conceptualizing a museum and realizing that concept in the actual world, between thinking, planning and doing? Do they not demand different and specific skills and kinds of education? They also demand — and this is more difficult to ensure — translating the language of one set of skills into the language of another, and acknowledging the limits, boundaries and distinct functions of each.
Artists, art historians, art theoreticians, curators, restorers, authenticators, collectors, museum directors, fundraisers, patrons, administrators, art critics, literary critics, anthropologists and art dealers. Each represents a different set of skills and methods, different kinds of vocabulary, experience and knowledge, and, crucially, different sorts of stake in being interested or disinterested in the making, viewing, buying, selling, showing, writing about and ‘museumizing’ of art. (There could be exciting, sinister or unfortunate overlaps among them, of course.) But when these different voices, vocations and interests think and speak together, the bridges between the different discourses have to be built with rigour and humility. And when the occasion for such a meet is specifically the planning of what to put in a museum, then every other profession or discipline (interdisciplinarity notwithstanding) will have to be subsumed under the highly specific discipline of running a museum.
Creating a museum on the scale of KMOMA is bound, therefore, to shake up and reorganize the relationships — the modes of communication and collaboration — among different kinds of learning and practice. When a museum rightly makes room for an academic wing, both in its advisory board and on its premises, it must do so with a realistic awareness of how specialized the training for running a museum is (and the training of the trainers), and how that training must not be conflated with other art-related skills and experiences — even when these are important for the sustenance of the larger art world outside the museum, of which the museum is, willy-nilly, a part.
An amusing, and significant, moment during this academic meet was a brief exchange across the table between a venerable professor of art history and an equally venerable museum director. The professor was explaining to us the post- modern problem of trying to judge the authenticity of a work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, à la Sherrie Levine, the American photographer and ‘appropriation artist’. And the museum director quipped, “But, sir, a fake is always a fake.”