{"id":11061,"date":"2017-09-21T12:17:01","date_gmt":"2017-09-21T12:17:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/?p=11061"},"modified":"2023-01-13T12:21:33","modified_gmt":"2023-01-13T12:21:33","slug":"towards-an-unfinished-museography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/towards-an-unfinished-museography\/","title":{"rendered":"Towards an unfinished museography"},"content":{"rendered":"
Llu\u00eds Alabern<\/h6>\n

Artworks have various lives; those that they live during their time, in their context, and those which live outside their times, in new periods. We owe the rupture of the unidirectionality and temporal coherence of the History of Art to the thinkers such as Aby Warburg or Walter Benjamin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Under the protection of these authors I am going to delve into half a dozen museographic disquisitions, somewhat unbalanced, that don\u2019t aim to be a manifesto or anything similar. The idea is, rather, to recreate an everyday \u201clandscape\u201d, a horizon that technicians from many museums have got used to watching over just about on a daily basis.<\/p>\n

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The rooms of a museum always talk of the present.\u00a0 Planning a museography is therefore a political act.<\/p>\n

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Museums shouldn\u2019t avoid controversies but should make them explicit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Art is not a good territory for doctrines; it is, on the other hand, the ideal breeding ground for paradoxes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Ram\u00f3n Puyol. At the Front<\/em><\/a>, 1937<\/p><\/div><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The museographies, what happens in the galleries of a museum, should challenge the visitor.\u00a0 In some cases they should even make the spectator feel uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

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\nThe museography is not the means for carrying out the museology.<\/p>\n

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\nThe museographic authors should be identified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Pablo Picasso. Woman in Hat and Fur Collar\u00a0(Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se Walter)<\/em><\/a>, 1937<\/p><\/div><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

A museography is a dialogue between images that are present and those that are missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The galleries of a museum should search for critical methods so as to always be posing questions.\u00a0 How do the walls and spaces speak? How do we want the walls and spaces to speak? They seem to be identical questions, but sometimes there\u2019s an abyss between the answers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The visitor perceives from what they feel, but also from their contexts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Museums are never neutral spaces.<\/p>\n

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\nContextual, cultural, social and political values coexist in a museography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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A museography should integrate evidences, forms, experiences, and performativities.<\/p>\n

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\nMuseography is a mediating activity, tied to the present, which does not tell us so much about what the museum means, but what the museum actually says.<\/p>\n

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\nMuseography must be questioned about its own limits. In a way, critical museography is bound to remain unfinished.<\/p>\n

Let’s assume a certain situationist idea, very much in vogue among the detractors of reforming the spaces of a museum, who understand the galleries as a place for drifting. Walking aimlessly between works of art, understanding the spectator as fl\u00e2neur<\/em>, quickly leading us to agree that the best thing we can “do” to the rooms of a museum is to “leave them alone”.<\/p>\n

It is not an idea that is at all outlandish, above all it wasn’t so in the times in which those who seemed to direct the efforts of rather a lot of museums, to decorate the spaces, to make them scenographic, in search of a wonderful experience and the headlines in the press. They were times of great expense, of barely sustainable designs, of wars of figures, of museographies placed at the service of the show business society and the cultural industry.<\/p>\n

It was logical that some intellectuals would demand that museums focus their attention on the visitors, on their uses and ways, on their wishes and needs, and on their unanswered questions.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a way, we as museums have moved on, in less than a decade, between two unfortunate conceptions of what should have been the relations between spectators and museums. As in the famous works that the American artist Bruce Nauman carried out in the early 70s, we went from asking for attention with a “Pay attention, mother fuckers” (lithograph on paper, 1973) to a moan in which we beg the visitor, \u201cPlease\/Pay\/Attention \/Please\u201d (Collage and letraset on paper, 1973).<\/p>\n

It’s neither one thing, nor the other. All museography is a cultural construction that speaks to us of the present<\/strong>. Do not hesitate. It is a public intervention that reframes and restores the work of art, away from the canonical frameworks. I paraphrase George Didi-Huberman<\/a> when I point out that the way in which the elements and storytelling are arranged in the museum space, has something about rehearsal<\/em> in it. Everything is in the assembly. Warburg posed the use of the montage as a method for giving meaning to the images.<\/p>\n

The exhibition assembly enhances the connections by osmosis, finding the bridges that take us from one image to another. We cannot consider the spectator as someone undocumented, an imbecile unable to associate and discover the “secrets” that the images hide. The contemporary visitor lives surrounded by a cataract of images. The museum, the museum’s rooms, must mediate so as to make the visit an exercise of freedom, pleasure and knowledge<\/strong>, to contribute to making the spectator a critical citizen.<\/p>\n

Why don’t we let the visitors talk to us, dialogue and build their interpretation? Why don’t we let them share this dialogue with us?<\/p>\n

Not so long ago, in the galleries of the Museu Nacional, I heard George Didi-Huberman say, that interesting images do not belong to only one time. Interesting images are a confrontation with the context, but they coexist with other times.<\/p>\n