Contemporary Art Museum by Richard J. Williams

Author:Richard J. Williams [Williams, Richard J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848223974
Google: VFBizgEACAAJ
Publisher: Lund Humphries Publishers, Limited
Published: 2021-10-11T23:25:20.252950+00:00

Fig.9 Frank Lloyd Wright, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City (1959), interior

To what extent does this matter? Do we still understand the museum as a neutral container of objects rather than a sculptural form to be apprehended for its own sake? Outside of the art world, this may seem a somewhat effete question, if art museums are understood by the visiting public as part of a continuum of options for urban entertainment that includes anything from opera to grocery shopping. The question in those terms might seem simply one of surfaces – do you want a more or less demonstrative building? To be entertained or quietly impressed? But the issue matters in terms of cultural politics because, since at least 1977 and the opening of the Centre Pompidou, the iconic museum building has come to signify a new relationship between art and the world. As Pontus Hultén explained when the Pompidou opened, the new centre was to be one in which traditional museum boundaries between high and low culture, art and industry, culture and entertainment would be exploded.15 And the building itself was, as we saw in Chapter 1, replete with pop culture references, from the garish colour coding of the service conduits to its open space-frame structure redolent of the out-of-town hypermarket. Jean Baudrillard’s complaint about its ‘supermarketing’ of culture was accurate insofar as the Pompidou appealed to a mass audience.16

Since 1977, to accept the iconic museum has been to accept art as a branch of the ‘culture industry’.17 There was no more straightforward an apologist for the icon in these terms than the American critic and occasional architect Charles Jencks. Jencks wrote about icons from the late 1970s and the publication of his widely read The Language of Post-Modern Architecture argued for a market-friendly architecture, operating in different symbolic registers to appeal to different publics (its assumption of effectively first and second-class audiences has not worn so well).18 His 2005 book on icons, The Icon Building: The Power of Enigma, elaborated further and included extensive interview material with Frank Gehry and others. It was clear throughout, however, that icons and the globalisation of the world economy were inseparable, and that icons were the architectural expressions of globalisation. ‘A specter is haunting the global village – the specter of the iconic building,’ Jencks wrote, crudely paraphrasing Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. ‘Driven by social forces, the demand for instant fame and economic growth, the expressive landmark has challenged the previous tradition of the architectural monument.’19 Many ‘bemoaned’ iconic architecture, he went on, but it was the inevitable expression of the globalised, secular world.

Jencks was a relaxed chronicler of things iconic, for he was also in a not insignificant way a player: as a landscape architect, he produced a series of Landforms, sculptural earthworks, part ornamental garden, part icon, that worked in the same symbolic register as the iconic buildings he described. The Landform Ueda outside the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) in Edinburgh is a good example.

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