Good evening.
My name's Ron Witte.
I'm on the faculty of the
Graduate School of Design.
It's my pleasure to introduce
tonight's speaker, David
Joselit.
Before I do that, I'd like
to cover a few info points.
Those of you who've
been using Zoom
lately may notice
that this webinar
has some different features.
The chat function has been
disabled so that we can better
focus on David's presentation.
David will respond
to questions after he
has finished his lecture.
You, the audience, are welcome
to send questions to him
at any time during the
lecture by clicking the Q&A
button at the bottom
center of your Zoom screen.
The final talk in the GSD
virtual public lecture series
will be on Monday, April 27.
Mexican architect
Paul Cabrera will
talk about how Doctors Without
Borders is collaborating
with the Spanish
government to adapt
existing infrastructure,
medical and non-medical,
to provide adequate care during
the coronavirus epidemic.
Cabrera's lecture will
happen on Zoom, like this,
and requires virtual
attendees to register.
More information about
the Cabrera lecture,
as well as how to
register for it,
is available on the GSD website.
Back to tonight's talk.
Museums are
extraordinary places.
That's because they
tell us things.
As cultural
institutions, that's also
where they become volatile.
What exactly do museums tell us?
What should they tell us?
Are there things they must tell
us or ought not to tell us?
Surveying the history
of museums lets
us glimpse some perspective
answers to these questions.
They hold our own histories.
They hold our yearnings
for others' histories.
They hold fictions that are
sometimes facts and facts that
are invariably fictions.
The long arc of archival
objectivity courses
through their evolution,
which is to say,
the museum radiates truth
among its delicate display
cases, encrusted rooms,
and colonnaded entries.
For some centuries now,
museums have given us
a way of understanding ourselves
as the byproducts of all
that came before us.
We go to them thinking
that when we leave,
we'll somehow be better for it.
Seeing all that sure-footed
curatorial prowess always
lets us set our compasses
to a truer true north.
And that's where David Joselit
gets very, very interesting.
David turns the
museum upside down.
In David's hands, true north is
now true south, east, and west.
David's most recent
book, Heritage and Debt--
Art in Globalization,
recasts the museum's role.
What had been a stone clad
storehouse of knowledge
is now a shimmering reservoir
of percolating possibilities.
Across David's
pages, local usurps
universal, indigenous
topples colonial, and perhaps
most vitally, prospect
smothers certainty.
Reading David, one wonders if
the word "museum" is itself
a relic without a cause.
David is an art historian.
He's remarkably prolific.
His previous books include
After Art in 2013, Feedback--
Television Against Democracy
in 2007, American Art
Since 1945 in 2003,
and Infinite Regress--
Marcel Duchamp 1910
to 1941 in 1998.
His essays are too
numerous to list,
but it should be
noted that they are
sustenance of the best sort.
David also works with
museums and galleries,
something that I find
especially exciting
given his razor sharp thinking
about these various spaces.
David received his
PhD from Harvard
and is, as of this
year, a professor
in the Department of Art Film
and Visual Studies at Harvard.
Those teaching and
learning at Harvard
can be very happy that
he's here among us.
He was, in fact, also
an undergraduate here.
David previously taught at the
City University of New York,
Yale University, and UC Irvine.
The last place, he
also happened to have
been in the same department
as my sister-in-law
and her husband.
This last point brings me to
something a bit more personal.
With all that David
is and does, and
with the extraordinary depth
of his academic pursuits,
David is simply a good
person to have dinner with.
I can chat with him
across a bowl of noodles.
Anyone can.
Smart and can hold a spoon.
What more could one ask for?
Please join me in welcoming
David to tonight's talk,
"Heritage and Debt--
Art in Globalization."
Thank you, Ron.
That was an amazing
introduction, especially
I'll always remember
that I can hold a spoon.
It's an important skill.
It's a great pleasure to
speak at the GSD, which
has meant a lot to me, both
during my undergraduate days
when I wrote my
undergraduate thesis
with the architectural
historian Neil Levine
and went in graduate
school across the street.
So I'm an amateur
in architecture
in the truest sense of the word
in that it is a love of mine,
but I am definitely
not an expert.
So this is a proposition
about a series of new museums
that have emerged during
the period of globalization.
And with that, I
will share my screen.
OK.
The period of globalization has
been a time of intense museum
building.
One of the questions I address
in my recent book, Heritage
and Debt, is how museums
of contemporary art
outside the West have developed
a new architectural type, even
as their architects
are typically European,
and how this type participates
in transforming the museum
from a mere storehouse of images
into a generator of images
as well, into a kind
of publicity machine.
As a type, the
contemporary global museum
responds to a dichotomy
of museum models
that were developed during
the European imperial era,
the museums that we're
most familiar with really.
So-called universal
museums, that
were founded in capitals
of imperial activity,
and national museums,
that were established
in their former colonies.
And here I'm just showing you
the floor plan, out of date,
of the British Museum,
where you get a sense--
I know the type is
very small-- but you
get a sense of the effort
to represent the world,
to be encyclopedic
on some level,
whereas the National
Museum in New Delhi
is focused on a
long period of time,
but all within the Indian
culture, broadly conceived.
On the one hand then, this
so-called encyclopedic museum
accumulated artifacts from
around the world, often
through forcible or otherwise
questionable practices
of acquisition in the name
of a universal humanism.
If the encyclopedic
museum was dedicated
to universalizing knowledge
by assembling world cultures
for the edification
of European citizens
as a kind of
enlightenment project,
really, museums
in former colonies
also deployed the culture
of non-European peoples
for the benefit of the
same Eurocentric gaze.
But now, rather than as a
kind of encyclopedic account
of world culture, it is
instead an ethnographic account
of a particular subject culture.
These institutions, such as
the National Museum in India,
were originally founded by
taking local culture, including
local peoples as
objects of study,
producing knowledge
that assisted
in the colonial
project of domination.
And I should say that the
National Museum was renamed.
The reason is, I
have on the slide,
that it was founded in 1949.
Because, as you'll
see when I recount
the work of Saloni
Mathur and Kavita Singh,
that the museum was
renamed and refounded
in 1949 at independence
as the National Museum.
As Mathur and Singh
have argued regarding
the history of museums
in India, quote,
"The museum in the colony had
been limited in its scope.
Being the museum of the
colony, its collections
were confined to objects
produced or found
within the territory
of the subcontinent."
Here is why I show you the map.
"This had made the
museum incommensurate
with the grand
universal survey museums
in the European
metropolis," unquote.
Even after decolonization,
as Mathur and Singh argue,
the colonial museum
in India as elsewhere
was reframed as a National
Museum, whose purpose
was to constitute and represent
the new nation as an expression
of a single world civilization,
both to its citizens
and to the world,
rather than as,
in the British Museum for
instance, an encyclopedic
overview of all civilizations.
An analysis of the National
Gallery of Singapore
allows us to consider
how the global museum
of modern and contemporary
art may suggest
a counter model both to the
universal museums in the West,
and to the nationalized
post-colonial museums described
by Mathur and Singh.
In other words,
the problem here is
how to make a claim
of universalism
but within regional context.
I mean, it's a paradox,
and one that I think
has been played
out institutionally
and architecturally
in these museums.
And that's what I hope
to argue for you tonight.
Opened in 2015, its
architectural design
suggests an archaeological site
rather than an encyclopedia.
It's a kind of stratification
rather than a monument.
It embeds two adjacent
colonial era structures,
a neoclassical Supreme Court
on the left, with the dome,
and a City Hall, built by
the British within new strata
of museum
infrastructure dedicated
to modern and contemporary
Southeast Asian art.
So not solely Singaporean
art, but art from the region.
The facades of both
the historical edifices
have been kept intact, as you
can see from this rendering.
And with the exception of
painstaking restorations
in areas of special
historical significance,
like the City Hall
chamber, where the Japanese
surrendered to Ally
forces in 1945,
their interiors have been
retrofitted to accommodate
state of the art galleries.
So on the one hand, certain
very important historical spaces
have been restored
within this building.
But on the other,
the museum looks
like a beautiful, newly
constructed museum
that could be virtually
anywhere in the world.
In its design, the
National Gallery
thus appropriates two former
seats of colonial power.
And here, I'm showing you a
view from the entrance atrium.
You can see the covering of
the doorway in front of you,
and on the left is the
City Hall, and on the right
is the Supreme Court.
So you can see how
the two buildings
are embedded within a new
architectural texture.
As such, the former City
Hall and court buildings,
one administrative
and one judicial,
serve a double function.
As primary components
of the new museum's
architectural ensemble,
they house collections
that narrate modern and
contemporary Southeast Asian
cultural history.
So they are the container
of a new history.
But they themselves
are important artifacts
of the kind of beginning
of that very history.
And as such, the City
Hall and court building
are equally incorporated
within the collection.
So the building both houses
and is housed by the museum.
The buildings, I should say.
Indeed the gallery's
inaugural exhibition
of Southeast Asian art, Between
Declarations and Dreams--
Art of Southeast Asia
Since the 19th Century,
dates the history of
modernism in Southeast Asia
to colonial contact.
So this is another one
of these paradoxes that
is implicit in this
building project that
is really kind of profound.
I'm going to read you a quote
from one of the curators that
makes this clear,
but the point here
is that modernity in Singapore
is rooted to colonial times,
and yet the colonial
legacy is precisely what
needs to be superseded.
And therefore, the legacy must
be both avowed and reframed.
And so the building
kind of does this
in absolutely literal ways.
But let me just read to
give you a sense of how
the history of Southeast
Asian art and Singaporean art
is founded in a kind of colonial
initiation of modernism.
This is from curator Phoebe
Scott in the National Gallery.
She writes, "Colonialism
and modernity were not
the same thing, but colonization
did bring a different system
of values into close
contact with the existing
structures and local
cultures of Southeast Asia.
To the extent that the
modern is understood in terms
of a conceptual
break with the past,
the environment of change and
uncertainty created by this
interaction can be seen as
the beginning of a modern
condition, " unquote.
So in other words, the
colonial institutions
absorbed by the
gallery are thus not
merely generic repurposed
heritage sites.
These are not sort
of neutral buildings.
They are artifacts of the
colonial origins of Singaporean
modernity that the
National Gallery
is tasked with simultaneously
excavating and reframing
through the agency of modern and
contemporary art exhibitions.
And this is important,
too, because it
is the modern and
contemporary art that
is both collectible
at this point,
but also that can show an
alternate story of modernity
from these colonial
institutions.
The close association of
this museological operation
to the very political
foundations of Singapore,
through its original
constitution,
is indicated by the historical
interiors and exhibitions
that the gallery has
chosen to preserve.
In addition to the
room commemorating
the end of the
Japanese occupation
that I showed you earlier,
there is a permanent exhibition,
The Law of the Land, that I'm
showing you a slide of here,
opened in 2016 soon
after the opening
of the museum in the former
chief justice's Chamber
in the court building,
which traces the nation's
constitutional history from its
founding by the British in 1819
to independence in 1965,
with documents borrowed
from the National Archives.
So the point here then is
that the political modernity
of Singapore as colony is
maintained within this museum
consciously, whereas its
contemporaneity is associated
with art, as I will
show you momentarily.
At street level, the former
City Hall and court building
are connected only by an
unobtrusive canopied glass
atrium inserted between them.
You see the atrium
on the left side.
And the canopy,
which, of course--
I'm sure you're aware it's
extremely hot and sunny
in Singapore, and so much has
been done in this building
to veil the sunlight.
It is below grade in a
lower level concourse, which
I'm showing you on
the right, which
spans both structures
that the buildings receive
a new foundation, both
architecturally and
conceptually, to accommodate
requisite infrastructure
of the museum, such as
ticket desks, visitor
services, auditoria, et cetera.
This subterranean level rhymes
architecturally with a layer
of rooftop amenities--
I'm showing you a slide
of that on the right--
which includes decks, gardens,
and restaurants about the City
Hall, and a smaller
terrace surrounding
the dome of the Supreme
Court building, which
you're seeing here.
There also are
restaurants up they're.
Now importantly, these
terraces give vantage
points for looking back at the
buildings themselves, which
goes back to the point I
was making earlier about how
the buildings are
themselves almost
ready mates within the
collection of the museum,
as well as containers
of that museum.
Jean Francois Milou,
whose Paris-based firm
designed the gallery in
association with the local firm
CPG Consultants, describes
this concept as follows.
Sorry that this is quite
small, but I'm more
giving it to you for a
sense of the stratification
of the building as described
by the architect, who
writes the following--
"Our goal was to offer an
elegant and welcoming art
gallery that deeply respects
the historical importance
of the existing
buildings and creates
new architectural layers,
each placed upon the monuments
with minimal intervention.
The key or signature
of the design
reflects our desire
to add layers
rather than to alter essential
aspects of the monuments
in the name of creating
one institution,"
This architectural device of
stratification, of layering,
of putting the buildings
into, what I would call,
a kind of archaeological
situation, where they're
almost excavated out of
the contemporary museum,
gives, again, the sense
that the buildings are not
only containers but part
of the museum's collection.
With its, collections and
exhibitions the National
Gallery articulates a second
narrative, as I've suggested,
alongside the becoming
archaeological
of Singapore's colonial legacy.
Its presentation of modern
and contemporary art
of Southeast Asia makes
its own alternative claim
on universality by staging a
story of national development
that is shared by post-colonial
states in the region.
So in other words, what
I want to suggest to
you is that Singapore, in this
exhibition, which I'll briefly
summarize momentarily, is
giving a universal story,
or one should say, a
shared paradigmatic story
of regional post-colonial
states in place
of the kind of
encyclopedic impetus
of the Western universal museum.
Its presentation of modern
and contemporary art
of Southeast Asia makes
its own alternative claim,
as I mentioned, on
universality by staging
a story of national
development that is
shared by post-colonial states.
As a tiny city-state within
a complex, diverse region,
whose wealth and
ambition outstrips
its territorial
expanse, Singapore
has built upon its mid
20th century success
as a manufacturing
center to develop
a sophisticated
21st century finance
and knowledge based economy.
As the cultural
critic C.J.W.-L. Wee,
who is the author of a great
book that I recommend to all
of you called The Asian
Modern, has written, quote,
of Singapore, "Culture combined
with the stunning developments
in information and
technology can contribute
to a post-industrial economy
in which the management
of creativity, ideas,
and images mattered.
Culture hence becomes a defining
sign of the contemporary
that the city-state must possess
after the initial decades
of pragmatic materialism.
The state increasingly
begins to deliver
infrastructural monetary
resources for arts development
from the 1990s that was
literally unimaginable
in the 1970s, despite an ongoing
regime of the spectatorship."
And I need to mark this
question of spectatorship, which
is not trivial by any means.
In fact, many of the museums
I'm talking about here
are built in illiberal
city-states or things
that operate like them.
And we can talk about that.
But for now, I want to
try to develop this model
without prejudging it.
So Wee's characterization
is consonant with the series
of government
commissioned reports
by Singapore called the
"Renaissance City Reports"
dating from 2000, that
explicitly recommend investment
in the arts as a
means of continuing
Singapore's shift to a
post-industrial knowledge
economy.
In these documents,
the utility of culture
is explicitly linked
to both enhancing
an environment of creativity
among Singaporeans themselves,
as well as attracting
high-skilled foreign workers
by producing a vibrant work
and living environment.
So it's extremely important
here that the museum
becomes a tool for creating
an attractive post-industrial
center.
Despite its rapid rise as a
regional financial center,
as I've eluded, Singapore
has no significant hinterland
to draw upon for
reserves of labor
or as a fiscal buffer
from its neighbors.
While its success risks
fostering resentment
in the region, and in
fact, I spoke with,
when I visited the museum,
the director of the museum.
And he more or less
mentioned this problem
of a kind of issue of resentment
among other arts organizations
across the region that Singapore
has to be very conscious of.
The narrative established by the
National Gallery's collection
helps to address this
geopolitical instability
by embedding post-colonial
Singapore within a broader
Southeast Asian
history, within which
it lays claim to the
privilege of exemplarity.
So it's a complex move here.
On the one hand,
Singapore is one of many.
But on the other, it's sort
of the first among equals
because of its
capacity to develop
cultural infrastructure.
To this purpose, the inaugural
exhibition, which I've
already mentioned to
you, Between Declarations
and Dreams--
Art of Southeast Asia
Since the 19th Century,
was structured according
to four sections.
Now I'm just going to show you--
I don't have the time or
the expertise, frankly.
I mean I did see the
exhibition, but I could not
say anything particularly
interesting about it.
What I want to show you is the
different sections of a it,
so that you see how the
exhibition was meant
to create a kind of
genealogy of the struggle
against colonialism and
the post-colonial state
through artistic statements.
So the first section is
called Authority and Anxiety--
19th to 20th Century and
was dedicated to addressing
the colonial period through the
display of visual artifacts,
ranging from European
maps and landscapes
to photographic portraits
of local rulers, which
you see on the right.
The next section, Imagining
Country and Self--
1900s to 1940s tracked
cross currents, particularly
in the genre of
landscape, between
colonial representations
and indigenous associations
during a period when
art academies were just
beginning to be established
across Southeast Asia.
The third broad section,
Manifesting the Nation--
1950s to 1970s,
embraces the period
of decolonization and nation
building in the region
by demonstrating, in part, a
kind of aesthetic dialectic
here between political
forms of social realism,
which I'm showing you
examples up on the left,
and forms of
abstraction, which were
meant to claim modernity in art
worlds outside of the region.
Finally, the last
section, Redefining Art--
1970s and After, surveyed
global contemporary art
during the period when
Southeast Asian capitals,
such as Singapore, became
important global centers
and when artists began
to participate directly
from those places in the
markets and biennnials
of global contemporary art.
By establishing an institution
like the National Gallery
to articulate this cultural
narrative supplemented
by historical exhibitions
of Singapore's colonial
and constitutional history,
remember those rooms,
the Constitution, the
buildings themselves.
These are two
intersect-- literally,
they intersect architecturally
and conceptually.
By doing both of
these things at once,
this small nation lays claim
to representing Southeast Asia
symbolically.
As in fact, it might be
said to do financially
as one of its major
global business centers.
And probably the one
that is most friendly
to Western commerce, as I will
discuss in a different context
in a minute.
It is this regional
claim to representation
that substitutes
for the universality
asserted by Western
encyclopedic museums.
But in order to authorize this
claim, to literally ground it,
it must be placed within a
quasi-archaeological excavation
of colonial history that
resituates the former City Hall
and Supreme Court
buildings within strata,
or as the architect
points out, layers,
of modern and contemporary art.
So literally, the
colonial history
is excavated out of a
post-colonial history that
is made from an
aesthetic narrative,
but one that has strongly
political balances.
Indeed, the National
Gallery Singapore
exemplifies a model
that is equally
applicable to other
museums in Asia, the Middle
East, and Africa.
It's built around a collection
of modern and contemporary art
that claims to represent
an entire region.
And it is housed in a
building rooted to its site
through quasi-architectural
excavation, who's
design by a prominent
Western architect
is meant to garner
international recognition
to produce publicity,
going back to that idea
that the museum generates
images as well as housing them.
A consideration of two
comparable new museums
indicates this
model's adaptability.
In Cape Town, the Zeitz Museum
of Contemporary African Art,
or MOCAA, designed by the
British firm Heatherwick Studio
and completed in 2017, has
also dramatically excavated
exhibition space from the
nested cylindrical towers
inside a former
concrete grain silo.
And you see the building
intact on the left
and from the other
perspective on the right.
This is a rendering, but
the building is complete,
and I'll show you pictures
of the actual building
in a minute.
Like the National
Gallery Singapore,
this building is an
historical artifact.
It's sited on the Victoria
and Alfred Waterfront,
a tourist complex, whose
website describes it as quote,
"One of Africa's most
visited destinations
with 24 million
visitors annually,
situated in the
oldest working harbor
in the southern hemisphere."
And it's also important to know
that this is where tourists
take off for visits
to Robben Island,
where Mandela had
been imprisoned.
So it is one of the
kind of primary tourist
destinations within Cape Town.
Zeitz MOCAA's core
collection, amassed
by the German philanthropist
and businessman, former head
of PUMA, Jochen Zeitz, aims
to represent the 21st century
art of the African continent.
Similarly, the M+ museum in
Hong Kong which is yet to be
completed is built around a
prominent early collection
of Chinese contemporary art
put together also by a European
the Swiss businessman and
former ambassador to China,
North Korea, and
Mongolia, Uli Sigg.
And I'm showing you
just a kind of poster
for his collection,
which is truly,
really I think, not
controversially,
the best collection of Chinese
contemporary art in the world.
It's a really
stellar collection.
And like Zeitz MOCAA
the M+ building,
which is currently slated
for completion in 2021,
is designed by a celebrated
international architectural
firm, Herzog and de Meuron.
Finally, though newly built,
M+ will also be grounded
in an excavation, sitting atop
an underground railway terminal
in the west Kowloon Central
District in Hong Kong.
The building will open onto
the new railway infrastructure
beneath it.
Unfortunately, this slide
is not terribly informative,
and as the building
is not yet open,
I haven't been able to
see this space in person.
But the architect's account of
it is extremely interesting.
They write, "How should
a post-industrial space
be created from vacant land?
A mere 20 years ago, the ground
occupied by the West Kowloon
historical district, WKCD,
was part of the seaport.
Section by section,
the land has been
reclaimed from the sea and
the natural harbor filled
with earth.
This artificial piece of land
is now the construction site
for the new building.
What can lend authenticity
to reclaimed land?
Paradoxically, yet another
work of engineering
defines the specificity of the
place, the underground tunnel
of the Airport Express.
Initially an obstacle
that complicated planning,
this distinctive
feature has become
the raison d'etre for
our project, consisting
of a rough large scale
exhibition universe that
quite literally anchors the
entire building in the ground,"
unquote.
So it might seem odd that M+
is anchored by an underground
transportation project.
I mean, it's quite--
it's really perfect that
it's to the airport shuttle,
you know, in terms of it's
both groundedness in a place
but linked to the whole world,
I mean at least after COVID.
But given the
enormous urbanization
China has experienced
since the 1980s,
this mode of authentication
seems richly appropriate.
It is as though the
symbolic value of the museum
grows directly
out of development
in an allegory of how a new face
of knowledge based economies
have overtaken an earlier
emphasis on manufacturing, as
in Singapore.
In Singapore, Cape
Town, and Hong Kong
alike, the impulse to
route museums, literally,
in their sites is
also a consequence
of how these
institutions are oriented
to global and
expatriate audiences,
often to the exclusion
of local ones.
Singapore's Renaissance
City Plan of 2000,
for instance, that
I quoted earlier,
advocates culture as a tool
of economic development
and as a necessary
step toward attracting
the kind of well-educated
workforce it wants.
If one of Singapore's priorities
is attracting and retaining
a global workforce, the program
of M+ is certainly directed
toward protecting Hong
Kong's special status,
more and more precarious as a
mediator between mainland China
and the world, particularly
in a moment when its partial
autonomy from the mainland
is increasingly threatened.
To this purpose, M+ calls
attention to its representative
function by describing itself
as one of the largest museums
of modern and contemporary
visual culture in the world
that encompasses 20th and
21st century art, design,
and architecture from Hong Kong,
the mainland, and Asia beyond.
So again, this idea of a
region form of universality,
as it were.
I mean, that of
course is an oxymoron.
But it's the one I'm working
with and playing with with you
tonight.
It is significant that the
representation of Africa
at Zeitz MOCAA and of China
at M+ is based on European
collections that were
amassed privately.
Moreover, Hong Kong and
Cape Town, like Singapore,
have prospered as enclaves where
Western infrastructure allows
them to function as
within, but apart
from the regions they
represent, acting
as commercial and cultural
mediators between the West
and Southeast Asia,
China, and Africa.
These cities not
only proffer a kind
of semi-official
special economic zone,
or official special
economic zone,
but also special symbolic zones
where cultures are collected
and curated in an effort to
claim representative status
on behalf of their regions.
Perhaps this is why the museum
historians, Gail Dexter Lord
and Ngaire Blankenberg can
claim that museums, quote, "are
one of society's main adaptive
strategies for managing
change," unquote.
The change that globalization
proffers to be managed
of course is double edged.
On the one hand, global cities
emergence into prominence
because they have
the capacity to act
as regional representatives.
Domestically, these
acts of representation
equally serve to
enrich localities
that themselves have been
drained of their own heritage,
first through colonization
and subsequently
through neoliberal policies
of economic development.
So on the one hand, there is a
way in which this place making
works for the world of
the city-states themselves
or the cities themselves,
but also is directed outward.
It's a kind of double
edge, literally.
The global museum
must be recognized
as a means of managing a
specific kind of change,
therefore.
The entry of global
capital into new markets
and a corresponding
economic evolution
from manufacturing or
extractive economies
to knowledge based ones.
And this is really, I think,
one of the most important points
here, is that museums help
move from manufacturing
and extraction economies
to knowledge economies.
They are an index of that
and also an agent of it.
Indeed, in his account
of the ambitious program
of new museums pursued
in Doha and Abu Dhabi
since the turn of
the 20th century,
Alexandre Kazerouni
argues precisely this,
that "for the royal families
of Qatar and the Emirates,
building global museums
assists in consolidating
domestic political hegemony,
as well as establishing
national stability."
The efficiency of this type
of soft power, he argues,
was evident during
the first Gulf
War and the
international outrage
at the pillaging of the
Kuwait National Museum.
And you can see--
sorry, I was not able to
find images of the museum
after it had been
sacked during the war,
but you can see reference
to it on the bottom line
from this web page text.
So what Kazerouni
really argues is
that the sacking of the
museum generated sympathy
in the West, which helped
not only to generate support
for the restoration of
works carried off to Iraq,
but also for ongoing
military aid.
In other words, the arts become
a kind of attractor, not only
of economic support, but
military support from the West.
He writes, "The
Kuwaiti experience,
in showing the
potential of museums
as a medium of
communication directed
to the West and the necessity
of a clientelization
of their cultural elites to
guarantee military support,
thus prefigures the artistic
programs of Qatar and Abu
Dhabi, which emerged later."
In describing the type
of museum designed
to generate such
soft power, Kazerouni
makes a distinction
between what he
calls root museums, which were
typically founded in the 70s
and 80s to give archaeological
and ethnographic accounts
of local histories, and mirror
museums, that have emerged
since the 1990s and
are outer, rather than
inner, directed institutions
aimed at establishing
global networks.
And so here, on the left--
again, I visited in
Dubai this amazing museum
of the city of Dubai that
was very much clearly meant
for a local audience
in that it didn't have
any of the flash and
glitter of the new museums
of the Emirates.
And, in fact, what
Kazerouni is arguing
is that the sheiks used
this kind of development
of heritage museums as a
way of unifying their power.
And then museums like the Louvre
Abu Dhabi are outer directed.
In the new global museums
that I've discussed,
the National Gallery
Singapore, Zeitz MOCAA, and M+,
the two types, the mirror museum
and the root museum, converge.
And this is really
the point here
that I'm making
throughout this lecture,
that there is a kind of
archaeological embeddedness
of, for instance
here, the Singapore
museum in its
colonial history that
is being excavated within
the promenade of galleries.
The most spectacular of the
projects from the Emirates
is the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which
straightforwardly presents
itself as a universal museum.
It does make the claim that it
is in fact a contemporary form
of the universal museum.
But it can do so
because not only has it
rented the name of the
Louvre for 30 years,
but it also is drawing
from the collections
of a consortium of 13 French
museums over a period of 10
years during the development
of its own collection.
Now despite this appropriation
of foreign legitimacy,
like the other new
museums I've discussed,
this one is symbolically
rooted to its site,
if one can say
that, because it's
a new island, Saadiyat Island,
rooted to its site in a broader
symbolic sense.
To reference to an idealized
typology of Arab architecture
described by Jean Nouvel,
its French star architect as,
quote, "more of a
neighborhood than a building,
inspired by white Arab
cities, the Medina."
Now it might be
important, though perhaps
a little mean-spirited,
to mention
that the Medina is a type
indigenous to North Africa.
But here there is
a kind of Arabness
that is being suggested
as a rootedness.
And I show you the plan--
I know that you probably can't
see the specifics of the plan,
but it's only to give
you a sense of how,
in fact, the museum is not
at all based on a BOZAR plan,
as universal museums
tend to be in the West,
but rather as this kind
of very confusing--
I can tell you from
having visited--
very confusing clusters
of small pavilions.
It is a very beautiful
museum I think,
but also one with a lot of
controversial dimensions,
not least of which is the
fact that the construction
workers who built this museum
and who have been notoriously
exploited, are also foreigners.
Here is where, probably a
nicer place where they live.
But rather than
coming from Europe,
like the institution's
architects and curatorial
advisors, they're largely
migrants from South Asia.
The division of labor that built
the Louvre Abu Dhabi, as well
as other museums and educational
projects in the Emirates, thus
reinscribes an
imperial worldview
within its global project.
Europeans direct grand
cultural institutions
that are built on the
backs of oppressed laborers
from the global South.
These asymmetrical
labor relations
correspond to Kazerouni's
broader assertion
that the new Gulf museums
are structurally Western,
though located in
the global South.
In arguing that the Gulf
museums, and by extension
those other near
museums I've discussed
in East Asia and
South Africa, are
made by Westerners
and for Westerners,
Kazerouni suggests that
behind their claims
to give voice to the formerly
colonized of their region,
the institutional and
ideological structures
of colonization remain in place.
The cultural theorist
Kuan-Hsing Chan's distinction
between decolonization
and de-imperialization
is useful in clarifying
this condition.
For Chen decolonization,
this is a quote,
"decolonization is the
attempt of the previously
colonized to
reflectively work out
a historical relation
with the former colonizer
culturally, politically,
and economically.
So in other words, it's
a kind of recalibration
of a relationship
with the colonizer.
De-imperialization
on the other hand,
would entail a
thoroughgoing transformation
of the imperial values
and cognitive structures
that underlie the
relationship between colonizer
and colonized."
So Chan insists that
de-imperialization is just
as necessary in
New York and Paris
as it is in Singapore or Cape
Town, undoubtedly more so.
It is indisputable that the
new museums I've considered
do attempt decolonization, in
Chen's terms, by working out,
quote, "a new
historical relation
with the former colonizer,"
a relation of equality
and competition even,
primarily through programs
that establish an
independent global profile
or brand while consolidating
national identities
for domestic publics.
Both of these actions
renegotiate relations
with former colonial powers.
They decolonize.
But as we've seen, they leave
the underlying asymmetry
of the curatorial
relation largely intact,
consequently falling short
of de-imperialization.
As we have seen, the museum
simulates and authorizes
roots for the kind of
extraterritorial, curated
assemblages that
global capitalism
constructs by producing imagined
communities or better imaged
communities out of
distributed networks.
As I've argued,
these three museums
claim to represent an
entire region in order
to assert symbolic
sovereignty over it
on behalf of the cosmopolitan
cities they occupy,
cities that are special economic
zones in spirit if not in name,
as well as special
symbolic zones.
But second, these
same institutions
consolidate the singular
identity of their own locale
by generating and
disseminating images
drawn from their
spectacular architecture.
Museums are typically
understood as organizations
that collect images, primarily
but not exclusively artworks.
They are less
frequently acknowledged
as generators of images.
This capacity, however,
explains a great deal
of the contemporary
interest in building museums
around the world.
As Beatriz Plaza, Pilar
Gonzalez-Casimiro,
Paz Moral-Zuazo,
and Courtney Waldron
conclude in their study of
culture-led city brands, quote,
"An art museum can
create branding capital
through the narrative
associations
and images shaped
on both the inside
and the outside of place.
The architecture itself is
a non-reproducible piece
of art"--
I would just parenthetically say
that that's not entirely true,
as we can see from the slide.
Certainly the experience is
non-reproducible, but not
the spectacular image
of the building.
They continue, "while brand
channels like the media
diffuse reproducible images
at accelerating rates.
The demand for these
images increases
as consumers absorb them due to
increasing returns on utility.
Image accumulation
fuels increasing demand
for place, which
reinforces a brand
and ultimately attracts
cultural visitors."
So what they're
arguing is actually
somewhat against
common knowledge, which
is that the reproduction
of an experience
actually produces more demand
for the actual experience.
And museums are in fact
factories, one could say,
for producing more
and more images.
There are places that
use their capacity
to transform images into
places as a unique power
to re-territorialize
global networks,
to bring globalization
into a local place.
Pictures attract us to
places, where when we arrive,
we take more
pictures that attract
more people after they're posted
on social media, et cetera.
And this form of image
proliferation and concentration
moves well beyond tourism.
The museum is not
merely a representation
of such global
procedures, but an actor
in establishing global
assemblages by transforming
their often invisible
and far flung
commercial networks into
attractive image-saturated
places.
Through the
quasi-archaeological ensembles
that I've identified
in several new museums,
these spectacular places
are literally grounded.
The museum becomes
the privileged site
within globalization
of simultaneously
deterritorializing and
reterritorializing the image.
It is the place, the museum
is the privileged place,
where the immaterial
networks of globalization
are rendered material.
And not only rendered material,
but used as symbolic capital.
So thank you very much, and I
will stop sharing my screen.
And I'm happy to take questions.
OK.
I'm going to-- the
first question is,
does the choice of a
French lead architect
reinscribe the settler
colonial tradition
that the National Gallery
attempts to disrupt?
Absolutely.
I mean, this is the
paradox, I think, precisely
of these museum projects.
And it goes back to
this question, I think,
of visibility and
wanting the museum
to be a factory of
images, of spectacle.
Because what these
places want is museums--
you know, they want
the Bilbao effect.
They want a museum that is
going to bring people to a place
and going to establish
a profile for the place.
And they believe that the
fame of the architect--
and I think that their belief
is grounded in reality--
will be effective in
bringing those people in.
So I mean, this is one
of the many paradoxes,
including the fact
that a place like Abu
Dhabi, the Emirates, Singapore
are all illiberal places.
I mean, these are places
with heavy censorship.
They're not democratic places.
They're places
where the museum is
being used to project a
certain kind of image globally.
So I want to be clear
that I'm fascinated
by this dynamic of a kind
of archaeological anchoring
of a post-colonial narrative.
But this is why I go to Chen
at the end of the essay, where
he makes this distinction
between decolonizing, which
means showing oneself
as a modern state,
a non-colony, versus
de-imperializing,
which would mean to really,
completely undermine
what, in the question, Robert
Levine is calling this settler
colonial tradition.
So thank you for that.
The second one is, what
conditions do you suggest--
Oh, here.
I can answer live.
What conditions do you
suggest to consider
to ensure they are
creating a space that
respects historical cultures?
Well, this is a great question.
And in my book--
I mean, this is one of
those cheesy answers,
but I talk a little
bit about what
has been called
Indian museology,
or Native American or indigenous
forms of museum practice, which
have been, I think,
on the forefront
really of a kind of
collaborative curatorial
process, where members
of indigenous communities
are invited in
some institutions--
the Museum of the
American Indian
in Washington was a pioneer
in this on a big scale,
but there are also smaller,
regional museums who've
done this--
where certain kinds of
indigenous properties,
cultural properties
that are sacred or are
forms of knowledge that
should be accessible only
to those who are initiated
or members of communities,
are discussed with the
curators in the institution.
And the museum
makes a big effort
to bring together historical
Native American artifacts
with living presentations
of Native American culture.
So there is not this notion
that the culture is gone,
is historical or dead.
So I think, in a way, I'm
very critical of museums.
I also really love museums.
I don't think we could
live without them.
But I think that what
needs to happen--
and I know that my
friends who are curators
would tell me that this is
often unrealistic-- but I think
it is a horizon that should
be aimed for, and as I said,
has been successful within
Native American practices
and museums, is to democratize
the curatorial function
in a much broader way.
Now I do think
that, in many ways,
the Singapore museum has
done a good job, a better
job than Zeitz
MOCAA for instance,
which is a kind of cynical,
contemporary art collection
produced by one collector
with an art advisor who
made a museum.
So there are real
distinctions here.
Robert Levine has
another question.
Oh, I think I answered that
question because I think that--
yeah, I'm going to
move on to another.
OK this is from Diaz.
Institutions that you are
describing have, in many ways,
mimicked European
and US museums--
same architects, redeveloping
industrial structures,
exhibited projects,
claimed universality--
however, regional institutions
have political significance
for the countries.
What is their
conceptual potential
which could possibly influence
Western institutions back.
Oh, that's a great question.
When I was at the
Graduate Center, where
I was before coming to
Harvard, as Ron mentioned, just
this very semester,
an odd time to start,
I was part of a
globalization seminar
that was very focused,
not exclusively,
but quite engaged with
questions of scholarship
around the Black
Atlantic, for instance.
And how one, instead of thinking
about histories of England
or thinking about
histories of the Caribbean
or parts of Latin America, such
as Brazil and North America,
that the Atlantic, and
particularly the Black
Atlantic, where traffic in
slaves and culture and products
back to Europe all
were occurring,
is a frame of reference
that's extremely important.
And some of you, I'm
sure many of you,
know the work of Paul
Gilroy, for instance.
Many other scholars who
have thought to really think
through the Atlantic
as a crossroads,
a cultural crossroads,
in ways that
aren't as kind of
pastoral, as that phrase
suggests, through the
slave trade, et cetera.
So having lived a long time
in Boston, for instance,
one of the things that
has really interested me--
this could be done at the
Metropolitan Museum in New York
and other places as well, and
this is being done much more--
but to think instead of the
American galleries, let's say,
and the African galleries, to
think about a Black Atlantic
gallery, where there
is a kind of exchange
of objects that mirrors
a different history
of their actual exchange.
So I feel like I actually think
that these great encyclopedic
museums can, and
are in some ways,
doing a lot to rethink the
narratives that they support.
What they can do--
they have the
collections to do this.
These newer museums don't
have those collections.
So in a way, it's
really up to them.
OK, so here's another question.
Thank you for that one.
From Martino, thank
you for the lecture.
Are the strategies of
stratification, reframing,
and adaptive reuse in these
museums in decolonized cities
different from comparable
contemporary strategies
in Western capitals, such as
the Musee d'Orsay or the Tate
Modern?
And if yes, how?
Well, that's a
very good question.
And I think the Musee d'Orsay--
yeah.
What is interesting to
me about this question,
and it would be great to have
a longer discussion about this
with--
I wish that this was a
more interactive context,
but in a way, what the
Musee d'Orsay was doing
was bringing academic art
out of the closet, right?
So in a sense, it was
kind of doing something--
it was making a
revisionist argument
and using the train
station as this kind
of great icon of a certain
sort of 19th century splendor.
I'm not sure exactly what
year that station was made,
so it might be
early 20th century.
So I think, in a way,
the Musee d'Orsay
is an effort to do
what I just mentioned,
in terms of making
a new narrative
within the Western canon,
instead of there being--
I remember that before the Musee
d'Orsay, you would go to see--
I'm old enough to have
seen the great masterpieces
of the impressionists
just sort of completely
outside of any kind
of cultural context,
which the new building, as an
excavation of a train station,
is, in fact, doing as well.
So maybe I have to admit
that the strategy is really
no different, but the idea
is that this kind of motif
of excavation, architecturally,
often enables and accompanies
a kind of excavation
of collections.
I think I'll leave it at that
and hope for future discussion.
OK, I think we can take
just a few more questions.
From Annie Kim, I'm curious
if even regional museums might
be created from a
position of power that
chooses not to
represent minorities,
thinking particularly
of the violence
against Muslim minorities
in India and China.
Have the efforts
of decolonization
permeated beyond
the architecture
and into the organizational
cultures of the institution?
Again, a very good question.
China and Korea
are both places--
I'm coming sort of
sideways to your question.
China and Korea are
both places that
have built huge numbers
of museums in this period
and have approached their
museums in a different way.
In China, a lot of them
are private museums
that are based on real
estate development.
But also, I think because
Chinese culture does not
feel precarious in the way
that the situation in Hong
Kong, Singapore, the
Emirates, and Cape Town is,
these museums are focused more
on either contemporary art
or Chinese collections.
The Long Museum, for instance,
is an interesting case of this.
It, to some extent,
makes my point.
It's a private collector
museum in Shanghai
that has three
different locations.
One of them collects Cultural
Revolution era visual material.
One of them is the
contemporary collection.
And I'm forgetting
the third now.
At any rate, you could
argue that, in a way,
they've separated
the functions there,
but the Cultural Revolution
collection is, in a way,
a kind of method of rooting,
archaeologically, Chinese
contemporary art in a legacy
of cultural revolution.
Has decolonization permeated
beyond the architecture
into the organizational
structures?
I think in Singapore
and in M+, yes.
I think in Zeitz, not so much.
I think in Louvre Abu
Dhabi, not so much.
I think really it goes from
institution to institution.
Both the Singapore gallery
and M+ have really amazingly
impressive, world class
curatorial staffs.
OK.
So I think I'm going to take
just two more and go quickly.
So Rob Aiken, do you
have any thoughts
about the International
Slavery Museum
in Liverpool, simultaneously
local and global, in an attempt
to place slave trade?
You know, I wish I did because
I haven't been able to go there.
But I think that that
is a great institution
to bring into the mix.
And I'm going to try my
best to see that museum when
we're able to travel again.
Thank you for that question.
And then one last question
from Lawrence Franklin.
Is there a difference
in the role
of an art gallery and a museum?
And what is to be made of
small local museums, whose
collections are so important
to their communities,
and specialized museums, such
as the Bata Shoe Museum where
I live in Toronto, with their
often entertaining and unusual
collections?
Now this is a really
great question.
And I want to make clear that
in engaging with globalization,
I'm trying to be
very careful to,
in fact, engage with
globalization as a mechanism
and as a set of conditions.
And that means not everything
that happens in the world,
but a specific sense
of a distributed
form of economic activity
and also aesthetic activity.
So for me then, the
scope of my project
has more to do with these
large museums that are really
meant to not only to
draw, to make place
for a foreign audience, and
also a domestic audience.
With that said, what you're
saying is incredibly important.
And I think that small
local museums have also
been extremely creative
in terms of tailoring
their narratives to a place.
And they're often the most
innovative of museums.
I guess what I would say is
the difference between an art
gallery and a museum is that
a museum has a collection.
And a collection
is not only a kind
of material form of
history of the institution
and of collecting
practices and the histories
that those objects
address, but also
a kind of resource held in
trust for that community.
And so for me, museums are
so much more important.
Well, I should say, they have
a very specific importance,
which is that they
really are institutions
that need to respond not only to
their history, but the history
that they're part of.
And so I think that the most
exciting thing right now
is really to think about
how to use collections.
And one of the great
things, the silver linings
of the downturn of 2008 was
that more and more museums
turned to their collections
because it was less expensive
than loan exhibitions.
And I think they've
developed procedures
that have continued
since that time
and probably will
now continue as well,
given the conditions
we're living
under now, to really rethink
the museum by excavating
collections.
So with that, I will thank
you and say good evening.
I really appreciate your
coming, and I appreciate
all of your questions.
So good night and thank you.
