Know Your Own Bone

An exhibit on the stairs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (designed by Scott Reinhard) says it all.

As encyclopedic museums transform into active community centers, their focus on the past is directly at-odds with the booming and breathing nature of the urban communities that they serve.

Encyclopedic museums are missing an opportunity. The artwork and happenings of now represent museums’ most direct symbolic connections to the cities in which they are situated.

Traditionally, when you enter an encyclopedic museum, the Greek and Roman sculptures are to one side, ancient Egyptian artwork is to the other, and early European paintings are up the stairs in front of you.We look at art history backwards. We start as far back in history as possible and end up, if we’re lucky, in the back corner of contemporary art— but this is changing.

There are two issues working against museums that are putting current culture in the back corner:

1) Connection to Location: Community

• The problem: We perceive encyclopedic museums to be euro-centric (because often they are), and American visitors touring American cities lose a potential level of connection to the works of art. Tourists visiting New York wish to experience New York– but the bustling contemporary New York art scene is not front and center at an encyclopedic museum– you have to go to the back, or visit an entirely different museum for that. Even New Yorkers visiting the Met are forced to transport themselves mentally outside of their city, and these museums  miss the opportunity to summon a sense of pride and community.

• One solution: In a city with limited history like Los Angeles, current cultural happenings are extremely important. Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art called L.A. a “city of the present” in a panel discussion last Thursday. This is the driving theory behind putting Chris Burden’s Urban Light, 2008 (an installation of 200 vintage Southern California streetlamps) prominently outside of the museum on Wilshire Boulevard. Govan explains that you experience the present first. It is a nod to the community, and this installation (and thus LACMA itself) has no doubt become a cultural landmark for the city. Los Angelinos can recognize this installation immediately as something 100% L.A. (rather than 100% somewhere else and placed in L.A).

2) Connections to Time: Relevance

• The problem: Encyclopedic museums risk losing the sense of immediacy associated with current cultural happenings.  There are many ways that museums are engaging visitors: social media, community-based programs, and even gambling works of art. But these engagement tactics will not keep museums current on their own if the museum’s basic structure is not built with societal relevance in mind. Encyclopedic museums need to always be at least acknowledging what’s happening right now.

• One solution: The Art Institute of Chicago is a good example of an encyclopedic museum that has recently placed current cultural happenings at the forefront of their community efforts. The museum opened their new Modern Wing in May of 2009. The 264,000 foot building was created exclusively for 20th and 21st century artwork. The addition is so new, so green, and so ideal for events, that AIC has managed to create strong associations between their encyclopedic reputation and their emphasis on the importance of what’s happening right now. Not to mention, the addition makes AIC the second-largest art museum in the united states, building a sense of pride and community mentioned in point #1.

In sum, there’s often unrealized potential for personal connections in encyclopedic museums. It’s not that the connections aren’t there– it’s that they are in the back. They don’t need to be the main focus of the museum, but it is important for museum relevance and community that they are not forgotten. Encyclopedic museums embracing contemporary and experimental art/science will create a symbolic sense of pride for not only the prized artwork of the past, but for this brief moment in history in which we are living.

After all, one day everything that’s happening right now will be the past. We won’t know how to talk to our children about it because, even though we went to the museums and we lived it, we didn’t realize that right now was just as important as- say, 1640.