The Culture Factory: Architecture and the Contemporary Art Museum

By Richard J Williams

This book explores the key battlegrounds in the design of the contemporary-art museum, describing the intersection of art, aesthetics and politics at the highest levels, and the commitment of states, cities and wealthy individuals to the display of art. It describes museum building as the projection of political power, but also as a desire to acquire power. It is commonplace to assume that the contemporary-art museum has become ever more spectacular, and the place of art ever more subservient within it. This book argues that a tendency to spectacle coexists with another equally powerful tendency, to make art museums that celebrate the artistic process, typically attempting to recreate the feeling of the artist's studio. Richard J. Williams's stimulating text includes many historical examples to illustrate how we got to where we are now, from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, to the Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao, London's Tate Modern, Oscar Niemeyer's work in Brazil and beyond, and the 798 Art District in Beijing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Release date: Oct 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781848223981

Book preview

Front Cover of The Culture FactoryHalf Title of The Culture FactoryBook Title of The Culture Factory

First published in 2021 by Lund Humphries

Lund Humphries

Office 3, Book House

261A City Road

London EC1V 1JX

UK

www.lundhumphries.com

The Culture Factory:

Architecture and the Contemporary Art Museum

© Richard J. Williams, 2021

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-84822-397-4

eBook (Mobi) 978-1-84822-400-1

eBook (ePub) 978-1-84822-399-8

eBook (pdf) 978-1-84822-398-1

A Cataloguing-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and publishers. Every effort has been made to seek permission to reproduce the images in this book. Any omissions are entirely unintentional, and details should be addressed to the publishers.

Richard J. Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work.

Copy edited by Michela Parkin

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Set in Mediaan by Dávid Molnár

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Inside front cover: 798 Art District, Beijing

Foreword by Marcus Verhagen

Chapter 1

How did we get here?

Chapter 2

Making sense of industrial space

Chapter 3

Museums and architectural icons

Chapter 4

Landscapes in the vicinity of art

Notes

Further reading

Image credits

Acknowledgements

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY ART

Series Editor: Marcus Verhagen, Senior Lecturer, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London

A series of newly commissioned, engaging, critical texts identifying key topics and trends in contemporary art practice and discussing their impact on the wider art world and beyond. The art world is changing rapidly as artists avail themselves of new technologies, travel ever more widely, reach out to new audiences and tackle urgent issues, from climate change to mass migration. The purpose of the series is to discuss these and other changes, in texts that are accessible, stimulating and polemical.

INTERNATIONAL SERIES ADVISORY BOARD

Amelia Barikin, Lecturer in Art History in the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland

T J Demos, Professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC) at UC Santa Cruz

Anthony Downey, Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa, Birmingham School of Art

Karen Fiss, Professor of Graphic Design, Visual Studies and Fine Arts, California College of the Arts

Yuko Hasegawa, Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT) and Professor of Curatorial and Art Theory at Tama Art University in Tokyo

Katja Kwastek, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Lisa Le Feuvre, curator, writer, editor and inaugural Executive Director of the Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson Foundation, New Mexico

Nina Möntmann, Professor of Art Theory, Institute of Art & Theory, University of Cologne

Tom Morton, curator, lecturer and writer, Contributing Editor of Frieze magazine

Paul O’Neill, curator, artist, writer, educator, Artistic Director of PUBLICS, Helsinki

Simon Sheikh, Reader in Curating, Goldsmiths, University of London

Foreword

The art museum has changed dramatically since the opening of the Centre Pompidou in 1977. Today its prestige rests partly on the residual influence of an earlier conception of its role and partly on its success in areas once seen as beyond its remit. Some contemporary art museums attract millions of visitors annually. Many now put on other events, from symposia and film screenings to music gigs. Some are backed by political and corporate patrons in the hope that they will spark the regeneration of cities or neighbourhoods, as the Guggenheim Bilbao seems to have done, to the extent that urbanists and policy wonks now speak of the ‘Bilbao effect’. Museums are no longer dedicated entirely to the study and conservation of art – they are also playgrounds, event venues and retail centres. They have, in other words, become pillars of the entertainment and tourist industries.

Architects have played a crucial part in this transformation. The Pompidou and Guggenheim Bilbao are of course landmark buildings. The design of the contemporary art museum has come not just to reflect its evolving social and economic profile but to catalyse it. In some cases, Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI in Rome for instance, the establishment of the museum as an attention-grabbing architectural statement has preceded the development of a collection and programme to match. Museums have competed for the services of eminent architects, who have aided and abetted the push for new, larger and more spectacular spaces and concurrent eforts to brand or rebrand collections, programmes and places. Thomas Crow, writing about institutions in the United States, sees in this trend the hand of wealthy trustees: ‘[the] museum as a tangible envelope constitutes the primary reality of the institution to those charged with its ultimate oversight; hence the preoccupation with architectural expansion as the most obvious evidence of standing and largesse’.¹

Whether it is the work of trustees, directors or political sponsors, the rush to build new museums and add new wings to older ones has had clear knock-on effects for artists and curators. Architectural ambition is not always congruent with optimal viewing conditions. Indeed, the argument that a bold design may overshadow a museum’s collection is one that was articulated well before the surge in visitor numbers and museum building: a group of prominent artists complained about the spiral ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim in New York before work on the site had even started.² But with the more recent boom in museum building, the question of the relative claims of art and architecture, addressed in these pages by Richard Williams, has taken on added urgency.

Marcus Verhagen

Chapter 1

How did we get here?

This is a book about art museums, with very little art in it. That, and others of the book’s choices, will no doubt strike some readers as perverse. But the recent history of contemporary art shows that we need an expanded idea of what the museum could be. There is an ever more capacious understanding of what art is, as well as an ever-greater acceptance on the part of museums that they are inescapably part of what might be called the entertainment complex, together with audiences whose growth has been largely untroubled by these questions. Art museums, to use a concept that threads all the way through this book, have become industries. To those who wish to defend art’s exceptionalism, or the art museum as a bulwark against the world, these trends are only cause for regret. This is not a regretful book, however, even if the trends I describe point to – as I suspect they do – the dissolution of art as a meaningful category and art museums as meaningfully distinct institutions.¹ Institutions merely represent the priorities of the societies that produce them, so we get mainly what we deserve. But we need to understand what we have and how we got here, and that is the point of the book.

Some of the museums I discuss are indubitably there for art: New York’s Museum of Modern Art, for example, later in this chapter. But there are also admittedly museums of design, museums of history, museums of urban life and museums of not very much at all. Even among art museums, however, there are questions. The extraordinary Guggenheim Bilbao, designed by the architect Frank Gehry and opened to global acclaim in 1997, is ostensibly for art. But prod the Guggenheim, figuratively speaking, and what shakes out is less an art museum in a traditional sense than an entertainment complex at the heart of a giant project of urban regeneration. The Guggenheim Bilbao, as we will see in Chapter 3, is, from the perspective of its consumers, just one of an array of leisure options, only some of which have to do with art. That is an observation, not a criticism, for without museums like the Guggenheim we would not have the radically expanded audience for contemporary art that we now have, all over the world.² But with these relatively new institutions, promoting and housing contemporary art, has come an unprecedentedly broad understanding of what art is. As well as paintings, sculptures and drawings, a regular visitor to Tate Modern – to pick one example – may have seen various species of installation, film, street photography, photojournalism, dance, advertising, industrial design, psychedelic lightshow, city plan and data visualization, and will have likely heard lectures, gone shopping, lunched and drank.³ And, as the art theorist Boris Groys has stated, even where museums are ostensibly art-focused, they have increasingly shown documentation of art events (performances, installations, social interventions) that have happened elsewhere.⁴ Ours is a period of ‘accelerated erasure of visible differences between artwork and profane object’, he has written, and artworks depend ever more on context in order to be understood as artworks.

The boundaries between the experience of art and other experiences have certainly become porous, and the same can be said of the boundaries between ostensibly different kinds of museums. The Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, discussed in Chapter 3, is a museum of history on the face of it. But its building, designed by the media-savvy Polish American architect Daniel Libeskind, is a highly sculptural form with arguably more in common with Land Art than any traditional form of museum. Its displays, meanwhile, short on objects and long on immersive ‘experience’, are more easily understood as belonging to the history of installation art than exhibition design.⁵ Some readers may disagree, but it seems to me that the IWM North is, like it or not, not much less an art experience than Tate. In the newly expanded world of the contemporary art museum, the distinction between what is and what is not art arguably matters little to visitors too.

If they are preoccupied with this question, visitors seem content that the ‘art’ component of a museum visit may well lie in the architecture. Architecture has always been