Writing in 1940, against the deepening shadow of Nazism, the great German Jewish theoretician Walter Benjamin had a few things to say about museumgoing. The thoughtful visitor, he wrote, may well be moved to tears by the beauty that he finds therein, but he will understand as well that “the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries.” Benjamin continues: “There is no document of civilization that is not, at the same time, a document of barbarism.” Power, made manifest through the splendid material of art, was, for him, the subliminal theme of the museum.
Scholars have been unpacking Benjamin's writings ever since, bringing us fresh interpretations. Through their efforts, we can now see how white, European modernism drained mojo from African sculpture (we're talking Picasso, here) and then wrote it out of art history; how Anglo-Canadian culture has grown in a sometimes tortured deference to the mother ship England; and how the genius of the male artist has often blossomed from the fertile compost of abandoned female potential. It takes shit to grow flowers, and those who enable the powerful – whether by force or by volition – get to be just that.
In the centuries since their inception in the Renaissance “cabinet of curiosities,” museums have been prime offenders in this scenario: designating the non-white as “other” and exotic in relation to a presumed white norm, erasing the testimony of the working class, suppressing the voice of women, and sequestering the art of aboriginal peoples in “ethnographic displays” presumed to be of a lower order of aesthetic distinction than their white European male contemporaries.
But what would it mean for a museum not to do this? What would it mean, here in the 21st century, for a museum to attempt to be civilized in a different way completely? Can there be such a thing as a non-violent museum?
These are the questions that animate the new galleries of the Art Gallery of Ontario, which opens to the public for the first time this weekend, an institution which has gracefully managed the transition from art gallery to museum, now housing important collections of Inuit, African and North American aboriginal art, as well as art made by men and women working the white European tradition.
Under the direction of Matthew Teitelbaum, and building upon the precedent of other institutions around the world (most notably the Tate Modern in London, with its themed installations), the curatorial team at the AGO has made a boldly ideological foray against outmoded museological traditions. There are many knots to untangle in the current installation – some passages of incoherence and some chaotic overcrowding – but there is also a powerful sense of mission: the drive to create an account of history that is not a master narrative but which, rather, allows for a kind of productive doubt, and multiple points of entry. The viewer must navigate between opposing views, and make meaning.
So, what does this look like?
First, the old tyranny of chronology is disrupted, a break with the plodding reiteration of progressive stylistic influence. Instead, contemporary works of art penetrate the narrative of art history at multiple points. For several decades now, museums have invited contemporary artists to create “interventions” into their collections, strategically inserting their work (and their realities) into the flow of the past. At the AGO, however, that strategy is now being deployed on an institutional scale.
In the Canadian historical galleries, a large commissioned painting by the Cree artist Kent Monkman offers comic commentary on the traditions of European white painting and colonial history, epitomized in this installation by the surrounding works from the permanent collection. A photograph of an inverted cedar tree by Vancouver artist Rodney Graham sits next to a forest picture by Emily Carr, their responses to modernity and the natural world separated by nearly a century. Alongside the AGO's very fine 17th-century Flemish genre paintings of cavorting peasantry, the gallery's chief of programming, Catherine de Zegher, has placed a two-part film installation by black American contemporary artist Kara Walker, a work which explores poverty and racial difference from a darkly sardonic present-day perspective.
