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.
Sometimes, the contemporary work pales in the comparison - and that shouldn't happen - but the idea is a good one: to demonstrate how art history and the ideas embedded in it are eternally present in the contemporary moment, and how the art of today can become a lens through which we see the past more clearly.
Historical time and human geography intersect in dynamic ways, as well, in the AGO's revamped sculpture galleries. In the dramatic, wooden-ribbed Galleria Italia, the giant carved-wood installation by Italian Giuseppe Penone rubs shoulders with the Frum collection of African art (housed in an exquisite series of galleries designed by the Toronto architecture firm of Shim-Sutcliffe). Just around the corner is the collection of Henry Moore plasters, and near it, a little gallery housing canonical small modern works by Gauguin, Picasso and Brancusi, as well as sculptures by contemporary black artists Willie Cole and Tim Whiten.
Down the hall, a gallery of Inuit art beckons, its crouching, flippered gatekeeper an electrifying shamanic sea creature by the carver David Ruben Piqtoukun, starkly contemporary yet redolent of ancient myth. All of these artists are clearly engaged in a kind of mystical relationship to materials, and to the stories of the past, but the point is made without being laboured and cheapened. There's a powerful sense here of the intermingling of world cultures, and of shared human experience across racial, temporal and social lines.
One of the most electrifying moments, though, is to be found in one of the new Thomson-collection galleries, where Lawren Harris's serenely minimalist arctic landscapes share space with an elegant Tlingit mask and other objects from the Dundas collection of Northwest Coast art. Bathed in celestial light that cascades from Gehry's angled, overhead volumes, both sets of objects seem galvanized by the comparison, with Harris looking much the better for it, his paintings depicting a True North that is crisper and clearer and emanating a kind of utopian transcendence.
Another, smaller gallery next door to this repeats the magic trick, pairing prime modernist abstracts by Quebec artist Paul-Émile Borduas with other Northwest coast objects to dazzling effect. Borduas's canvases seem suddenly to spring from a vibrant connection to the land: melting snow, twigs and bracken, the smell of cedar, crushed berries. It's a very Canadian moment, a statement about our territory and how - in the museum, at least - we can all share in the austere beauty of it.
The inclusion of aboriginal culture in the displays is a striking shift for the gallery. In this, the new AGO perhaps freshly embodies the deep propensities of its former chief curator (and current head or research and collections) Dennis Reid, whose interest in first-nations and Inuit culture has been a constant throughout his long and estimable career as a curator and art historian. (His pioneering 1984 exhibition, From the Four Quarters: Native and European Art in Ontario, 5000 BC to 1867, was a milestone in scholarship, blending aboriginal art with the art made by white colonial settlers.) Three years ago, the AGO hired Cree curator Gerald McMaster to run its Canadian division, and his sensitivity and fresh vision are also everywhere apparent in the Canadian rehang. A Mohawk ceremonial tree sculpture from the early 1900s (a hybrid object that uses Victorian beadwork motifs to embellish traditional Mohawk myth) provides a sharp, clarifying corrective, for example, to a room on emerging Canadian identity. One suddenly sees the exotic white man from the indigenous perspective.
The area of relative weakness, here, is the contemporary collections, which are displayed in a roughly chronological fashion. Happily, the presence of women artists has been significantly enhanced, with major high notes being struck by Joyce Weiland, Susanna Heller and Vera Frenkel, whose hypnotic video work, This Is Your Messiah Speaking, is installed in one of the museum's west elevators.
But half of the work in the contemporary galleries should go, giving room for the rest to breathe. A small room full of paintings by German artist Gerhard Richter (many of them presciently acquired by former chief curator Roald Nasgaard) is marred by the jarring inclusion of a Richter-decorated harpsichord in a space that is easily two times too small to accommodate it. In another, larger space, outstanding works by international artists Mona Hatoum, Doris Salcedo, Jac Leirner and Guillermo Kuitca (acquired by then-curator of contemporary art Jessica Bradley) are overwhelmed by lesser things. Other mini-galleries devoted to single artists (e.g., Michael Snow, N.E. Thing Co., Betty Goodwin) are likewise too densely packed, though the warm little spaces themselves are wonderfully conducive to powerful encounters with art.
One senses, strolling these galleries, an overweening but understandable desire to show off the extent of the AGO's holdings or, perhaps, to honour donors who have been instrumental to the gallery's rebirth by showcasing their gifts, but this inclusiveness has come at the expense of aesthetic resonance.
Lack of focus also plagues the display on contemporary Toronto art. Themed around the idea of collaboration, the exhibition All Together Now is unfocused and oblique, simply failing to present the vitality of our current city, and that's a shame. This could have been a real come-to-Jesus moment for a community in dire need of some discerning articulation.
These things, however, can be sorted out in the months and years ahead. The larger, overarching achievement is enormous: the repositioning of the gallery as a museum open to all cultures and both genders, and the pioneering merging of historical and contemporary collections in an experimental new format.
One of the questions casting a shadow over the AGO project since its announcement has been: Is the Thomson collection worth it? For years, the institution has been convulsed by the incorporation of Ken Thomson's expansive and at times eccentric holdings, preoccupying itself with its own growth and transformation when Toronto urgently needed leadership in the visual-arts sector. There was grumbling.
The verdict, though, is in. The gamble that Teitelbaum made has paid off in spades. The AGO director and his curatorial team have bravely taken the museum off auto-pilot, plunging us instead into a complex, mirrored space of contemporaneity in which history is present and so, too, is the possibility of a more progressive future.
Vastly increasing the holdings of the gallery, deepening immeasurably its ability to articulate the story of Canada, providing opportunities for dazzling aesthetic pleasure, the new AGO is easily twice the institution it was. The superb rooms devoted to David Milne's oils and works on paper; the charming anthology of folk-art parable paintings by William Kurelek; Peter Paul Rubens's Baroque marvel The Massacre of the Innocents; the spectacular, jewel-like galleries that house the Thomson collections of European ivories and miniatures - these displays are among the finest ever staged in the Canadian museum world. In this accomplishment, Toronto has taken a decisive step forward. So, too, has Canada. Now let's keep walking.
For more information, see www.ago.net or call 416-979-6660 or toll-free 877-225-4246.