[‘Sun in the circle’]July 19, 1990Archive Gerard de Boer Jr., Emmen

Date: Source:

Smithson frequently criticized the art world’s inherent power relations and institutional constraints. Much of his later artwork can be understood to overcome the limits posed by the museum, which he chal-lenged in several directions. He looked for different per-spectives, introduced unusual materials and operated on different timescales. Since Smithson’s time, both the situation of the museum and ways to overcome its limita-tions have changed consid-erably. In comparison with Smithson’s day, two influential parameters for the museum and its operational mode have been introduced: globalization and new forms of storing and remembering cultural objects. The Internet and digital media have tremendously changed the practices of memory. A scientifically established, his-torical order of the items in the museum is being challenged by forms of knowledge that turn out to be the result of a col-laborative effort. The relation of the museum to its visitors is up for a dramatic change, and the role of the artist and the artwork needs to be re-eval-uated. In the future, a secure place in the canonized history of art might look less appealing than the activation provided by a multitude of links. What will the future of the museum look like under these conditions?

Museum, Media, Society

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JAn ROThuiZEn, ‘This is not a Church’, part of an Augmented Reality-tour developed by the artist Jan Rothuizen in 2010 for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Courtesy Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

nullifying

Mcluhan, Smithson and the Future of the Museum

Stefan Heidenreich

When talking to Alan Kaprow about the topic of the museum, Smithson did not go along with his friend’s straightforward criticism. He preferred to remain undecid-ed and ambivalent:  “I think the more points the better, you know, just an endless amounts of points of view.”1 Kaprow accused him of irony and complained about the “lack of extremity” in his position. He pushed for a strict posture of refusal, a stance well known amongst rebel artists throughout modernism. It took Smithson five years to come to a point close to Kaprow’s extremism. Shortly after having finished his work for Sonsbeek Beyond the Pale (Sonsbeek buiten de perken), he decided not to exhibit his work at the documenta 5 in 1972. Instead he published a text in the catalogue, fiercely attacking the institutions of the art world and their oppression of artists.2 In the meantime, he opted for a position that looked vague in his friend’s eyes, but was no less radical. Kaprow was arguing from a political standpoint, accusing the museum of per-petrating class differences and being stuck in empty traditionalism. His position resembles the criticism later to be uttered as Institutional Critique by, for example, Hans Haacke, warning against the museum’s becoming part of the “consciousness industry”3, a term borrowed from the cultural theory of the Frankfurt School and their somewhat traditionalist belief in the superiority of modernism. Smithson looked at the museum from a different point of view, uttering his opin-ions at times with irony, at times with exaggeration. “I think the best thing you can say about museums is that they are really nullifying in regard to action, and I think that this is one of their major virtues.”4 His criticism comes from inside the institution, but claims to speak from the outside. In fact, this ‘outside position’ can be seen as a recurrent motif throughout his career. He never went to college or to an art academy. Instead, he entered the art scene through the bars and meeting places in Manhattan, and his job in a bookshop on 8th Street was probably what was most influential in shaping his intellectual approach in a non-conformist, independent and very self-determined way, without attachment to any particular intellectual school.5

The difference between his and Kaprow’s attitudes shows in the way the museum is depicted. Whilst for Kaprow it is a more or less screwed up and doubtful entity under political and social control, Smithson talks of the museum as an agent, one that is facilitating or mostly limiting. For him, museums are by no means passive institu-tions or tools of control and suppression. On the contrary, they shape their world in a very specific way, and that counts for the artists and their works as much as for

1. Robert Smithson; Allan Kaprow, ‘What is a Museum? A dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson’ (1967), in: Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 51.

2. According to art historian Philipp Ursprung, this is a decision that parts of the established art world either tried to ignore or never forgave. See Philipp Ursprung, Grenzen der Kunst. Allan Kaprow und das Happening, Robert Smithson und die Land Art, Munich: Schreiber, 2003, p. 205.

3. Hans Haacke, ‘Museum, Managers of Consciousness’ in: Brian Wallis (ed.), Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business (exhib. cat.), New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 1986, p. 60.

4. Smithson; Kaprow, ‘What is a Museum?’ (1967), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p. 44. 5. Thomas Crow, ‘Cosmic Exile: Prophetic Turns in the Life and the Art of Robert Smithson’, in: Eugene Tsai; Cornelia Butler

(eds.), Robert Smithson, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, p. 36.

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the spectators. “The museum undermines one’s confidence in sense-data and erodes the impression of textures upon which our sensations exist.”6 But the artworks suffer even more than the senses: “Once the work of art is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically lobotomized it is ready to be consumed by society. All is reduced to visual fodder and transportable merchandise. Innovations are allowed only if they support this kind of confinement.”7 The rooms for art – and Smithson includes galleries in this as well as museums – are far from being passive containers. He conceded that the museum does not have an entirely repressive character. It determines its content, it sets a framework and limitation for actions, but is still able to create a void. “Visiting the museum is a matter of going from void to void.”8 This apparently neutralizing energy seems to contradict the other verdicts, but it can be explained with regard to the theoretical model behind Smithson’s arguments. “Well, it seems to me that there is an attitude that tends toward McLuhanism, and this attitude would tend to see the museum as a null structure.”9

McLuhanismMcLuhan himself never mentions the term “null structure”. But he talks about a nihil-istic attitude on a very interesting occasion, when referring to James Joyce and his opinion on ‘automatic writing’: “His verdict on the ‘automatic writing’ that is photo-graphy was the abnihilazation (sic!) of the etym.”10 It is unclear if the ‘nihilism’ attrib-uted to photography led Smithson to his idea of nullification, but he obviously must have known that passage, as from the same page he quotes another example of what McLuhan calls a ‘nihilistic’ effect, and which he calls a ‘nullifying’ effect, namely that the newsreel “substitutes the ‘reel’ world for reality.” 11

When it comes to technology and information, Marshall McLuhan turned our thinking upside down. Instead of regarding the medium as a mere tool, designed to fulfil defined purposes and desires, he reverses these positions. First comes the medi-um, and then something is said or shown through it. Rather than using the medium for a purpose, it is strong enough to impose its mark on the content, or, in McLuhan’s words: “the medium is the message”.12 McLuhan gave his argument an historical scope by placing the medium always ahead of whatever might appear as its content. “Nobody wants a motorcar until there are motorcars, and nobody is interested in TV until there are TV programs.”13 Mediums do not simply fulfil our desires, but prefigure them. As a model for this reversal, McLuhan referred back to the argument on causality expounded by David Hume. The Scottish philosopher warned against taking the mere sequence of events as a guarantee for a causal relation and depicted the obsession with causality as a human illusion. McLuhan explains this figure of thought as trig-gered by mediums. “Neither Kant nor Hume, however, detected the hidden cause of our Western bias towards sequence as ‘logic’ in the all-pervasive technology of the alphabet.”14 The argument has a double layer. Not only is causality turned upside down

6. Smithson, ‘Some Void Thoughts on Museums’ (1967), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p. 41. 7. Smithson, ‘Cultural Confinement’ (1972), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p. 155. 8. Smithson, ‘Some Void Thoughts on Museums’ (1967), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p. 41. 9. Smithson; Kaprow, ‘What is a Museum?’ (1967), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p. 43f. 10. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man, Cambridge, (MA): MIT Press, 1995 (originally published

in 1964), p. 200. Cited in: Smithson, ‘A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art’ (1968), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p. 91. 11. McLuhan, 1995 (note 10), p. 284. 12. Ibid., p. 9. 13. Ibid., p. 65. 14. Ibid., p. 121.

[see also Letter to

Enno Develing,

pp. 108–112]

in comparison to common sense, which tries to understand mediums as mere tools, but also, causality itself is shown to be an effect of the medium. Through their pres-ence, mediums make us operate and exchange information in a certain way. When talking about the museum, Smithson is aware of McLuhan’s argumenta-tion, else he would not name him explicitly, and renders his own formulation of the matter in appropriate terms. The museum appears as a medium, a proposal explicitly made in an article that Smithson cites.15 McLuhan neither had to say much about the museum, nor did he specify it anywhere as a nullifying institution. According to his theory, such a thing would be close to impossible, as mediums always relate to earlier mediums, thus forming an ever-continuing chain that would never reach a zero point. But Smithson’s application of McLuhan’s theories to the art world extends them in a very decisive manner. Whilst for McLuhan all media still bear a human-centred core, as “extensions of man”, Smithson, according to the subtitle of McLuhans book [‘A Manifestation of Effects’ –ed.], wanted to see them grounded somewhere else. “The manifestations of technology are at times less ‘extensions’ of man [Marshall McLuhan’s anthropomorphism –ed.], than that they are aggregates of elements.”16 It is no coincidence that his objections against McLuhan’s theory involve the term “ele-ments”. It indeed makes a difference if machines and technologies can be traced back to bodily functions, or if they are grounded in a non-human, material substance. The very term “elements” introduces a different point of departure. Smithson continues his rebuttal of one of McLuhan’s central theses by naming one of the elements in question: “Even the most advanced tools and machines are made of the raw mat-ter of the earth.”17 When Smithson speaks of elements, he does not refer to a neutral entity but to the elements that lie at the basis of the physical world and also at the basis of his preoccupation with this world as an artist. “I gave up painting around 1963 and began to work plastics in a kind of crystalline way. And I began to develop structures based on a particular concern with the elements of material itself.”18 Thus, both manifestations, those of technology and those of art, are aggregates of the same elements. In this way, Smithson’s radicalization of McLuhan essentially replaces the human factor with a substance in which both media and art are based. “I am for an art that takes into account the direct effects of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation.”19 The element guides the way in which the artist can overcome the limitations of the medium, but only if the medium is traced back to these elements and not to whatever anthropomorphism. That is why Smithson had to contradict McLuhan on this matter. With the term “nullification”, Smithson again shifts McLuhan’s position, but only a little bit. The “nullification” is his own interpretation of that very brisk statement, “The medium is the message”.20 And indeed, seen from an artist’s perspective, a straightforward reading of McLuhan’s message would be truly horrifying because his approach denies any illusion of autonomy and would declare the artist subjected to a medium, be it a gallery or a museum. It would annihilate all the momentum of the artist as an independent creator, and the fantasies of power and god-like abilities that have circulated in the art world ever since the invention of the artist as a hero.21

15. Smithson, ‘A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art’ (1968), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p. 84. 16. Smithson, ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’ (1968), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), pp. 100–101. 17. Ibid., p. 101.18. Paul Cummings, ‘Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution’ (1972),

in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p 284.19. Smithson, ‘Cultural Confinement’ (1972), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p. 155. 20. McLuhan, 1995 (note 10), p. 9.

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JEF CORnEliS, Sonsbeek buiten de perken, 1971, documentary commissioned by Belgian radio and television (B.R.T.), 56 min. 4 film stills. Courtesy VRT, Brussels. From left to right: telephone conference at the Information Center in Arnhem; feedback through a video synthesizer designed by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe; discussion in the Conference Hall designed by Eventstructure Research Group; Artists Union (BBK) Protest

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The focus on media and their effects was by no means restricted to Smithson. It was commonplace in the theoretical discussions of the time. When Wim Beeren spoke about the concept for Sonsbeek 71, he declared: “Therefore we have accepted the fact that the communication media (modern or old) have contributed greatly to our conception of space.… A considerable portion of world events comes across to us by those means of communication and nothing else. Information is becoming an almost independent phenomenon.”22 But the art world always shrank back from taking the consequences of McLuhan’s ideas seriously. Smithson is one of the few, and this led him to radical opinions and decisions.

The Artist’s PositionThe reference to media theory cannot fully explain Smithson’s attitude towards the position of the artist. McLuhan himself takes a very different stance and puts the artist in an exceptional position. “It’s always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it.”23 That gives the artist a unique capacity within McLuhan’s theory as the singular fig-ure able to sidestep the powers exerted by media. He even extends the visionary quali-ties of the artist to other fields of society and knowledge. “The artist is the man [sic!] in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of his knowledge in his time. He is the man of integral awareness. The artist can correct the sense ratios before the blow of new technologies has numbed conscious pro-cedures.”24 But at that point, McLuhan has to introduce a sharp distinction between this idealistic visionary full of knowledge and creativity and the much less convincing reality on the ground. “If it is true that the artist possesses the means of anticipating and avoiding the consequences of technological trauma, then what are we to think of the world and bureaucracy of ‘art appreciation’? Would it not seem suddenly a con-spiration to make the artist a frill, a fribble, or a Miltown?”25 McLuhan describes the art world’s systemic effects on artists as almost pathogenic and psychotic. Nowadays, the meaning of the term “Miltown” has become obscure.26 It refers to the brand name of the first heavily marketed blockbuster tranquillizer (Meprobamate), produced in the town of the same name in New Jersey from 1955 onward. In 1964, the year of the publication of McLuhan’s book, it was re-evaluated as a sedative, and three years later banned after being found addictive.27 Thus the effects of a system on the artist are: tranquillizing, sedative and in the end, addictive. Two types of artists operate on the opposite sides of McLuhan’s spectrum: on the one side, the promising hero who alone is able to transgress the power of the medium, and on the other, the psychotic victim, degenerated by exposure to the forces of the art world. This may be the departure point for Smithson’s own harsh criticism of the role that the artist has in the art system. And, very much like McLuhan, he describes the effects of the art world as inducing a type of psychotic state: “This causes acute

21. For a collection of motifs, see Ernst Kris; Otto Kurz, Die Legende vom Künstler: ein geschichtlicher Versuch, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995 (originally published in 1934).

22. W. Beeren, ‘From Exhibition to Activity’, in: Geert van Beijeren; Coosje Kapteyn (eds.), Sonsbeek 71. Sonsbeek buiten de perken (exhib. cat.), Vol. 1., Arnhem: Foundation Sonsbeek 71, 1971, p. 11.

23. Eric Norden, ‘Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation With the High Priest of Pop-Cult and Metaphysician of Media’, Playboy Magazine, March 1969.

24. McLuhan, 1995 (note 10), p. 65.25. Ibid., p. 66. 26. For example, the German translation simply leaves it as such without further explanation.27. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meprobamate.

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ROBERT SMiThSOn, Film Treatment (Aerial Camera Movement for Broken Circle), 1971, drawing, private collection. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery New York/Shanghai

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anxiety among artists, in so far as they challenge, compete, and fight for the spoiled ideals of lost situations.”28 The artist is corrupted by the very existence of a medium and its power structures. Instead of reaching out as an autonomous creator, the artist suffers from the mediatic setting. Throughout his writings, Smithson frequently criticized the art world’s inherent power relations and institutional constraints. His critique culminated in refusing to show a work at Harald Szeemann’s documenta 5 in 1972. “Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. Some artists imagine they’ve got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control. Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells – in other words, neutral rooms called ‘galleries’.”29 A general problem as regards to his criticism is that it often comes from within, and therefore risks being either self-destructive or limited. Smithson did not shy away from endangering his own position. His arguments left little room for compromise but they did not lead to a futile position. On the contrary, the ability to recognize limits clearly gave him the incentive to deal with them. “All legitimate art deals with its limits. Fraudulent art feels that it has no limits. The trick is to locate those elusive limits. You are always running against those limits, but somehow they never show themselves.”30 Much of his later artwork can be understood as form to overcome the limits posed by the museum as a medium in the sense of McLuhan.

Air and EarthSmithson tried to challenge limits in several directions. Ultimately, this leads to his early death in 1973. He died when flying over one of his artworks. The aerial perspec-tive came into his artistic production almost by accident. In 1965, he was asked by some architects to propose a contribution for the new Dallas/Fort Worth Airport that was under construction. His considerations quickly took a McLuhanist turn, as he focused on what air traf-fic does, and not what purpose it serves. Smithson takes the medium, in this case the airplane, not as a mere vehicle for transport, but as an independently acting force. “Let us now try to delimit some new meanings in terms of the actual facts of today’s new aircraft. By extracting esthetic morphologies from existing aircraft, the same way the artist extracts meanings from a given ‘art object’, we should find a whole new set of values.”31 The aircraft itself sets the basis of an aesthetic approach, and not the oppo-site way. After a series of more or less risky turns, Smithson arrives at an astonishing conclusion: “What is needed is an esthetic method that brings together anthropology and linguistics in terms of ‘buildings’. This would put an end to ‘art history’ as sole criterion. Art at the present is confined by a dated notion, namely ‘art as a criticism of earlier art’.”32 With its blending of functional, linguistic and aesthetic concepts, the airport construction site allowed Smithson to step out of a discursive cage. Ever since, flying and its related modes of perception formed an integral part of many of his art-works, especially his outdoor works. “These aerial sites would not only be visible from arriving and departing aircraft, but they would also define the terminal’s man-made

28. Smithson, ‘Cultural Confinement’ (1972), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p. 156. 29. Ibid., p. 154. 30. P.A. Norvell, ‘Fragments of an Interview with Patsy Norvell’ (1969), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p. 194. 31. Robert Smithson, ‘Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site’ (1967), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p. 52. 32. Ibid., p. 59.

perimeters in terms of landscaping.”33 The outdoor artwork, just as the site itself, is not situated on a neutral ground. Both are defined by a medium, the aircraft, and the perceptions it facilitates. In a turn that is as McLuhanist as can be, the landscape itself is altered: “The old landscape of naturalism and realism is being replaced by the new landscape of abstraction and artifice.”34

As a consequence, Smithson’s earthworks are to be seen from a mediated point of view. These conditions play out in a double way, which shapes Smithson’s work in Emmen, Holland in an exemplary fashion. When asked about the fact that Spiral Hill allows Broken Circle to be seen from above, Smithson avoids a straight reply. “I don’t see it as an object. What you have there are really many different scale changes. Speaking in terms of cinema, you have close, medium and long views.”35 The artwork itself is not taken into consideration as a sculptural piece anymore, but is exclusively seen as a stage for a cinematic operation, which involves different scales, such as cre-ated during a flight. The work cannot be detached from its filmic representation. The representation is not something external to the work, and as such becomes rather a form of presentation than a re-presentation. “Both the making and the filming of the work informed each other.”36 This vice-versa influence extends beyond the fact of the parallel existences of a film and an artwork. There is a drawing Smithson made for the filming of Broken Circle/Spiral Hill that strikingly shows the formal parallels between the works them-selves and the flight trajectory. When Smithson talks about the plans for filming the work in Emmen, he mentions that “The helicopter would go as high as possible over Broken Circle, then slowly drop down into the middle, till it was about three feet over the sand bank and the water.”37 The cam-era spiralling up and down finds its mate-rial expression in Spiral Hill, which can be taken as a material modelling of a flight route. And this counts for all the spirals, circles and ramps, which may not only be abstractions in an abstract landscape, but direct and straight materializations of pos-sible flight and camera trajectories. Again, the medium becomes the message, when the camera films its own trajectory. Smithson’s obsession with filming is not only about the elevated viewpoints and the changes in perspective; it also stands for a distance that frees the spectator from its limits, physically as much as men-tally. After describing the flight manoeu-vres over the site in Emmen in every detail, he continues: “Museum shows often neu-tralize art by taking it out of society – out of circulation – by rendering it ‘abstract’

33. Smithson, ‘Aerial Art’ (1969), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p. 116.34. Ibid.35. Gregoire Muller, ‘…The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms, is a Cruel Master’ (1971), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), pp. 253–254. 36. Ibid., p. 256. 37. Ibid., pp. 258–259.

[see p. 149]

[see p. 155]

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and ineffective. Sonsbeek, at least, points toward a new sense of circulation.”38 And filming the work further enhances that type of circulation, whose primary aim would be to overcome the museum’s limits.

The Contemporary Both the situation of the museum and ways to overcome its limitations have changed considerably since Smithson’s time. But his approach, inspired by McLuhan’s media theory, of investigating a medium’s internal forces in order to find an appropriate artistic answer, remains as valid as ever. Of course, this answer will still be confronted with the same paradox of having to be inside, i.e. inside the art world with its institu-tions and limitations, and outside, transgressing those limits at the very same time. The art of the last century, Smithson’s work included, might well be seen as a result of the age of the museum, in the very same way as we had ages of feudal or ecclesiastical art. Linked to the prevailing discursive order of the museum, art history proved very efficient in flattening out the gaps and differences between these insti-tutional settings. Not much has changed in that respect since Smithson described his experience in a museum, except for the fact that its model was extended from the Europe-centric to the global sphere. “Blind and senseless, one continues wandering around the remains of Europe, only to end in that massive deception ‘the art history of the recent past’.”39 What exactly is so deceptive about art history? Where does its nullifying force lie? It is to be found exactly in those parameters that are taken so much for granted that they are neither questioned nor even apparent. For art history as much as for the museum, there is one dimension in which no concessions can be made. It is history itself, and thus something art history cannot free itself of. But the mode of our his-toricizing comprehension has its own historical starting point: it had to be invented, set into place, turned into a discipline and brought to institutional power. All this hap-pened from 1770 to 1820, with the father of modern art history, Winckelmann, as one of the great protagonists, pretty much in line with the historization of the academic disciplines of culture and knowledge at large.40 The modern museum, with its strict order of timed objects, was first established by scholars of Winckelmann’s work and became the dominant mode of presenting art after the French revolution, when the new scheme was adopted in the Louvre. The very movement of modernism, with its dependency on a strict time-based sequence, can be traced back to this discursive rule.41 Smithson was clearly aware of the deceptive and “nullifying force”, as he would have said, exerted by this form of historical order. “When a thing is seen through the consciousness of temporality, it is changed into something that is nothing.”42 In this sense, modernism and its follow-up of avant-gardes can be seen as the most promi-nent mode of art production during the age of the museum and as a perfect fulfilment of its discursive requirements. Smithson himself was not able to escape this force. His work fits all too well in a history of absorbed rebellions. Nothing proves the strength of McLuhan’s arguments better. Whatever content is produced, however explicit it pushes against a medium’s limits, it may still find its place within their constraints. It will be nullified. From that experience, one could form the sad conclusion that resistance is useless. And indeed,

38. Ibid., p. 259. 39. Smithson, ‘Some Void Thoughts on Museums’ (1967), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p. 42. 40. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, London: Routledge, 2002 (originally published in French in 1986), p. 235f.41. See Stefan Heidenreich, Was Verspricht die Kunst?, Berlin: BvT, 2009, p. 84f.42. Smithson, ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’ (1968), in: Flam, 1996 (note 1), p. 112.

looking at our contemporary scene, much of our so-called contemporary art is mostly concerned with adapting to given structures. Even if the heroism of the avant-garde has dwindled, and even if we are accustomed to live in nullified flatlands of scattered individual artistic positions, the temporal order and its features remain intact, at least on the level of artistic production. Just like the market, artistic production still relies heavily on temporal formats. The biographical model of career building is as intact as ever, and shows its unpleas-ant effects in the ongoing ego branding that much of the art world has subscribed to. Artists have found new strategies to claim historical value. Art criticizing other art, which Smithson complained about, is still very much in vogue, but other means of claiming historical importance have also stepped in. One recently very successful strategy was named ‘referentialism’, referring to the variety of references, especially from the fields of philosophical theory or political history, rhetorically attached to an artwork in order to claim longevity and importance. These strategies are not to be condemned per se, but they all answer the museal demand for historization, canoni-zation and “nullification”, as Smithson would have said. The cracks in the system are more hidden, even though they surface in plain sight. The dominance of the contemporary may be described as a symptom of the decline of the modernist timescale. Contemporaneity as such makes two contradictory prom-ises. It claims both an immediate value and a position within history. But of course, being only contemporary with one period of time, it will necessarily be replaced by the next contemporary movement having the very same demands. Essentially, the very term “museum of contemporary art” is contradictory, at least if one takes the museum’s task of preserving and creating history seriously.43 The obsession with the contemporary must in the long run lead to an abandonment of the historical order. Here we encounter one of the moments where a nullifying force shows itself, and it proves valuable insofar as it leads to a productive contradiction. How did we end up in the trap of ‘the contemporary’? And how do we get out of it, if ever? In comparison with Smithson’s time, two influential parameters conditioning the museum and its operational mode have changed. The state is no longer the same, and new forms of storing and remembering cultural objects have been developed. The modern museum appeared parallel to the founding of the modern state in the 19th century. It was at the core of the narration of the state, and for that reason it necessarily operated under the timeframe of the newly founded nation-states, which had to invent a proper history in order to secure their future. Nowadays, in our fully capitalist society, this timeframe is not needed anymore. On the contrary, in a world of consumption, a continual flow of distinctions and trends brings in much better returns than the old-fashioned historical duration. The concept of ‘the contemporary’ can be understood as a compromise between the two. It fulfils the requirements of the given temporal order, still formally referring to its historicity. And it simultaneously instates the logic of distinctions, which by now dominates the art world. On the other hand, the Internet and digital media have tremendously changed the practices of memory. The museum has lost its unique position as a storage place and caretaker of memory. But memory on the Web applies very different routines than those of the museum. The most obvious contrast occurs in the handling of time. A page of Google search results, despite being something stemming from an archive, does not give any indication of time, except for the fact that it took less than a blink of

43. See also: Stefan Heidenreich, ‘Make Time. Temporalities and Contemporary Art’, Manifesta Journal, No. 9, 2009/2010, pp. 69–79.

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gOOglE ART PROJECT, National Gallery, London. Exhibition rooms: 4 (Germany), 5 (The Netherlands), © 2012 Google Art ProjectArt Project allows you to make a virtual tour through museum galleries, navigate the floor plan, zoom in on individual artworks and create, comment and share a personalized collection.

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the eye to retrieve. The time of the creation of those referred data is neither precisely tracked nor does it matter. Google operates as an a-historic machine. It creates its relevance everywhere but in terms of history. The same counts for Wikipedia, where the history of the contributions remains hidden on a lower level. For the dominant order of the Web at this moment, the decisive factor is not time, but density of links or relevance. There is only presence, and even the past is given as a present past.

Looking Back at the Future of the MuseumWhat will the future of the museum look like under these conditions? Even if this seems to be a reasonable question, it might already contain a circuitous logic that prevents us from finding a range of possible answers. Because if an investigation of the future was to be based on the concept of historical time, it would apply the very categories of the institution in question. This would lead to a performative contradic-tion. As one simply cannot seriously question the future of the museum whilst tak-ing its operational modes as given and perennial. This argument might sound overly sophisticated, but it can be illustrated by a few simple examples. One is the paradox of the library. It has always been very clear that the digitaliza-tion of books would lead to a change in the organization of libraries. One point of view proposes undertaking all possible efforts to make use of digital equipment in order to streamline the library processes of sorting books and lending them, even provid-ing digital copies of the texts. And this is indeed done on a large scale. But there is a second perspective, which simply calls for a shutdown of material libraries as such. For the task of making written texts accessible, a single storage worldwide would serve, once all written sources were digitalized. In this case, it makes a tremendous difference if the answer presupposes the existence of something or if it does not. And in a way, questioning the future of the museum presupposes the existence of its his-toricizing task. At this point, the library paradox shows a solution. Of course, in the real world, a middle way will be found between the two opposites. But most likely the middle ground will be situated at another level. Like, for example, if libraries were to somehow survive, but adapt their operations in such a way that they very little resem-ble what a library used to be. When considering the future of the museum, another known effect in the history of mediums is to be taken into account. According to McLuhan, mediums always include other mediums, because “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.”44 Therefore, if we want to know how the museum may look like, one other question is to be considered. Just as the museum introduced and enforced a certain type of tem-porality, another new medium might shape the perception of time, and thereby also of old mediums, according to its own discursive settings. Thus, one would first have to clarify whether one can still regard the future within the timeframe of the museum, or if one has to consider other mediums with their specific properties and routines. Given the fact that we are in the middle of a media transition, it is very likely that a new perspective will define the future of the museum, which is not that of the museum anymore. Instead, the museal order and its rules will have to become the content of another medium. This medium will either be the Web, or something else arising from the digital sphere. The transition to a Web-based perception of the future might not necessarily take the form of a break with the past. Instead, the two regimes of time and memory could keep coexisting in parallel, as they do now. Not even a conflict is necessary. Only,

44. McLuhan, 1995 (note 10), p. 8.

MUseUM, MeDIa, sOCIeTYMUseUM, MeDIa, sOCIeTY

3D projection showing the ‘UAR’ (Urban Augmented Reality) application of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) in Rotterdam. UAR is an interactive mobile application for the iPhone that provides information about a city’s built environment by means of advanced 3D-models on the basis of text, images, archival material and film.

Children playing on a multi-touch screen at the ‘Info Centre’ designed by Jaime Hayon in the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands. Visitors can compose their own collection or sketch alternative routes through the museum.

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in due course of time, the order dictated by the museum might look as arbitrary and strange to an ordinary observer as did the ancient medieval treasure chambers to the viewer educated in the museum, at the time when it succeeded as the new medium. What could a museum look like after it becomes the content of another medium? The case of the Web is much less clear than it looks. The phase of its domination of communications and the media discourse might soon wane, once it becomes so ubiq-uitous that it is seen as a simple base of information-exchange not worth mention-ing. One could even claim that with the rise of the Worldwide Web, the era of media diversity is over, and that we have to find other driving forces, in routines, algorithms and their extensions to behaviour and perception. But nevertheless, what might the museum look like, seen from this uncertain state? The process of this transforma-tion is already well under way. Even in Smithson’s time, indications of the end of the museum were clearly visible. History might lose its dominant role in favour of other forms of knowledge and other rankings of relevance and dependencies. Instead of one dominant dimension, the cultural database will be accessible by many different approaches. With this diversity, the canonizing power of the predominant historical scheme will dwindle. This could well lead to a re-evaluation of the last 150 years of art history, not necessarily in terms of history, but more so in terms of a new landscape of things worth being remembered. The relation of the museum to its visitors is up for a dramatic change. Until now, we have had a scientifically established historical order of the items in the museum, but the coming forms of knowledge might rather be the result of a collabo-rative effort. This would turn the direction of edu-cation upside down. It would not be the task of the museum and its staff anymore to educate the view-ers, but the opposite. A collective of viewers would inform and educate the museum. And finally, the role of the artist and the artwork can be re-evaluated. A secure place in the canonized history of art might look less appealing than the activation provided by a multitude of links, which could turn out to be the only token of value. This in turn, would make a whole new frame of relevance available to artists, as well as to their viewers, whose judgments up to now have been largely ignored within the modernist figure of a passive observer, despite all talks of ‘relational’ practices. For now, the nullifying forces of a growing global market, that increasingly domi-nate the museum, still reign over the art world. But the shapes of a different medium already become visible, even if it may take some time until they are recognized as a future in the present..