The following text is based on a paper delivered at the Zooming into Focus symposium “Envisioning the Future of Contemporary Art from Different Glocal Positions”, China Art Academy, Hangzhou, China, March 2004

Part 1: The Museum as Paradox

In trying to imagine the future of the museum we cannot ignore the past history of museums and exhibition practices except at great peril. For museums have always been paradoxical things: at once solid, immobile, historically rooted, preoccupied with the seemingly moribund acts of collection and preservation, and in the best of circumstances (as a handful of visionary curators and museum directors have shown us over the decades), potential laboratories for experimentation, bastions for reflection and change, loci of dynamic memory, and vital archives for the future. Looking closely at the paradoxes of this institution-which also means countering the prevalent amnesia about museum and exhibition history-allows us to reconnect the museum’s possible futures to its past at the threshold of the present.

My own interest in art and artists has developed hand in hand with an interest in the experimental history of museums. I often mention Alexander Dorner, and I think his example bears repeating- and repeating again-not only because his writing inspired my own interest in art and exhibitions, but because Dorner’s work at Hannover Museum in the 1920s suggests that from the very beginning, museums of modern and contemporary art (they did not bear that name then, but the Hannover Museum did already show the work of living artists) were places where radical experimentation was possible, even central. Dorner invented radical display features for the museum, collaborated with artists such as El Lissitsky and Malevich on exhibition rooms, and also developed extremely innovative models for mobile exhibitions and exhibitions of facsimiles. The fact that he envisioned the museum as a place where artists intervened and re-thought the displays was radical for its time. He defined the museum in terms of the process possible within it; he saw it as laboratory, as a “Kraftwerk,” and emphasized in his writings The Way Beyond Art that he intended to dynamize the traditionally static museum and to transform the supposedly “neutral” white cube in order to help construct a more heterogeneous space.

Collaboration was one of the things Dorner already understood as vital to the museum decades ago. “We cannot,” as he wrote in The Way Beyond Art, “understand the forces which are effective in the visual production of today if we do not have a look at other fields of modern life. “His lesson has not much been heeded in an epoch when the exterior spectacularity of museums (what has been called the “Bilbao effect”) too often overrides an attention to the more subtle interior complexity of an exhibition. This interior complexity is the result of different elements, one of them being the openness to collaboration.

One of the most important possibilities for the museum today is to think about how bridges can be made between fields of knowledge. There is a great deal of potential, for example, that could be exploited by linking art institutions at universities with other fields and other institutions of learning and research- including science, architecture, design, etc. Museums for their part could invite people from various disciplines to take on an active role in the museum’s production of cultural meaning. The enduring impact of Jean-François Lyotard’s exhibition, Les Immateriaux, is a perfect example of the potential that lies in such unexpected curatorial ventures. As another way to collaborate, the museum could work more actively with artists to develop exhibitions, programs, permanent displays, and other museum structures. Some of the most far reaching and experimental of exhibitions of all time were organized by artists, including Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, Marcel Duchamp, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, or architects such as Frederic Kielser, Mies van der Rohe or Lilly Reich. Dorner saw this potential in the 1920s. More recently, inspired curators and museum directors including Willem Sandberg, Pontus Hulten, Walter Hopps or Johannes Cladders worked closely with artists at a moment when museums were otherwise increasingly disconnected from the actual producers of culture. These curators developed collaborative artistic projects, but also pushed the exhibition’s form, and made sure that their respective institutions collected some of the most difficult or thought-provoking works of their contemporary period.

To return to the notion of the museum as paradox that I began with, let me mention that another way in which museums can attend to the interior complexity of exhibitions is to incorporate the possibility of change at the very heart of the institution. The museum has indeed been long defined by its monumental immobility and by its historical roots, but the late visionary architect and urbanist Cedric Price (from whom I learned much about redefining the museum) offered another possibility for the institutions of culture. In his Fun Palace project from 1961, he responded to the necessity of preventing institutions from sitting permanently and concretely in place. He proposed a building that would, by definition, not last forever-it would disappear after a limited life span of ten to twenty years. But more than simply disappearing, it was to be a flexible structure in a large mechanistic shipyard which, according to changing situations, would be continuously built from above. Radical in its implications, Price’s proposed Fun Palace was a building that could be responsive, it could be altered whilst it is occupied. Price’s ideas envision a new kind of cultural centre for the twenty-first century, one that utilizes uncertainty and conscious incompleteness. Installation view of Cities on the Move at the Vienna Secession, 1997. Photo credit: Margherita Spiluttini. Courtesy of the Vienna Secession Museums should consider Price’s urgent message and conceive their exhibitions as complex, dynamic learning systems with feedback loops, so as to renounce the paralyzing homogeneity of exhibition master plans. An exhibition thus might be under permanent construction.

Price was extremely present in the concept that I developed with Hou Hanru for Cities on the Move. Rather than producing a transportable, repeatable exhibition-as-product, we thought of the exhibition as a process, as a laboratory. The result was what you could call a three-year ongoing dialogue in the form of a traveling show. The show would not only change in every city it went to but it learned from every city in which it took place. The show became a procedure of sedimentation: building up in layers with each edition. It thus resisted the too common tendency to either send a show to travel exactly the same way no matter its context or, conversely, to put up a show and then erase it with a tabula rasa once it is over. Here, there was never a fixed artist list, fixed exhibition architecture, or fixed number or kind of works, so that each version of the show reflected something of the new situation (cultural, institutional, geographic, social) in which it was presented. And, little by little, very interesting things started to occur which go beyond the scope of the display of finished works. Artists involved in the various editions started to collaborate with other artists. Many projects were triggered that existed beyond the exhibition itself. And the exhibition in this sense truly became “on the move.” I mention this project just briefly here to underline the lesson Cities on the Move learned from Cedric Price, which also suggests the radical potential of the museum: to, in destabilizing itself from within, inspire new artistic practices from without.

To envision the museum of the twenty-first century, we thus must urge it to be less stable, more open, more collaborative, and less definitive in its articulation of history. We must use different models and allow disparate conditions to co-exist so that it can, as Price so eloquently said, “thrive through both protection and exposure.”

Part 2: The Museum Becoming A Program

I think a key is the need for several representations of the knowledge, such that when the system is stuck (using one representation) it can jump to use another. — Marvin Minsky in an interview with David G. Stork, published in Hal’s Legacy, 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality (1997)

One Way or Another, We Are Going to Live in a Fluid Universe
When I try to sum up what, above all else, I have learned from grappling with the sprawling prolixities of Philippe Parreno’s artwork, what I come up with is that his thought and practice are precisely impossible to summarize, a resistance to this very act. Perhaps, then, the best way to introduce Parreno’s exhibition Alien Seasons at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (ARC), which I co-curated with Laurence Bosse and Angeline Scherf, is to reflect on its process, to make it as transparent as possible. Therefore, this introduction echoes conversations I had with Philippe Parreno, and even if it tries somehow to contextualize different fragments of these conversations, it does so in a way that approximates a notebook exercise rather than a comprehensive writing practice.

Mulholland Drive/Pop-Up Books
In a recent interview, David Lynch said that the only thing he was sure about with Mulholland Drive was that the film would start with an image of the road sign, “Mulholland Drive,” under the headlights, and then that a series of small stories would be linked together. So he had no idea of where the film was headed. “Well, that’s exactly where I am now,” explained Parreno in the early stages of organizing the exhibition: “I would like this exhibition to be also a set of small bifurcations that will create in the end a kind of narrative cloud.”1 Parreno’s starting point-this road sign-was the idea that the exhibition would stem from a book (like in a Walt Disney movie, it always starts with a picture of a book, then you enter into the page and the animation begins); an exhibition as a pop-up book. This first implies that the book is the precise place of the monographic, and then, on a practical level, that the exhibition would evolve out of, and exist almost only on paper. The press invite, the poster, the catalogue, and probably even the space itself will be on paper. For Parreno, the idea of the exhibition as a pop-up book seemed to have the potential to resist the habitual stable framework of the monographic / retrospective exhibition and, more specifically, the potential to resist the possibility of apprehending his own practice as a definable resolution. During the preparation of this exhibition, Parreno sought an experimental model which could offer multiple takes on his work, trigger a variety of links between different issues, and reflect (not summarize) his non-linear practice.

The Chain is Beautiful
“The images are no longer beautiful, but chains are.” This somehow cryptic, yet succinct, statement-which also popped up during our conversations-was another possible starting point Philippe Parreno, Alien Seasons, 2002, installation at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Courtesy of the artist on which this monographic exhibition could have been built. In Parenno’s artistic vocabulary, the chain is the dynamic structure that leads to the production of forms. It is the process that, for example, in the making of a project (be it a film, a building, or an exhibition), links pre-production to production to post-production. All too often, the narrative is narrowed down to one of these sequences, Parreno explains, “however sense and narrative come from the whole series of events that occur in, and even in-between, these sequences. Sense and narrative come from the whole continuum of the chain.”

A film does not only tell a story. It is part of a story. Perhaps this is all too obvious but why is it that we cannot find novels inspired by films? We only find novels based on film scenarios, which is completely different. Through this example, Parreno expresses his extreme suspicion toward the idea of the scenario as an object (which can, in some cases, be turned into a book), but also toward how we apprehend images as objects, as the sole and ultimate result of the production process. “I don’t believe in a projective model,” Parreno explains. Does everything always start with a scenario and end up as an object?

In this retrospective exhibition, the different objects Parenno has previously produced are not on display and can only be seen in the book. In some ways, there are no objects left. Though, with the metaphor of the chain, it is also possible to rearticulate or to connect the different projects produced since the early nineties with current ones. From Réflexion sur le Mont Analogue, a project based on René Daumal’s book, the film rights of which have been temporarily acquired by Parreno, to El Sueno de una cosa, a one-minute film shot in the North Pole as part of a pseudo-scientific expedition, most of Parreno’s projects or propositions address these issues in different ways, through different angles and hypotheses: Bruno Latour speaks about experimental anthropological expeditions of uncertainty.

An Infinite Conversation
Through collaboration, Parreno seems to have found a means for rendering the chains of production and moments of irresolution more visible, more legible. “The projects I am interested in are those that brim over,” he explains, “either because they contain many more ideas than forms, or many more forms than ideas. These are moments of irresolution, moments of imbalance that continue to fascinate me. In fact, I am much more interested in proceedings than in resolutions.” For this Philippe Parreno, Alien Seasons, 2002, installation at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Courtesy of the artist exhibition, Parreno decided that he wanted to trigger such a proceeding by working with someone he has never worked with before, and without any pre-established idea of what might come out of the encounter. He chose to work with Jaron Lanier, who is considered to have coined the concept of virtual reality. Even if the outcome of this procedure as it pertains to the exhibition is still not clear at the moment the catalogue goes to print, Lanier and Parreno rapidly found common ground for discussion in the conflict between resolution and irresolution of images. (PP “Noresolution.” JL “Yeah. Resolution is an idiot’s game.”).2

“One of the things I do,” Lanier first said after accepting Parreno’s proposition to collaborate, “is work with neuroscientists by inventing computer models for how the brain works. Usually the work takes a long time, and it is very hard to point to anything specific. However, in the last few years there have been extraordinary advances, such that we are now pretty sure we have come up with a computer model of how visual memory works.We think we understand the signals that neurons exchange for creating a new visual memory as well as for recognizing something seen from an old memory.”3 And, incidentally, during this first conversation they had, Lanier even produced a statement which corresponds to the loose conceptual structure, or narrative cloud, Parreno was aiming for during the initial preparations for this exhibition: virtual worlds are shared. Virtual worlds are the first kind of reality that is both very malleable, and very flexible, like a dream, but also shared by other people. That is what is so special about it. So, if we had this ability to quickly create what exists in a virtual world, we could also have the potential for a new form of communication. I like to call this form of communication “post-symbolic.” This means that instead of trading symbols that refer to things or evoke things, you would actually make the things. Instead of using the word house or museum, you could just suddenly make one. You could imagine this form of communication having some of the qualities of a dream, in that it might be fantastical, moving through many places and through many associations. But, at the same time, it would have conversational elements, with multiple people contributing, a back and forth quality and a collaborative continuity. And obviously it would be under human control, so would not involve the loss of control like a dream, but would be guided more like a conversation.

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Notes
1 All Parreno quotes from interviews between the author and the artist from 1999 to 2004.
2 From conversation recorded by the author.
3 From interview with the author.