From Monet to the coronavirus: a history of attacks on museums | Babelia – Explica

Today it is a virus that has left the museum empty, but long before it was the artists. In fact, the destruction is inscribed in the origins of the museum, an institution that was born from the secular and republican looting of the assets of the monarchy and the church of the Old Regime. The disagreement comes from far away. Since the 19th century the Impressionists still scream when they are remembered complaining about the official juries of the Parisian Salons. While Claude Monet blurted out the dont go to the museums, be like children!, Eugen Kalkschmidt wrote in 1906 The museum of the future inviting to create the Anti-Visitation Union of Museums to fight the boredom that produced him traveling from above downstairs rooms full of Etruscan sarcophagi. We want to destroy the museums! Said Marinetti from the Futurist Manifesto in 1909. Paul Valry, a notorious enemy of the art galleries, also missed the good weather outside. He was not without reason. It was what led Valry to write in 1927 The Conquest of Ubiquity, a short text, quite prophetic, where he announced the advent of a society for the distribution of Sensitive Reality at home , a society where the supply of the images guarded now The museums will function as the supply of water, gas or electricity. A network that predicted the service of art at home. A utopian idea that today seems like an omen.

Tristan Tzara also supported this idea from the Cabaret Voltaire, which opened its doors in Zurich in 1916 under the idea of anti-museum. There is a destructive task to be done; sweeping, cleaning, he said in 1918. That year, when the Spanish flu broke out around the world, Dada was also a virus. Also the assemblies that Duchamp made as curator brushed against the fair booth. At the International Exhibition of Surrealism, held in 1938 in the central hall of the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he did everything he could to make access to works of art an almost impossible endeavor for the visitor. He hung 200 sacks of coal from the ceiling and a brazier in the center. The truth is that neither the sacks contained coal nor the ember brazier, but the heavy presence of the sacks made the public suffer under the threat of three thousand kilos of coal on their heads and the possibility that everything would explode into the air.

View of Urs Fishers Day for Night at the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Sheldan C. Collins

That idea of exposure-nightmare took another turn in 1942 when he staged First Papers of Surrealism at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in New York. 16 miles of twine was spent making a spider web that was not accessible. An exaggeration that had all kinds of reactions among the artists included in the sample: Remedios Varo could not find comfort while Man Ray was angered for not being invited. Years later, New York was filled with irascibles, a group of dissident artists who exploded against the Metropolitan Museum in 1950 and whose history awaits confined to the rooms of the Juan March Foundation in Madrid.

Other artists, instead, opted for negation from the opposite side. Yves Kleins empty room dates from 1961. Those sixties were the time when the assault on the museum as a paradigm took the big leap. Institutional criticism leaves great examples of clear opposition to the establishment of cultural institutions: Daniel Buren, Michael Ascher, Lawrence Weiner, Dan Graham, Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Haacke From Argentina, Graciela Carnevale proposed a running of the bulls in 1968, within the Cycle of Experimental art. He placed an ad in the newspaper and brought the public to his exhibition at number 22 of the Melipan shopping arcade. Once they were all inside, he went out and locked the door, and left. Breaking the glass was the only way to get out of that also empty exhibition. In 1970, Emilio Hernndez Saavedra, left from Peru one of the mythical works regarding the idea of the museum void: The museum of erased art. An empty center that in 2002 Sandra Gamarra retakes as Limac: a museum that does not exist in a physical headquarters, but that is presented as real through the various ways in which real museums arrive in Lima: through souvenirs, catalogs and cards .

View of the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism (1942), at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource

Although if there is a key name in the idea of destruction and museum that is Chris Burden. In 1985, and for the Henry Art Gallery, he presented Samson: a 100-ton motor connected to an access winch and an extendable wooden double girder that pushed strongly against the gallerys load-bearing walls. Every time a visitor passed the access lathe, the beam pressed against the gallery walls until it cracked. The more visitors, the more destruction. An installation that he repeated in 2004, in the New York gallery Zwirner & Wirth. Urs Fishers gaps at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, titled Day for Night, went along those lines of pushing the museum to its limits. A year later, he raised the floor of the Gavin Browns Enterprise and called it You. A giant hole for $ 250,000. In 2008, the most unique So Paulo Biennial arrived, when Ivo Mesquida left the third floor of the Oscar Niemeyer building empty and was assaulted by young people who filled the walls with graffiti.

A reflection on the possible disappearance of the museum cannot be separated from examining its goals and objectives, its limits. The Antoni Tpies Foundation in Barcelona dedicated an extensive colloquium to this in 1995. I remember one of the curators, Thomas Keenan, defining the museum as a declining institution and inviting all of us to a museum that is responsible for its loss and it emerges from its deconstruction in the form of a museum of museums. That sounded like a phoenix of modern culture. Perhaps from that dysfunctionality you can read the wedding of Shristi Mittal and Gulraj Behl at the Museu Nacional dArt de Catalunya held in 2013. Beyonc and Jay-Z remembered it from the Louvre and Rosala sings it from her Fucking Money Man, looking at I glance at the Macba. Museum excesses and defects. The lights and the shadows. Martin Creed winning the 2001 Turner Prize.

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From Monet to the coronavirus: a history of attacks on museums | Babelia - Explica