Identity crisis of museums goes far beyond 'Enola Gay'

By THOMAS FITZGERALD

A headline in the April 16 Ann Arbor News announced “Museums in ID crisis after ‘Enola Gay.’ ” It was followed by a report on a major conference being convened two days later by the Smithsonian and the University of Michigan entitled, “Presenting History: Museums in a Democratic Society.”

The 25 invited presenters and panelists were articulate and well-informed, but what they actually discussed was not how museums ought to function in a democracy, nor can I recall anyone mentioning an “identity crisis,” however that banalized metaphor is understood. Instead, even in the afternoon session, conferees kept circling back to the tangled details of the contested exhibit of that symbolic bomber, Enola Gay. All was quite amiable and civil - “collegial” -with a curious reticence to confront the many issues facing museums today beyond those inevitably raised by officially sponsored commemorations, as at the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, Little Big Horn in Montana and the Holocaust Memorial in the nation’s capital. Those, of course, are highly visible and involve strong feelings for honored dead, differences between populist and expert perspectives, and in turn, a politics of resentment and participation denied.

The next day I was in New York and saw the latest Biennial at the Whitney Museum, and the big new shows at the Museum of Modem Art. Vivid contrast indeed. At neither was there a mood of reasoned discussion among congenial colleagues, but something looking like a marketing campaign for Death of the Enlightenment.

Although fewer of the clumsy politicized “installations” were included than at the previous Whitney Biennial, the museum’s floors and walls displayed the same rancour: self-serving heroics about being transgressive (the rock band pose); works mean and sullen, insinuating and contemptuous, as if the barbarians wanted to let us know they are now encamped inside our city’s walls. Samples: a dilapidated hearse sits upon dozens of rusting mufflers; a huge bundle of sodden old mattresses hangs overhead but their smell reaches us when we walk underneath; prurient photos repeat the stale news of sexual reconstruction. ’

Acres at MOMA, given over to Bruce Nauman, offered a similar assault on sense and sensibility. To explain the 67 exhibits, an unpersuasive tabloid was distributed in which the curator’s notes on Nauman’s philosophizing were equally abstruse. Mindless videos played continuously: flashing lights and noise all around; a crude plywood box for standing inside under yellow fluorescent tubes; gratuitous images of violence and pain, a booth whose edification consists of paired speakers giving off sounds of vomiting or strangulation.

I cite these items from the ambient nastiness as illustrating certain issues the Ann Arbor conference ignored - or would not touch, but whose reality was confirmed at the Frick Collection, that isle of clarity and calm to which I retreated from the slough on Madison Avenue. Two examples:

Anxiety among museum staffs about unstable funding and their uncertainty toward audience constituencies, along with ambitions of directors at the larger museums, have led to programs and orientations that undermine well-established understandings about the purposes of art objects in museums. Blockbuster events (e.g., bringing crowds through the door and attracting corporate patronage), paradoxically reduce visibility of the works themselves in packed galleries, and thereby impoverish the singularity of aesthetic experience, making it as transient as lining up to cheer the pope or the queen as they drive by. Merchandising at those shows also converts the particularity of art into more consumer commodities, like stuff from the Disney store.

Less apparent to museum publics is a crisis of fundamental authority and confidence. Post-modem-ism’s radical skepticism and distrust have seeped as toxins into the cultural environment with the profound effect of leveling evaluation of comparative merit and worth. Aggravated in this country by highly partisan multiculturalism, a corrosive relativism dissolves artistic values and forecloses judgment, so museums hesitate to sort out (“discriminate”) quality from a surfeit of contemporary production by naming the good and denying a place for ill-made mediocrity, a failure of nerve commonly seen where victim art claims attention. Hence, we find a pile of timbers on a gallery floor; a plain ruler (called My Foot) affixed to a wall; a something made of boiled spaghetti awaits our applause. All this confuses and alienates ordinary people as audience, especially the many non-attend-ers whom administrators seek with “inclusionary outreach.” Yet sensible puzzlement of citizens is met with scorn, or piety, or snobbery, or virtuoso jargon -or cries of “censorship!” - from cosmopolitan art critics and new class professionals schooled in the patter of anarchic relativism.

Transforming conditions at “museums in a democratic society” will require more than a conference; the rot runs deep in society itself. Fortunately, the aesthetic and moral presence available in art sequestered at the less imperial institutions can evoke the hope, courage, and solace we need as we navigate the closing of a once great epoch.

Thomas Fitzgerald lives in Ann Arbor. News readers can contribute to 'Other Voices.' Please call the editorial page editor about writing information at 994-6863.

OTHER VOICES

Post-modernism's radical skepticism and distrust have seeped as toxins into the cultural environment with the profound effect of leveling evaluation of comparative merit and worth.