Un/Re/De-Categorizing Art

Warning: this one's a bit all over the place.

There's a trend (still, apparently, although I had thought it was ending, but that might reflect more about my short attention span than any change in the matter) among art institutions whereby collections are being rehung not by objective measures like media or movement or even time period, but rather by premise or sentiment or something more subjective. We saw it in 1999 at MoMA, when before they closed on 53rd street for renovations, they installed three exhibitions that "presented well-known masterworks in new contexts, juxtaposing the familiar with lesser-known and recently acquired works by world famous and emerging artists." The general groupings for these three exhibitions were people, places, and things. Shortly after that, the inaugural exhibtion at the new Tate Modern in London did the same, adding a fourth category: History/Memory/Society.

I got to thinking about how this has evolved while reading an article on artinfo.com about the rehanging of the collection at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, which is an example of the next step in the evolution of thinking here. Precisely:

Different media once segregated by form sculpture, painting, decorative arts are being integrated in the same rooms as museums' once-rigid restrictions on displaying art are dissolved and curators look for ways to present easier-to-understand themes and attract new visitors.

It seems as if some punctuation is missing in that first sentence, but the point is that in addition to mixing and matching the fine art, museums are now adding in decorative arts pieces.

David Carrier, who authored Museum Skepticism, on the evolution of public art museums since the late 1700s, says the idea of mixing the high arts (painting and sculpture) with decorative arts (furniture, vases, etc.) can be jarring for some curators.

"It's a real reorientation in our way of thinking," he says.

Even those who champion the approach say there are limitations. Terrence Riley, director of the Miami Art Museum, who helped integrate objects during his 14 years at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, says it works best when dealing with art from a time when there was a great deal of creative fusion.

And although this is not the only example, a wonderful installation at John Connelley Presents recently, by Marco Boggio Sella, illustrates how such fusions are even being absorbed into artmaking itself. After travelling to Africa, where he introduced a remote population with little access to such images, photographs of the 1969 American moon landing, the artist presented a series of collaborative projects with the Africans in "a salon fashion that integrate[d] a new series of paintings made by Boggio Sella in New York with sculpture, batiks and bogolans (mudcloth), created by local artisans in Africa."

As much as I enjoyed the MoMA, Tate, and John Connelly exhibitions, though, I'm still somewhat hesitant about the notion that such juxtapositions reveal more than isolating works do. This so-called dialog between objects...this approach that Nelson curator Catherine Futter described by noting

"We said, 'Let's look at the art and let's look at how it's talking to each other and how it's communicating with each other and let's let it dictate what we should do,'" she says.

sends off some alarm bell in the back of my head (although I should note that the connection between an artist doing this and a curator is not to be drawn out too long...clearly an artist's project represents one accumlative vision being presented as "art" itself...I note Marco Boggio Sella's exhibiton only as point of interest).

But back to that alarm bell...what bothers me here is the notion that there's a significance to the dialog between objects brought together by what in one sense is chance (oh, I know a collection represents a unique vision too, but the variances between the work by an artist a museum really wanted and the one they got opens up a considerable chasm with regards to the importance of what that object "dictates we should do"). In other words, replace one Rembrandt with another, and your whole installation might change, so it's difficult to accept that this one installation represents anything more significant than the dialog of what was available to work with. Which, in turn, perhaps leads to choices that are a bit forced.

I mean if a curator had access to every work by every artist, and the curator was exceptionally bright, then I might buy that this approach was important, but even MoMA has gaps in its collection (don't ask me to name them, it's simply a statistical certainty), so such efforts represent at best an intersting sidebar discussion, not the main argument that could be made.

I'm not the only skeptic here:

While some galleries are taking this approach, many others reject it. David Sokol, who has been curator at several museums and consultant to numerous others, says it's dividing the art world.

"There's a part that says the traditional painting hanging on a wall with a little plaque next to it is not getting them through the door," says Sokol, who directs the museum studies program at the University of Illinois-Chicago. "And there's a powerful, powerful curatorial lobby saying that's the only way to do it."

Perhaps it's precisely that motive---"getting them through the door"---that chaffs my neck here. Attendace is certainly a valid consideration for a museum, but if that's the major justification for this mix-and-match approach, I'm even less in favor of it. I'd like to read a more conceptually sound rationale for this trend...can anyone point to one?