How to give order and meaning to an excess of stuff? This is the old-fashioned museum model at work
In the opening episode of John Berger’s celebrated television series Ways of Seeing (1972) the iconoclastic writer is seeking to strip art of the “false mystery and the false religiosity that surrounds it”. Mystery and religiosity that’s acquired mainly when art is presented in museums, which are constantly working to enhance their own cathedrallike aura. And which need to defend the ‘special aura’ of their holdings against an age of mechanical reproduction that has changed the way in which their holdings circulate and made the works they contain seem a lot less special. (Berger spends most of the episode riffing off the writings of the philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin.) The fact that Berger is using TV to present his version of art history, ‘live’ as it were, is both a sign of the new age and of the old symbiotic relationship between form and meaning.
As part of the striptease, Berger introduces the UK National Gallery’s 14-page catalogue entry for Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Virgin of the Rocks (1495–1508), warning viewers that the publication in question is “for art experts” rather than, one presumes, those who do not pretend to be experts. He’s also making a distinction here between the old (books) and the new (TV). Flicking through the pages, he describes what’s in front of us as little more than an aggravated list: of “who commissioned the painting, legal squabbles, who owned it, it’s likely date, the pedigree of its owners”, all of it designed to prove that the painting in question is both authentic and the original (hence ‘special’), and conversely that a similar painting in the Louvre is not. (Nowadays it’s generally accepted that the one in the Louvre is the original and the one in the National Gallery is a second version produced after Leonardo had sold the original in a fit of pique over the paltry payment offered by the religious types who had commissioned it. But that doesn’t affect Berger’s point – that art history as practised by museums is about defending retail value, which in turn is connected to the powerful rather than the powerless – just the words he used to make it.)
Indeed, what Berger was discussing half a century ago remains valid today. What is a museum, really, other than testimony to humanity’s basic need to produce and acquire objects? What are production, consumption and desire other than the building blocks of capitalism? A system that museums seem designed to defend. And what is the role of the museum director or curator other than to pretend that the value of an institution’s collection lies somewhere other than in the material value of the objects it holds? While generally failing to disassociate material value from its holdings, which are often described as ‘priceless’, which implies both that they are beyond ‘price’ and that they are so expensive that ‘price’ would never cover it.
These two types of ‘value’ (material and… let’s call it ‘cultural’ – everyone knows that has no value) are the underlying theme of this year’s Homo Faber exhibition, presented at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice. Although its official theme is ‘The Journey of Life’. That tale is told through 11 rooms designed by film director Luca Guadagnino and architect Nicolò Rosmarini. Homo Faber is a biennial exhibition (this edition is the third) billed as a ‘celebration of contemporary craftmanship’, staged by the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship. What it presents at first glance is an excess of stuff: more than 800 objects made by more than 400 craftspeople from over 70 countries. The stuff on show ranges from cabinets and chairs, to cups, to watches, to dolls houses, to contemporary versions of traditional tribal masks, to dining tables, to embroideries and a 2011 tapestry (The Map of Truths and Beliefs) by British artist Grayson Perry. In the Afterlife room. And we’re only getting warmed up with that.
While Guadagnino and Rosmarini’s design – to take one example, a refectory lined with pink drapery, decorated with a reproduction of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding at Cana (1563: the original is in the Louvre; the reproduction adds a smidgeon of Bergeresque ‘religiosity’ to proceedings) and housing a long, mirrored dining table on which an abundance of fanciful tableware (ceramics and glassware that look like foodstuffs, etc) is displayed like the aftermath of a wild feast – masterfully adds auras of various kinds to the work (a darkened room dedicated to dreams features a swimming pool, the collection of masks, some fashion dummies), it also transports one into a Disney-type fantasyland (you feel like a princess). You stand there wondering if the mirrored table (and, by implication, the objects on it) is designed so that diners might admire themselves, or, from a museological point of view, so that the objects might be admired from every point of view. Then you wonder if there is any difference between those two things. Still, the overall effect remains that of a high-end pawnshop (some of the objects come from sole-trader artisans, others from well-known luxury brands – the Michelangelo Foundation’s chairman is the founder of the Richemont luxury group) filled with objects whose functionality has been buried beneath the excess of their design. Which really isn’t so far away from the image of the museum that Berger was attempting to present: the gathering of all this stuff, the shipping of it to Venice and its display to a certain type of tourist class corresponds to the now slightly suspect ambitions of old-fashioned universal museums.
Of course, what Homo Faber is about is celebrating the potential of craft. And protecting what might now seem like the antiquated practice of making things by hand. (There’s even the odd demonstration of making among the displays, which, in terms of the aura that so much effort has been spent on generating, is a little like being asked to understand Pinocchio through the character of Geppetto – some of the magic is gone.) But the celebrating and protecting is the museum director speaking. What you really end up thinking as you move through this exhibition is how it is engineered to suggest that what’s on show is something more than a hoarder’s bedroom, an excessive accumulation of stuff.
