Boundaries and Scales

Doctors Without Borders was implemented as a networked response to a global need. Museums without Borders, the locus of the Center for Future Museum's recent research, is a networked reality needing a global response.

“A prominent futurist has said that forecasting isn’t a means of predicting the future, but rather an effort to discover what you need to do now to help shape the future. We think Museums & Society 2034 will help museums make a better future for themselves and society,” pronounced Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of CFM in the press release for the Association of American Museum's May 2009 conference in Los Angeles. Concerned with the new interconnected reality of the young 20th century, AAM is asking whether "We can be a community of museums without borders," citing the technological advances of Internet 2.0, the hopes for more porous boundaries between international museum professionals, and the motivation to cater to a global audience sharing new access and shared concerns (environmental, local, communal). Sharing business models, streamlining operational models, catering to the "new meanings of diversity", the AAM's concrete goals for the museum are indeed "mindful" of its position as an important actor in the processes of social reproduction, setting the stage for creativity and living in the future. But are they really without borders? Even bringing in new audiences, the art world and especially its institutions are nonetheless inherently hermetic. Connectedness doesn't erase the boundary between the outside and inside of the museum window, whether it's through the computer screen, at international festivals and fairs, or in the boardrooms. It seems, rather than breaking boundaries, the new museum is changing scales. From the local to the global, technology has widened its purview, but the excluded remain those in underdeveloped countries, those objects of anthropological exhibitions rather than generators of the next great operational model. Boundaries remain between subject and omniscient shapers of the social fabric. But the AAM is right - "Museums are positioned to be among society’s most active participants in this new interconnected world. We represent history, culture and knowledge and are trusted sources of relevant, valuable information. We are dynamic manifestations of societal views and communities. Museums can be the connectors and bridge-builders, helping visitors of all ages, backgrounds, nationalities and locations

better understand one another." If we assume this to be true, than the museum has the ability, nay, the responsibility to do more than change scales from local to communal to urban to regional to national to international to global. It's in the last jump, from international to truly global, where lie the greatest challenges. How to go beyond the network of technology nodes, knowledge centers, urban captive audiences to truly reflect a global audience? How to avoid the erasure of those parts of the world community that are just as concerned with health, education, history, culture and representation, yet without the safe lilypads of museums to alight on from New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Shanghai, etc?

New Museum

Although it's stacked in sections, the experience of the New Museum is one of continuity, where visitors flow through the spaces smoothly. As a project conceived by a curator, every aspect seems to exemplify its function as a "site of ongoing experimentation and questioning of what art and institutions can be in the twenty-first century, [...] devoted exclusively to contemporary art" (from the manifest). At the far end of the lobby, a glass-walled gallery makes the art visible before the tickets are even bought, yet separates its visit from the milling bookstore or café to preserve the quality of its observation. The pink and white neon Silence = Death piece draws the viewer down a sunken staircase from the lobby to the lower level's Donor Wall, a conceptual mapping of culture's philanthropists and shapers ("Target: 10M" - "France: 3.2M" - "Hamas: 1.5M") - where one can read the fine print (quotes on giving from great writers and thinkers) while waiting for the green-walled elevator to the upper-level galleries. These pillar-less rooms are lit from skylights and fixtures in a high ceiling that avoid any glare on the glass table-tops displaying Emory Douglas' Blank Panther lithographs on the 2nd and 3rd floors, and prevent shine on David Goldblatt's large photographic prints of post-Apartheid South Africa on the 4th floor. The staircase between the two exhibitions is the centerpiece for Rigo 23's installation, where the viewer passes a cell marked with the year of the Panthers' liberation and ascends the staircase lined with prison bars to the open jail gate and into the Goldblatt show on South Africa's own tenuous "liberation". This spiral path upwards brings the viewer across galleries-in-the-gallery for video viewings (surviving Black Panthers narrate over archival images) and smaller grouping of works (black-and-white images of South Africa under apartheid also by Goldblatt) - parentheses of space smoothly articulated within the larger tour. Ending in the "sky room", the visit displays the rooftops of Soho and the Lower East Side to the wind-whipped visitor, bringing the works in the exhibitions home to the reality of their context - New York, its contemporary issues, and this site for its contemporary art.

The 6th-floor "education center" was temporarily closed during my visit, yet its current project, "Museum as a Hub: In and Out of Context" describes itself as "a partnership of arts organizations looking to pursue experimental methods of exhibition, communication, and collaboration, and considers the consequences of being part of a “hub”—what it means to displace conversations and activity from elsewhere to New York".

How will museums show art made on the internet?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/arts/12iht-rcartech.html?ref=design

On the internet?

Speaking of technology and donor egos: the Royal Ontario Museum has some of the most technologically branché galleries of any museum - their list of donor names is digitalized (as are their labels in the galleries of scientific artefacts, etc) and touch-sensitive, so that interested visitors can pop-out more information and photographs of individual donors rather than marvel at the brass polish on the granite wall of obscure names and titles in most museums.

http://www.overdrivedesign.com/portfolio/viewCasestudy.asp?id=1