Rosalind Krauss The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum, Krauss
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The Cultural Logic of the Late
Capitalist Museum*
ROSALIND KRAUSS
May 1, 1983: I remember the drizzle and cold of that spring morning, as
the feminist section of the May Day parade formed up at Republique. Once we
started moving out, carrying our banners for the march towards the Place de la
Bastille, we began our chant. "Qui paie ses dettes s'enrichit," it went, "qui paie
ses dettes s'enrichit," in a reminder to Mitterand's newly appointed Minister of
Women's Affairs that the Socialists' campaign promises were still deeply in
arrears. Looking back at that cry now, from a perspective firmly situated at the
end of the '80s, sometimes referred to as "the roaring '80s," the idea that paying
your debts makes you rich seems pathetically naive. What make you rich, we have
been taught by a decade of casino capitalism, is precisely the opposite. What
makes you rich, fabulously rich, beyond your wildest dreams, is leveraging.
July 17, 1990: Coolly insulated from the heat wave outside, Suzanne Page
and 1 are walking through her exhibition of works from the Panza Collection, an
installation that, except for three or four small galleries, entirely fills the Musee
d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. At first I am extremely happy to encounter
these objects—many of them old friends I have not seen since their early days of
exhibition in the 1960s — as they triumphantly fill vast suites of galleries, having
muscled everything else off the walls to create that experience of articulated
spatial presence specific to Minimalism. The importance of this space as a vehicle
for the works is something Suzanne Page is conscious of as she describes the
desperate effort of remodeling vast tracts of the museum to give it the burnished
neutrality necessary to function as background to these Flavins and Andres and
Morrises. Indeed, it is her focus on the space—as a kind of reified and abstracted
entity — that I finally find most arresting. This climaxes at the point when she
* This text, written as a lecture for the September 10, 1990 meeting of the International
Association of Museums of Modern An (CIMAM) in Los Angeles, is being published here consider-
ably before 1 have been able to deliver, as fully as I would have liked, on the promise of its title. The
timeliness of the issues, however, suggested that it was more important to open them to immediate
discussion than to wait to refine either the theoretical level of the argument or the rhetoric within
which it is framed.
OCTOBER: The Second Decade, 1986-1996
428
positions me at the spot within the exhibition that she describes as being, for her,
somehow the most riveting. It is in one of the newly stripped and smoothed and
neutralized galleries, made whitely luminous by the serial progression of a recent
work by Flavin. But we are not actually looking at the Flavin. At her direction we
are scanning the two ends of the gallery through the large doorways of which we
can see the disembodied glow produced by two other Flavins, each in an adjoin-
ing room: one of these an intense apple green light; the other an unearthly,
chalky blue radiance. Both announce a kind of space-beyond which we are not
yet in, but for which the light functions as the intelligible sign. And from our
point of view both these aureoles can be seen to frame — like strangely industrial-
ized haloes — the way the gallery's own starkly cylindrical, International Style
columns enter our point of view. We are having this experience, then, not in
front of what could be called the art, but in th
e midst ot an oddly emptied y
et
gra
ndiloquent space ot whicn tne museum itseit—as a building—
is
some
how
the object.
Within this experience, it is the museum that emerges as powerful presence
and yet as properly empty, the museum as a space from which the collection has
withdrawn. For indeed, the effect of this experience is to render it impossible to
look at the paintings hanging in those few galleries still displaying the permanent
collection. Compared to the scale of the Minimalist works, the earlier paintings
and sculpture look impossibly tiny and inconsequential, like postcards, and the
galleries take on a fussy, crowded, culturally irrelevant look, like so many curio
shops.
*
These are two scenes that nag at me as I think about the "cultural logic of
the late capitalist museum," because somehow it seems to me that if I can close
the gap between their seeming disparateness, I can demonstrate the logic of what
we see happening, now, in museums of modern art.
1
Here are two possible
bridges, flimsy perhaps, because fortuitous, but nonetheless suggestive.
1. In the July 1990
Art in America
there occurs the unanalyzed but telling
juxtaposition of two articles. One is the essay called "Selling the Collection,"
which describes the massive change in attitude now in place according to which
the objects in a museum's keeping can now be coolly referred to, by its director as
well as its trustees, as "assets."* This bizarre Gestalt-switch from regarding the
collection as a form of cultural patrimony or as specific and irreplaceable embodi-
ments of cultural knowledge to one of eying the collection's contents as so much
capital — as stocks or assets whose value is one of pure exchange and thus only
1. Throughout, my debt to Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism,"
(New Left Review, no.
146 [July-August 1984], pp. 53-93) will be obvious.
2.
Philip Weiss, "Selling the Collection,"
An in America,
vol. 78 (July 1990), pp. 124-131.
Krauss
429
truly realized when they are put in circulation — seems to be the invention not
merely of dire financial necessity: a result, that is, of the American tax law of
1986 eliminating the deductibility of the market value of donated art objects.
Rather, it appears the function of a more profound shift in the very context in
which the museum operates — a context whose corporate nature is made specific
not only by the major sources of funding for museum activities but also, closer to
home, by the makeup of its boards of trustees. Thus the writer of "Selling the
Collection" can say: "To a great extent the museum community's crisis results
from the free-market spirit of the 1980s. The notion of the museum as a
guardian of the public patrimony has given way to the notion of a museum as a
corporate entity with a highly marketable inventory and the desire for growth."
Over most of the course of the article, the market understood to be putting
pressure on the museum is the art market. This is, for example, what Evan
Maurer of the Minneapolis Institute of Art seems to be referring to when he says
that in recent years museums have had to deal with a "market-driven operation"
or what George Goldner of the Getty means when he says that "there will be
some people who will want to turn the museum into a dealership." It is only at
the end of the essay, when dealing with the Guggenheim Museum's recent sales,
that some larger context than the art market's buying and selling is broached as
the field within which deaccessioning might be discussed, although the writer
does not really enter this context.
But "Selling the Collection" comes back-to-back with quite another article,
which, called "Remaking Art History," raises the problems that have been
spawned within the art market itself by one particular art movement, namely
Minimalism.® For Minimalism almost from the very beginning located itself, as
one of its radical acts, within the technology of industrial production. That
objects were fabricated from plans meant that these plans came to have a con-
ceptual status within Minimalism allowing for the possibility of replication of a
given work that could cross the boundaries of what had always been considered
the unreproducibility of the aesthetic original. In some cases these plans were
sold to collectors along with or even in place of an original object, and from these
plans the collector did indeed have certain pieces refabricated. In other cases it
has been the artist himself or herself who has done the refabrication, either
issuing various versions of a given object — multiple originals, so to speak—as is
the case with the many Morris glass cubes, or replacing a deteriorated original
with a contemporary remake as in the case of Alan Saret. This break with the
aesthetic of the original is, the writer of this essay argues, part and parcel with
Minimalism itself, and so she writes: "If, as viewers of contemporary art, we are
unwilling to relinquish the conception of the unique original art object, if we
insist that all refabrications are fraudulent, then we misunderstand the nature of
3.
Susan Hapgood, "Remaking Art History,"
Art in America,
vol. 78 (July 1990), pp. 114- 123.
OCTOBER: The Second Decade, 1986-1996
430
many of the key works of the '60s and '70s. ... If the original object can be
replaced without compromising the original meaning, refabrication should raise
no controversy."
However, as we know, it is not exactly viewers who are raising controversy
in this matter, but artists themselves, as Donald Judd and Carl Andre have
protested Count Panza's various decisions to act on the basis of the certificates
they sold him and make duplicate versions of their works.
4
And indeed the fact
that the group countenancing these refabrications is made up of the works'
owners (both private collectors and museums) — that is, the group normally
thought to have most interest in specifically protecting the status of their prop-
erty
as
original — indicates how inverted this situation is. The writer of this essay
also speaks of the market as playing some role in the story she has to tell. "As the
public's interest in the art of this period grows," she says, "and the market
pressures increase, the issues that arise when works are refabricated will no doubt
gain prominence as well." But what the nature of either "the issues" or the
"market pressures" might really be, she leaves it to the future to decide.
In the bridge I am setting up here, then, we watch the activity of markets
restructuring the aesthetic original, either to change it into an "asset," as in the
case outlined by the first article, or to normalize a once-radical practice of
challenging the very idea of the original through a recourse to the technology of
mass production. That this normalization exploits a possibility
already
inscribed
in the specific procedures of Minimalism will be important to the rest of my
argument. But for now I simply point to the juxtaposition of a description of the
financial crisis of the modern museum with an account of a shift in the nature of
the original that is a function of one particular artistic movement, to wit,
Minimalism.
2. The second bridge can be constructed more quickly. It consists merely
of a peculiar rhyming between a famous remark of Tony Smith's from the
opening phase of Minimalism and one by the Guggenheim's Director, Tom
Krens, made last spring. Tony Smith is describing a ride he took in the early
1950s on the New Jersey Turnpike when it was still unfinished. He is speaking of
the endlessness of the expanse, of its sense of being cultural but totally off the
scale of culture. It was an experience, he said, that could not be framed, and thus,
breaking through the very notion of frame, it was one that revealed to him the
insignificance and "pictorialism" of all painting. "The experience on the road,"
he says, "was something mapped out but not socially recognized. I thought to
myself, it ought to be clear that's the end of art." And what we now know with
hindsight on this statement is that Tony Smith's "end of art" coincided with —
indeed, conceptually undergirded — the beginning of Minimalism.
4.
See
An in America
(March and April 1990).
Krauss
431
The second remark, the one by Tom Krens, was made to me in an interview
and also involves a revelation on a turnpike, the Autobahn just outside of
Cologne.
5
It was a November day in 1985, and having just seen a spectacular
gallery made from a converted factory building, he was driving by large numbers
of other factories. Suddenly, he said, he thought of the huge abandoned factories
in his own neighborhood of North Adams, and he had the revelation of MASS
MoCA.
6
Significantly, he described this revelation as transcending anything like
the mere availability of real estate. Rather, he said, it announced an entire
change in — to use a word he seems extremely fond of—
discourse.
A profound
and sweeping change, that is, within the very conditions within which art itself is
understood. Thus, what was revealed to him was not only the tininess and
inadequacy of most museums, but that the encyclopedic nature of the museum
was "over." What museums must now do, he said he realized, was to select a very
few artists from the vast array of modernist aesthetic production and to collect
and show these few in depth over the full amount of space it might take to really
experience the cumulative impact of a given oeuvre. The discursive change he
was imagining is, we might say, one that switches from diachrony to synchrony.
The encyclopedic museum is intent on telling a story, by arraying before its
visitor a particular version of the history of art. The synchronic museum — if we
can call it that — would forego history in the name of a kind of intensity of
experience, an aesthetic charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is
now radically spatial, the model for which, in Krens's own account, was, in fact,
Minimalism. It is Minimalism, Krens says in relation to his revelation, that has
reshaped the way we, as late twentieth-century viewers, look at art: the demands
we now put on it; our need to experience it along with its interaction with the
space in which it exists; our need to have a cumulative, serial, crescendo towards
the intensity of this experience; our need to have more and at a larger scale. It
was Minimalism, then, that was part of the revelation that only at the scale of
something like MASS MoCA could this radical revision of the very nature of the
museum take place.
Within the logic of this second bridge, there is something that connects
Minimalism — and at a very deep level — to a certain kind of analysis of the
modern museum, one that announces its radical revision.
*
5. The interview took place May 7, 1990.
6. MASS MoCA (The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), a project to transform the
750,000 square feel of factory space formerly occupied by Sprague Technologies Inc. into a museum
complex (that would not only consist of gargantuan exhibition galleries, but also a hotel and retail
shops), proposed to the Massachusetts Legislature by Krens and granted funding in a special bill
potentially underwriting half its costs with a $35 million bond issue, is now nearing the end of a
feasibility study, funded out of the same bill, and being conducted by a committee chaired by Krens.
See Deborah Weisgall, "A Megamuseum in a Mill Town, The Guggenheim in Massachusetts?"
New
York Times Magazine
(3 March 1989).
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