The Display of Art: An Historical Perspective

Leonardo

The Display of Art: An Historical PerspectiveAuthor(s): David CarrierSource: Leonardo, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1987), pp. 83-86Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1578216 .

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Theoretical Perspectives on the Arts, Sciences and

Technology

The Display of Art: An Historical Perspective

David Carrier

Abstract-An historical perspective on the changing ways that art has been displayed teaches us something about present-day art. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the 'cabinet of curiosities' mixed artworks with objects which today would belong in a museum of natural history or a museum of the history of science. In the eighteenth-century French Salon, visual artworks were displayed in ways that led to the creation of a new form of writing, art criticism. Contrasting these displays with those of the modern museum, we may understand some of the differences between present-day commercial art and art involving technology, which is a special concern of Leonardo.

I. INTRODUCTION

Because we are accustomed to the ways in which visual artworks are displayed in modern galleries and museums, it is easy to forget how recently these ways of presenting art have been created and how they influence our judgment of artworks. Shown under artificial lighting, with white walls isolating it visually from other works, today the work of art is meant to be seen as a self-sufficient artifact. Any traveler to Italy who has viewed sacred fresco cycles is aware that art during the Renaissance was displayed differently. Such works-intended to be shown under natural lighting, one panel in relation to another-are not self-sufficient artifacts; and this difference in the display of art reflects beliefs about the nature of this art. One kind of information that the viewer brings to an artwork is knowledge about the artist and theories of art. Another kind of information is that which is implied by the display space itself. It is this knowledge implicit in the display of art which is my present concern.

My account draws on two recent books. The Origins of Museums, an anthology of papers on the pre-history of the museum, discusses the museum's origin in what sixteenth- and seventeenth- century writers called the Wunderkammer, "the cabinet of curiosities" [1]. Thomas E. Crow's Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris traces the origins of the modern commercial art gallery [2]. Although neither book is concerned directly with the present-day display of

Readers are invited to communicate with the section Editor at the Department of Philosophy, Carnegie- Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, U.S.A.

art, both help provide an invaluable historical perspective.

These books show that the spaces in which artworks are displayed influence our thinking about these works in two distinct ways. Spatial connections often imply relations of stylistic influence and exhibit period styles. Cubist works are hung after Cezanne's late paintings; paintings by Fragonard, Chardin, and David are hung together: such arrange- ments cause us to look for connections between these artworks. And the individuals who enter the space determine how this art is talked about. Much great art of the past was intended for, and discussed by, only an elite. By contrast, modern museums are tourist attractions; discourse about the art contained in them responds to the need to make it accessible to the larger public.

Let us consider the assumptions involved in the modern museum display. Art is placed in a visually neutral setting; for example, works taken from churches, temples, or mosques are set in a place where they are to be contemplated aesthetically. The museum arranges these objects in chronological order and segregates objects of aesthetic interest from precious natural things and living and stuffed animals. The curator endea- vors to arrest the effects of time, preventing-as much as is possible-any further aging of these artifacts.

Each of these assumptions is complex. To put sacred works in a secular setting assumes that these artifacts possess aesthetic significance over and above their religious meaning. Placing them in chronological order presupposes that this is the best way to understand the relation of earlier to later art. Segregating artworks from minerals, shells and animals

implies that artifacts have a special identity. Preserving these artifacts implies that they are best seen as historical records.

II. THE WUNDERKAMMER

The Origins of Museums gathers 33 papers presented in a recent symposium. This wealth of information makes evident the recent nature of our distinctions between the art museum, the museum of natural history, and the laboratory. One typical Wunderkammer contained, among other things, musical instruments, fossils, ethnographic objects, weapons, books, and paintings; another included exhibits of human and animal life, such as a man with only two fingers on each hand who, after he died, was stuffed and preserved [3]. It is not easy to reconstruct the principles underlying these collections. One Italian collection had two forms of display: first, items of similar appearance were alternated; second, groups of similar items were arranged together [4]. This sounds like a rational method, but since the display included artworks, clocks, mirrors, animals, and rocks, the array of things thus gathered seems strange. Such collections glorified the collector as some- one with the wealth needed to gather such a collection. These collections also some- times served a political function; in Vienna "ostentatious objects from the empire of the Turkish archenemy ... brought home the duel for power, the constant threat from the east" [5]. Certainly the lack of interest in non- European culture led to strange group- ings; for example, a fourteenth-century Islamic vase captured by the Ottomans in Cyprus in 1571 was described as a vase from the marriage feast of Cana [6].

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LEONARDO, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 83-86,1987



Usually, these collections were accessible only to personal guests of their owners, although the Kunstkammer in Kassel was open daily to "scholars, princes, noblemen, and the educated upper middle classes" [7]. Just as the modern ethnologist, geologist, and physicist can only barely recognize these collectors as real researchers, so the museum curator will feel, I believe, that a collection of animals, shells, and stones "in which the transitoriness of all earthly things is emphasized and which culminates in ... a picture of the Last Judgment" hardly is akin to a modern museum [8]. Similarly, when we read of a collector who admired stones and a painted slab which used "the texture of the stone to give the illusion of clouds, rocks, and mighty cascades", then we are in a world unlike that of the twentieth-century curator [9].

The Origins of Museums provides a rich survey of materials but lacks a theoretical framework within which they might be organized. But there are two ways we may think of this activity which concerned Europeans from Italy to Russia and from central Europe to Spain. First, if we took the artworks from the Kunstkammer and organized them according to our principles, we would have the modern museum. Second, as Foucault suggests in The Order of Things, perhaps we are wrong to see here a poorly drawn sketch of our modern museum; maybe these collectors viewed the world entirely differently [10]. In a time when it was a commonplace idea that the artist, like nature, gave form to chaos; when a great artwork, like an Australian bird, was a rare object; when the modern distinction between the natural world and the world of culture was lacking-in such a time the order of the Kunstkammer, so puzzling to us, must have seemed so self- evident that there was no need to theorize about its structure.

One commentary in this volume makes both these points. Today, though "museums are still in the business of 'keeping and sorting' the products of Man and Nature", we think about man and nature differently: "Those very traits of diversity and miscellaneity which serve in our eyes to impair the serious intent of these collections were essential elements in a programme whose aim was nothing less than universality" [11].

Foucault explains why exotic systems of classification are intellectually fasci- nating. Reading a passage by the writer Borges quoting a 'Chinese' encyclopedia classifying animals as those "belonging to the emperor embalmed, tamed, sucking pigs, sirenes, fabulous stray dogs ...

drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, et cetera", Foucault found the limitation of our system of thought in "the stark impossibility of thinking that" [12]. It is impossible today, Foucault is saying, to really understand such a system of classification. Analogously, when we read of a collection that gathers distorting mirrors, artificial eggs, a telescope, and paintings containing hidden images, the idea that we can think of these as "objects in which Nature seems to work like an artist and the artist in the manner of Nature" is foreign to our culture. Similarly, if to these collectors "it would make little difference whether a beautiful vessel was turned in ivory by an artist or was shaped in the form of a conch shell by God the Almighty, the greatest artist of them all", then their concept of science and art is perhaps unthinkably different from ours [13].

III. THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SALON

By contrast, Thomas Crow's Painters and Public Life is clearly organized around a theme; the ways eighteenth-century painting was talked about and produced in Paris depended heavily upon its manner of display. In earlier times, the nature of public art "was openly determined and administered from above"; in this period we find "a collective space that was markedly different from those in which painting and sculpture had served a public function in the past" [14]. The Salon brought together people of all classes:

... wherever one looks, countless young clerks, merchants, and shop assistants in whom unchanging, tedious daily labor has inevitably extinguished all feeling for beauty ... are the men whom every artist has endeavoured to please [15].

This condescending comment recognizes, at least, that such a mass audience is a radically new phenomenon.

Crow poses two fundamental questions: Why did the nature of the audience for painting change at this time? How was this change reflected in novel modes of writing about art? As long as the dominant form of art had been history painting, the rules of taste were fixed by an elite of connoisseurs; it was possible to claim that these rules were universal and that in practice only the privileged had the sensitivity needed to judge artworks. All rational people would agree about art-connoisseurs believed-and so dis- agreements show merely that limitations of experience and education prevent some individuals from being rational.

In the eighteenth century, the demand was not for history paintings but for "small-scale decorative pictures, tapestry designs, and family portraits"; with this change, there was need for a new vocabulary to describe this art [16]. The ways of discussing the history painting of Poussin or Raphael were ill-adapted to the art of Boucher, Chardin, and Greuze. Crow records one interesting seventeenth- century account by Samuel de Sorbi&re which deplored this creation of a language that permitted viewers "to identify the artist after glancing at a picture, then being able to pronounce on his manner of paintings.... In all this I see nothing of more than mediocre intelligence ..."

[17]. But once the Salon had become established and critics had begun writing about the art that was displayed there, then both the refusals to take the public's response seriously and the vocabulary of the traditional connoisseur became outdated.

Crow concludes that by 1741 "the ordinary visitor is entirely free to indulge an appetite for illusion, unselective attention to the physical presence of things, and a straightforward delight in representations of his or her everyday life" [18].

There was a fundamental contradiction here: how were universal aesthetic values possible in a society so clearly divided into classes? The historian may see in this collective aesthetic experience an antici- pation of the Revolution of 1789. Once fixed aesthetic categories were overruled and people could judge for themselves, a critical attitude was created which-so we can see in retrospect-could be applied also in political life. For the Salon was "not a spectacle for passive onlookers, but an opportunity for active audience participation and judgement" [19]. The critic's aim was to make choices, explain- ing why this or that work was worth attention. This active audience was created by the intermingling of diverse pictures-an ensemblage of images through which a guide was required- and by the mixing of all classes of spectators.

What we know of that public's response is, of course, only what writers recorded; and most of them, whatever their class, "were educated men, acquainted with advanced speculative thought, political theory, and literary innovation" [20]. But there was a real conflict between conser- vatives and potential radicals. The experience of the Salon provided a rehearsal for the Revolution because it created a space in which, momentarily, all people were equal. What makes this parallel between judgments about art and judgments about politics more than a mere

Carrier, Theoretical Perspectives 84



analogy, Crow argues, is that the creation and continuation of the Salon was itself a political issue. For example, when dis- senting art criticism appeared, such texts were considered subversive political documents, the product of "pre-Revolu- tionary radicals" whose task was "that of finding language clear and powerful enough to stand against the formidable symbolic structure of the old order" [21]. Some of these radicals were indeed privileged men. One of the heroes of Crow's account was Carmontelle, who "spent the last half of his life as a protected intimate of the court" and "by 1780, was receiving 6,000 livres per year" [22]. What made him a radical, however, was his challenge to the artistic and political order. Ultimately, this problem of finding a form of writing "actually able to mediate between artist and public" was a demand impossible to solve within art; only in the Revolution, in the actual working out of class conflicts, could this contradiction be resolved [23]. The public, though it could not speak for itself, was spoken for by the advanced critics; and what the space of the Salon created was a place in which such a dialogue could be grounded.

IV. THE MODERN PUBLIC EXHIBITION

Contemporary group exhibitions, like the Biennial at the Whitney Museum in New York or the Carnegie International at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, are direct descendants of the Salon [24]. As in the Salon, the public views assemblages of art; and the published response of critics provides one standard by which to judge this art. Like eighteenth- century viewers, we doubt that there are fixed rules of taste; as a reader of exhibition reviews quickly discovers, the experts often contradict each other.

Today, Crow's eighteenth-century Salons are supplemented by an in- dispensable institution, the commercial art gallery. The gallery, the museum and the collectors' luxurious homes are a series of connected spaces. In his study of this situation, Brian O'Doherty writes:

For many of us, the gallery space still gives off negative vibrations. ... Esthe- tics are turned into a kind of social elitism. ... Isolated in plots of space, what is on display looks a bit like valuable scarce goods-the gallery space is expensive. ... Exclusive audience, rare objects, and difficult to comprehend- ... the classic modernist gallery is the limbo between studio and living room where the conventions of both meet on a carefully neutralized ground [25].

His essays remind us how "it should be

possible to correlate the internal history of paintings with the external history of how they were hung" [26]. The modern gallery, by isolating the artwork, makes that artifact a precious commodity. Too large, often, to be exhibited except in such a space, the painting is isolated by artificial lighting and white walls from any contact with the outside world, as if it were best displayed apart from that external world.

The modern art critic, like his eighteenth-century counterpart, provides a guide to these often-bewildering works. The differences between earlier and present-day criticism are, however, as important as the parallels. The public Crow describes looked at art which was not presented in a sophisticated verbal framework. By contrast, when the director of the Carnegie Institute, John R. Lane, writes of the problem of defining "a new critical approach" utilizing "the aesthetic theories of the French structuralists and deconstructionists and the humanistic Marxism of the Frankfurt School", we are reminded how esoteric is the discourse surrounding contemporary art [27]. If the modern exhibition is meant for the public, that public needs to be educated to understand what it will see; the contemporary museum is a public space whose contents are understandable only to the viewer who knows something of this esoteric discourse.

The creation of the Salon was marked by a conflict between the erudite connoisseur and the artistically ignorant visitor. Modern group exhibitions, though they inspire much controversy, involve different kinds of political concerns. Even art claiming to be politically radical is discussed in extremely esoteric writing; only 'experts' possess enough knowledge of the theories of structuralists, deconstructionists, and Frankfurt School Marxists to take part in these discourses. Saying this is not to defend or promote elitism, but simply to note that our situation differs from that of the eighteenth-century French, when the writing about Chardin, Greuze, and David was straightforward, accessible to an educated audience. The texts of our art critics are not, and even when museums seek to popularize present-day discourse, they acknowledge this problem.

Perhaps the public response to eighteenth-century Salons could better be compared to our experience of movies and popular music. Though critics review this popular art, in these genuinely popular modern media we do not need knowledgeable experts to tell us the meaning of these works. Unlike modern art, movies and pop music are publicly

accessible. Obviously this situation can be frustrating to the curator, who might like to have a mass audience; but since most twentieth-century art is esoteric, it is hard to see how this situation could be changed by any individual. If the contradiction of Crow's eighteenth-century Salons is that they created a public space for art within an aristocratic society, the equivalent contradiction today is that the modern museum presents in a public space art whose meaning is inherently private.

V. THE DISPLAY OF ART IN LEONARDO

This brief historical analysis is sug- gestive about the role of art discussed in Leonardo. Many artists interested in the work presented in this journal must be frustrated with the lack of acceptance of such art within the commercial artworld [28]. Understanding how this work belongs neither in a genuinely public space, like eighteenth-century Salon paintings, nor in the modern commercial spaces might place this situation in perspective. As we have found, the structure of the spaces of a Wunder- kammer, the eighteenth-century Salon and the modern museum manifests a conception of art. In what kind of space does the art of Leonardo belong?

In separating the art presented in Leonardo from that presented in the modern museum, I make a rough generalization. Certainly, some of the art illustrated in this journal often does appear in the commercial gallery, and some of the art on view in the contemporary museum often is discussed in Leonardo. Still, however, computer- generated images, kinetic sculpture, and investigations of perspective are not often represented in museums. Conversely, though the artworld has shown interest recently in the revival of abstract painting, political art, and post-structuralism, these topics have not been emphasized in Leonardo.

The role of the art discussed in Leonardo can be understood, I propose, by con- sidering the ways in which it is appro- priately displayed. Let us consider, for instance, art involving computers. In one sense, this art-unlike the art admired by aristocratic connoisseurs-does not define its audience by class; anyone possessing the appropriate technical knowledge may appreciate it. In another sense, this art- unlike the paintings on view in the Salons-demands specialized knowledge of its viewers. It was possible to admire realistic images by Chardin or Greuze without knowing how these works were




made; it is often difficult to fully understand computer art without knowing something about the technology involved.

Perhaps, then, if the proper space for commercial painting is the gallery and the museum, the proper location for the type of art published in Leonardo is not a physical space at all, but in this journal. Just as the work of physicists is presented in specialized journals, so the research of artists interested in technology is presented in texts, not in a public space. In one way, we here return in part to the world of the Wunderkammer, in which art was intermingled with objects of interest to the scientist. The art seen in Leonardo unites the concerns of scientists and artists in a way that contemporary commercial art frequently does not. Perhaps it is fitting that such art is displayed differently: it is less an artifact to be displayed in a gallery than research best presented in illustrated texts.

This is as radical a break with the past as that provoked by the eighteenth- century Salon. Those displays provided a space in which every observer-the connoisseur and the amateur, the aristocrat, and the worker-could judge new work. This is no longer the case. Museum art presupposes knowledge of esoteric theori- zing; art in Leonardo, knowledge of science. In either case, the community of viewers competent to discuss this work is a self-chosen elite. Should we be uncomfor- table with this situation? An owner of a Wunderkammer did not worry about the inaccessibility of the collection to the public-class divisions were taken for granted. In our modern society, we cannot do this; thus it is easy to regret that serious art does not have a large public. But if we think of art in Leonardo not as work intended to be accessible to this public, but as a kind of visual research,

then this result should seem less surprising. Art in the eighteenth-century Salon

could appeal to a broad public because it could be judged without complex theories. This is frequently not true either of modern museum art or of work in Leonardo. Because the modern museum is a public space, is supported in large part by public funds, and desires a large audience, it seeks to educate the public by providing ways of making esoteric art accessible. Because much of the work in Leonardo is not displayed in such a space, and Leonardo itself has a relatively small circulation, the art described in it does not so readily become popularized.

This short study of the history of how art is displayed can provoke questioning, but it does not provide a real guide to present-day action. If artmaking is a kind of research, akin to work in physics, then perhaps it is unsurprising that this work cannot really be of immediate interest to a large public. On the other hand, the model of the eighteenth-century Salon, in which such a public was engaged, cannot be dismissed easily; though the nature of art, and perhaps politics as well, has changed, we remain uneasy about art that lacks the capacity to attract such a public. But my aim here is to suggest some ways of thinking about these problems, not to provide solutions.

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

2. Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985).

3. Impey [1] p. 26. 4. Impey [1] p. 19. 5. Impey [l] p. 44.

6. Impey [1] p. 254. 7. Impey [1] p. 108. 8. Impey [1] p. 118. 9. Impey [1] p. 99.

10. The standard, now no doubt dated, analysis of the Wunderkammer, originally published in 1908, is Julius von Schlosser, Raccolte d'arte e di meraviglie del tardo Rinascimento, P.Di Paolo, trans. (Florence: Sansoni, 1974). The most useful presenta- tion of Foucault for my present purposes appears in Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

11. Impey [1]p. 1. 12. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

(New York: Random House, 1970), p. xv. 13. Impey [1] p. 26. 14. Crow [2] p. 2. 15. Crow [2] p. 19. 16. Crow [2] p. 11. 17. Crow [2] p. 31. 18. Crow [2] p. 103. 19. Crow [2] p. 101. 20. Crow [2] p. 97. 21. Crow [2] p. 222. 22. Thomas Crow, "The Oath of the Horatii

in 1785", Art History 1, 425, 437 (1978); most of this essay is incorporated into Crow [2].

23. Crow [2], p. 133. 24. For Crow's very different view of the

present, see his "Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts", in Modernism and Modernity, B. Buchloh, S. Guilbaut, D. Solkin, eds. (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), pp. 214-263. My views are presented in D. Carrier, Artwriting (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1987).

25. Brian O'Doherty, "Inside the White Cube: Part III, Context As Context", Artforum 15, No. 3, 42 (November 1976). These excellent essays are to be reprinted as a book, Inside the White Cube (San Francisco: Lapis Press, 1987).

26. Brian O'Doherty, "Inside the White Cube: Part 1, Notes on the Gallery Space", Artforum 14, No. 28 (March 1976).

27. Editor's Note, Carnegie International (Pittsburgh, PA: Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, 1985) p. 17.

28. See, for example, the letter, David W. Bermant, Letter to the Editor, Leonardo 19, No. 94 (1986).




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The Display of Art: An Historical Perspective