SITUATED

From 1981 till 1990 Catherine David was Curator for the Museum of Modern Arts Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. From 1990 on she worked at the national gallery Jeu de Paume in Paris and curated a number of international shows. She was headcurator for Documenta X in 1997 and worked at the Witte de With centre for contemporary arts in Rotterdam. Currently she is working (amongst other things) on the Contemporary Arab Representations project.

Kris Rutten [KR] : I would like to start with telling you a bit about the project on (the) Museum and (new) Media that I have been working on for constant.

Catherine David [CD]: Ok…

KR: Museum and new media are two terms that are open for discussion. I started a weblog a few months ago to have a closer look at this discussion. My starting point is that at the end of the 90’s there was a big debate on the relationship between the Museum and New Media. On the one hand there were utopian visions which said that the museum would not be the same and that it would change totally. On the other hand there where more conservative voices which said: “let the museum be the museum, and the web be the web”. According to this perspective they wouldn’t be able to meet each other.
At a certain moment there seemed to be a very pertinent discourse on museums and new media. We now live in a time that Geert Lovink refers to as ‘after the party is over’. After the booming of new media, there was the dot.com crash which in first instance was an economic fact but which also had large cultural implications. The new media have become ubiquitous and are becoming more common in our everyday lives… But the discussion on the museum and new media seems to have lessened a bit in impact.
I would like to know how you see this change. Do you also think there has been a change on thinking about new media and museums starting from the 90s when it was really hot and revolutionary to now when it is more common to have this new media around us. Is there a change in approach of New Media in museums?

CD: From my point of view, I never really shared this very ingenious vision of new media necessarily associated with more-better-best, whatever…
I think that media is being used for what it is, they have a number of qualities but they have no transcendence. I think that the traditional missions of the museum cannot be really fulfilled by new media. Another question would be ‘Are the museums today really fulfilling their mission?’ I see there is a big confusion and people are calling their museums whatever. I also see it is quite often that one is identifying a museum as an exhibition gallery, which is very far from the museum concept. So to my experience with the museum – for instance a very big historical museum – is less and less really able to display the collection properly and offer to the audience a meaningful parcours. I don’t see that many museums are doing what they should do with regards to presentation and transmission, especially when they have a traditional historical collection. The mission of ‘doing it properly’ often is privileging an ‘event’ or let’s say what I call ‘a tourist visit’. You get a big historical collection which is supposed to be less seen than Re-seen regularly, and Re-discussed and Re-thought about. These are for me more important questions than really the pseudo competition between Museum and New Media which I never really understood very well why it exists.
This said, I think that the kind of sensitive and intellectual experience with new media is very different from the one you were supposed to have with the museum, so again I don’t see any competition. At times I see a very naïve and sometimes very ridiculous tendency to overestimate new media. It is not an essence so it depends what you are doing with it.

KR: So starting from this. Indeed new media is a tool, but maybe not for better or for worse… Nowadays cultural workers and academics are talking about e-culture referring to the fact that these new media are part of our everyday lives, part of our everyday cultural productions and that the borders between the different institutions are disappearing. We are used to see the museum, the library, the university, school as very separate entities, but their borders are becoming more and more blurred and transgressed. Do you think this is really happening? And if so, it this a good evolution?

CD: I think it is very pragmatic so it’s quite clear that you have a kind of blurring of the frontiers or limits on the one hand. On the other hand, I think it is quite ingenious and cynical to pretend that this e-culture is globally a world event. I mean I know many places in the world where there is no e-culture, and there is no easy access to internet. So this is one thing that we should be a little more modest about. Secondly, I really think that the potential of the internet is one thing, but it’s use is another thing. For instance you are mentioning the library. When you are doing research, the question is: are you finding what you are looking for? So if you have no idea what you are looking for, I am a little dubious about the use you will be able to make of the internet. It is one thing to have this immense resource on-line, where you can find close to everything – a certain number of texts you can’t find on the internet – but the question is: what if you have no idea? You will never find what you are looking for specifically. Quantity is one thing, another thing is the quality, still another thing is the potential, and yet another thing is reality. So on this level I think that specialised libraries still have a lot of work in front of them. Again, it is really possible that there are many uses developing these days on the internet. I think that it’s very ingenious to make us believe that this is ‘the’ solution, you have many other possibilities.
I see that a certain number of libraries have to be kept very well, and not only kept. The library is a living body, so we have to go on with books. You know in the end whatever you say, whatever you do, its one thing to read a text on-line and it’s another thing to read it on paper. I don’t know anybody, at least from my entourage, who will read 200 pages on-line, so we have to be a precise and serious with these issues.

KR: I wasn’t really referring to the fact that we should skip books and get everything on-line. We now see the role of the librarian changing as the gatekeeper to the collection. (S)he is the guide to where to find the books as such. Whether the texts is on-line or not, just to find the book is a problem too because the databases and archives are getting more complex. So what I was talking about really, was not about putting everything on-line to read, but more about the changes that these institutions are experiencing. The librarian – more than ever – is becoming a gatekeeper for people who want to look into these databases. Maybe these are also changes for the curator and the museum, as an intermediary between information, art and the public that is looking for this information.

CD: Yes this is true to some extent. I think that when you have no clue, what do you do with a big database? When you have no clue of the difference between Heidegger and Plato, what do you do?
I see that there is more and more a gap between the potential, and what people are able to do with it. I am a little anxious if you are completely neglecting transmission and the cultural formation of people. For me it doesn’t mean anything to have bigger and bigger sources and possibilities; even when you think about intellectuals who are not so far from us. If you think about Michel Foucault who was able to process and control a library with his brain. I think this is for me close to the way that you are building your corpus and your relationship to the corpus, it is part of the thinking. I see more and more that everything has to become easier and I think it is very naïve. Before a thinker is thinking, you are building your corpus, you are coming back to text, you are making connections, and the quality of the connections you will make I’m afraid, is not really depending on the internet. So this is what I would balance. For instance, I am using Google a lot when I am searching. Why? Because I heard about an author from a friend, because I am back from a trip where I took notes, so on and so forth. I think it is a little ingenious to make us believe that the more you are educated, the more you are informed, the more your corpus or your network of activity etc, the better you can use Google. It is like in a library- why should you ask for any sophisticated author you have never heard about unless you see it.

KR: Indeed, it is more the idea of networks and thinking in terms of networks, and new media becoming a tool in this thinking process as you describe it… You need to know what to type into Google. It is not just the fact that Google is there, you have to know which links to make, and…

CD: How to circulate. Of course you are not using the internet corpus as you would use a library, because they are working differently. For instance you have to enter through this very bizarre intersection. It is another way of thinking: you have to learn, you have to adapt, you have to invent. I am not working with Google the same as I am working in the national library in Paris, but I think that sometimes it is the number of cynical politicians who would make us believe that there is something like an inversion: Internet will make us more intelligent, but I think it is the opposite. The way you use internet and alphabet you are not able to go very far, so people should be aware of this.

KR: Maybe you have heard of the concept of multiliteracies, a term put forward by the new London group. It’s a group of scholars with amongst others James Gee, Brian Street, Shirley Brice Heath… who are thinking about education just in the manner you are describing it. There is not one single form of literacy, or there is not one single tool that can bridge this gap between literacy and illiteracy, but there are multiple facets and different factors that are important in a different context. So we need multiple literacies for multiple contexts.

CD: I think it is an interesting concept, but you have to be precise. I would never enter this kind of “Eden”, this very liberal perspective that everything can be fixed and re-organised. I think when there is no attention paid to the transmission, nor paid to the cultural formation of people, when culture is identified to be as an immediate and common good, you can move and agitate yourself as much as you want but it will never work. So we have to be a little aware that it is not like a miracle. Again I don’t see how you can be literate when you have no access to your tradition, when you have no way of distancing yourself, when you don’t have a minimum linguistically, historical culture. Of course everything is culture, but I think this is a very populistic view. Unfortunately not everything is culture and you don’t do the same with very different backgrounds.

KR: Another question, perhaps a bit more pragmatic. You have worked for a long time curating shows and I am trying to look at how in general there has been a change in thinking about new media in the museum. Do you think the questions that are posed now about new media and media art when you are curating shows, are different than they were 10 years ago during the time when you were curating Documenta or when you were working at the Beauborg?

CD: Well I don’t see that things have really changed so much. Maybe the last moment when we had to make a certain number of decisions was the moment when you had one more video than still images entering the museum, and on this I have some mixed feelings. I do think that a museum is not a cinema and that a certain number of experiences are more interesting and more legitimate in a cinema. I don’t like to stand for one hour and a half, I don’t like to look at the images with people passing in front of me and between myself and the image, I don’t like to hear a very important dialogue in the middle of a mess, and when in certain exhibitions or events you have more hours of projection than a human being could stand in a festival, then there is a problem. I think there are also some exaggerations. I can’t stand it when there is no sign for a piece which is not mentioning how long it is, if it is three minutes or three hours.
There are a certain number of practical problems that can be solved quite precisely, it is not a metaphysical problem. I think that a certain number of Internet projects or networks should be seen on-line. I don’t see why they should be entered into a museum. Unless you want to compensate the fact that a certain number of people have no access to internet, and in that case you should have a booth. There is a certain limit to this very specific issue, which I would not quote as exactly my style. Just as a very conservative museum director – the one that was in MOMA in New York when Bob Smithson was developing his early work – once said: “museum walls are not infinitely expandable”. This experience is related to new media. I don’t see why we should completely oppose to any attitude of fetishisation as I don’t see why we should fetishise the screen. You can have it at home, in a shop or a station or wherever; I don’t see why you should go to a museum for seeing something you can see at home.

KR: I have been reading some of the interviews that you gave, especially during the Documenta period. The kind of problems you had with internet art was that it was objectifying itself as a piece in a museum, while it is exactly this technology that makes it possible to stay…

CD: Wherever… I think there is a moment between populism and kitsch that the museum is supposed to legitimate. We see now for more than 20 years that the museum is a space without quality, not meaning bad quality, but without the possibility of maintaining and imposing it as it was in the 19th century or
until the 60’s where you still have a minimum relationship to the historical and the avant-garde. What I see, is that anything is called ‘Museum’, including places without a collection which are very new and which have no tradition with the community around it. From this perspective, I don’t see why not showing a piece in a museum, in an exhibition space in a shopping centre, as long as the conditions of light, of accessibility, of protection of the work and visibility are fulfilled. I don’t see why there should be a difference. Of course there is a difference going to the Beauborg or to the National Museum of Modern Art, than to go to a shopping centre, but when I see the way that the Beauborg is developing, I am not completely sure anymore (laughs)… Which has nothing to do again with being authoritarian, but I think there is a minimum reflexivity in the way you show a collection; there is a minimum attention which is supposed to be paid to the works and to the audience, which I don’t see anymore.

KR: It seems that museums are more and more becoming public centred. There is this transformation of the more ‘autonomous’ museum that is there to educate people and with maybe a rather big distance between the public coming into the museum and the work that was being shown there. I have read an analysis by a philosopher, Hilda Hein, who sees a link between the fact that museums are becoming more and more spectator and public centred and the discourse of process, interaction and experience. The museum thus as a form of experience for the public. She criticizes the negative consequence that the museum is becoming more and more market based. That the line between the museum offering an experience to the public, and the museum being market based and doing marketing is becoming thinner. I don’t know if you have any comment about that?

CD: This is more true with regards to a museum of modern art or undefined museums. I think it is not exactly the case with the very traditional historical museums with classical historical art collections. Even if these museums are extremely exposed to this kind of event or audience. I think that some of them are able to answer to both audiences. In the Musée du Louvre in Paris for example, it is sometimes very difficult because you have too many people running around. So if you are a little clever, you try avoid a big crowd. Fortunately we can go to other places too, but the use of the museum I have, and the use of the museum a certain number of other people I know have too, is getting more and more difficult. Meaning you go to the museum to see a few paintings by Rembrandt, or you want to check a few studies by Delacroix, and this should be possible, because it is exactly why the Musée du Louvre is there for. It is a big collection with a very complex history, and it is a collection we are supposed to know, and also a collection which has a reference or memory, which we are supposed to deal and play with, and this should be kept possible. The Musée du Louvre wasn’t conceived to become a tourist attraction, even if it became that way. So I think now you have to be pragmatic. You can’t kill the tourist; they are very necessary for the economical life of the museum, so how do you deal with this? This is the difficulty we are facing and it is not the problem of museums which are paradoxically supposed to deal with contemporary production. Maybe that’s where the experience is more important or difficult with the audience, the fact that many of these places are now considering their mission more as attracting people at any cost, and being very public meaning they are trying to please everybody immediately without any distance: I think this is extremely problematic.

KR: There is this distinction between the commercial aspect and the fact that they are trying to tell a story to the public that is coming to the museum.
There is also a tendency to look at the museum as a ‘work place’ – as a place where things can be experimented; not so much a space where things have to put up against the walls but where artists can enter and use the space and intervene in these spaces… Do you think it is important that the museum also serves as a workspace and as a political site: asking questions about politics and ethics at the same time?

CD: In my point of view, there was a regression from the late 60’s until now. And in the late 60’s and 70’s, there were a number of places which were conceived as working, debating and meeting places, and which were the institutes of contemporary art, the Art Foundation project in New York, etc. These places were for meetings with artists with very specific works, which had to be kept under certain circumstances. These days I would plead for less ‘big places’; I am afraid we cannot stop it anymore to have an heterogeneity of places and to have the possibility of having much smaller places where people are thinking more, which could be open one or two days a week for a specific audience and specific meetings, where you can have time and people can process (their ideas). I am afraid that this kind of activity cannot be performed anymore in big museums, whether it is places like the Beauborg, etc. It was part of the mission at the beginning, and it was supposed to be an experimental place but we saw what became most important for the machine, and again I am completely sure there is an audience for that but not a big one. But who cares about big audiences? At first you can’t begin with big, you have to go little by little; you feed the one audience first, which I think is extremely authoritarian and populist, and secondly you have to be for a big audience immediately, I think it is extremely questionable…

KR: But maybe the format of the museum as such, as a space where people enter and look at these works that are hanging there or standing against the wall, makes it rather difficult to make a diversification in your audience or to not approach your audience as one homogenised whole…

CD: But the reality is that each time you have a possibility or the ambition to have an experimental space in a big museum, you never win, so there might be a problem there. Why not have some smaller spaces completely disconnected from the museum? When I go to Musee du Louvre, I am expecting and developing a different experience than when I go to the Beauborg I want to see what’s happening and come back and re-discuss.

KR: I was in Berlin last winter at the Transmediale and there was this discussion about the relationship between contemporary art and new media art and the question whether we need a different category or not. According to Christiana Paul from the Whitney museum, the terminology is really important. She wanted to come to some categories to name this type of art and to give it a place in the contemporary art world. Whereas Gunalan Nadaradjan said: ‘No lets keep these boundaries open let’s not define it too much because then we can incorporate things like ‘Islamic Robotics in the Middle East’, for instance… Then there was Sally Jane Norman who was saying that thanks to the fact that these technologies are becoming so common now, we can look beyond the fact that they are technological and we can look more at the social and technical meanings they have.

CD: Well I think I would be more interested in the second analysis of why we should be building more borders and categories. I am not interested in technique or media as such; my only interest is what it is about, what kind of experience is it conveying and what kind of wealth is it proposing or dealing with? Posterior to that, if you know that it is a painting or video or even with cinema, it is an extremely different experience seeing movies by Lucas, than to see a movie by Pedro Costa. They are different worlds, it’s about very different realities. So we are dealing with the kind of debate I am interested in, but I don’t see what is the gain or the plus of entering into the contemporary art category which is more and more a package than a video collection of meaningful works. It is more for me a specific segment of cultural consumerism: Who cares to be a part of contemporary art?

KR: Apparently this was the issue at this festival where people were wondering why new media art still largely exists in mailing lists or in special festivals instead of the biennales or the Documentas.

CD: I don’t see the need for legitimizing, they are doing quite well and there is a sense of respect for new media. I don’t see a lack of interest and it is a little bit like what happened with video. I was always very sceptical when people were coming and were saying this is video art. I replied ‘this is video, what else are you doing?’.

Brussels – June 2005

(interview to be read and corrected by the author)

Posted by kris_r on August 24th, 2005 in: Uncategorized.