Having passed the guarded gate and carefully pinned on the museum badge signaling our permission to enter, we proceeded up the staircase and through hallways decked with well-known sculptures, paintings, and whispering tourists and aficionados. There was no doubt that we were in a public art museum with clearly defined limits.
Yet, upon entering the all-white walled space of the John Baldessari: Pure Beauty exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we were instantly thrown into a world where boundaries are blurred: what seemed to be a purely functional documentation of the past locations of the exhibit was in fact the first piece of the exhibit, a room with paintings hung on its walls was also filled with a soundtrack broadcast from an unseen location, fellow museum visitors planned a dinner party as security guards surreptitiously jotted down notes. One museum visitor captured the crux of the issue, saying to her friend “How do you navigate that boundary?”
How does the art museum visitor navigate the binary boundaries between public and private, art and life, presence and absence?
In his essay “Of Other Spaces”, French philosopher Michel Foucault describes the museum as a heterotopia. Heterotopias, according to Foucault, are “effectively enacted utopias in which the real sites...are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted...[and] are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about” (Foucault 1986, 24). Foucault suggests that a site is defined by its set of relations, and a heterotopia is one of the two types of particularly interesting sites that “suspect, neutralize, and invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (24). Perhaps a good way to think of a heterotopia is a place that draws attention to, and potentially critiques, certain aspects of social relations. In his essay, Foucault exemplified one type of heterotopia, heterotopias of time (or heterochronies), with the museum, as the museum is a space detached from the elapse of time (26).
For the Baldessari exhibit, as we contemplate the relationships between the museum, the museum visitors whose observations of art we observe, the security guards who watch us, and ourselves in the art exhibit, we entertain the idea that, in addition to a heterotopia of time, museums can also be a heterotopia of boundaries, where the lines between dichotomies are suspended, challenged, explored, and permeated. Because the contemporary museum is a distinctively public presentation of art, the museum obviates the museum visitors from the need to delineate the boundaries between public and private, art and life, and presence and absence, and allows these boundaries to blur. In other words, by being what it is, the museum grants permission to the museum visitors to explore these nebulous distinctions, and serves as a heterotopia of boundaries
In the following posts, we explore the ways in which different boundaries are blurred.
Yet, upon entering the all-white walled space of the John Baldessari: Pure Beauty exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we were instantly thrown into a world where boundaries are blurred: what seemed to be a purely functional documentation of the past locations of the exhibit was in fact the first piece of the exhibit, a room with paintings hung on its walls was also filled with a soundtrack broadcast from an unseen location, fellow museum visitors planned a dinner party as security guards surreptitiously jotted down notes. One museum visitor captured the crux of the issue, saying to her friend “How do you navigate that boundary?”
How does the art museum visitor navigate the binary boundaries between public and private, art and life, presence and absence?
In his essay “Of Other Spaces”, French philosopher Michel Foucault describes the museum as a heterotopia. Heterotopias, according to Foucault, are “effectively enacted utopias in which the real sites...are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted...[and] are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about” (Foucault 1986, 24). Foucault suggests that a site is defined by its set of relations, and a heterotopia is one of the two types of particularly interesting sites that “suspect, neutralize, and invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (24). Perhaps a good way to think of a heterotopia is a place that draws attention to, and potentially critiques, certain aspects of social relations. In his essay, Foucault exemplified one type of heterotopia, heterotopias of time (or heterochronies), with the museum, as the museum is a space detached from the elapse of time (26).
For the Baldessari exhibit, as we contemplate the relationships between the museum, the museum visitors whose observations of art we observe, the security guards who watch us, and ourselves in the art exhibit, we entertain the idea that, in addition to a heterotopia of time, museums can also be a heterotopia of boundaries, where the lines between dichotomies are suspended, challenged, explored, and permeated. Because the contemporary museum is a distinctively public presentation of art, the museum obviates the museum visitors from the need to delineate the boundaries between public and private, art and life, and presence and absence, and allows these boundaries to blur. In other words, by being what it is, the museum grants permission to the museum visitors to explore these nebulous distinctions, and serves as a heterotopia of boundaries
In the following posts, we explore the ways in which different boundaries are blurred.
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