Guggenheimlichkeit is what happens when the people making the decisions decide that the interface is where the action is. There are simple reasons for this, and simple reasons to walk away from it.
2 Heimelig is simply familiar, homey.
3 Heimlich: There’s the maneuver, but that’s not what this is about. The German word Heimlich would be translated as “surreptitiously,” or “on the sly.”
4 Unheimlich: A Freudian psychoanalytic term, generally translated as “uncanny” in English.
5 Guggenheim: Yes, the museums. Not because anybody there is special, but because their Frank Lloyd Wright building on Central Park was one of the first modern museums to explicitly invert the figure-ground relationship between the work and the walls; also because Philip Johnson has been quoted on the subject of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao: “When the building is this good, who gives a fuck about the art?”[1]
An investment has been transferred….The first wave of modern art display may have been misrepresented as neutral, universal. In the last twenty or thirty years, it’s become officially obvious that the art and architecture of the “Family of Man” school actually articulated, and served, the desires of a rather narrow segment of the Family, a.k.a. “Daddy.” Now, the same rhetorical, symbolic, and technical devices penetrate with all the more lubricated ease, by a more and less explicit exhibition of the museum itself as object of fascinated deconstruction, whereby it is advertised as Pure Power.
Museum architecture and exhibition design have a much narrower ideological range than art, even in these tedious times. As the facilities become more and more spectacular (I use the word ‘spectacular’ advisedly), the customer and the product come to meet in a moment of mutual embarrassment, whose brevity is its only virtue. It’s understood that the viewer will be gone in five minutes, the piece will be gone in a month, and that in any case they are both there for the sake of the building, which is the real Social Sculpture, and which will endure (real is used here as in real big, real expensive, real slick, real site-specific).
2 Zone Books put out a new edition of The Society of the Spectacle so slick and precious and expensive and copyrighted that it had a closer affinity to Eau d’Issey than to the Situationist International. That’s not an embarrassing mistake, either. It’s détournement. Uncanny? Hmmm...
3 The medium is the competition: This effect is not proper to art environments, and in fact it is reaching its fullest realization online. Consider AOL, which provides access to the rest of the Web, but whose actual business it is to keep you within its own “environment” instead.
4 The Pardo installation at Dia went a step further in the explicitness of its reorientation of museum experience as designified, (in the sense of a standardized narrative, a true political theater of Agitational Shopaganda). In this case, the artist redesigned the bookshop and the first-floor gallery into a continuous and homogenized exhibition space of candy-colored tile, populated by an arrangement of Merchandise in its high and low modes (high=unique artifact, low=multiple inventory). On the gallery side, I found myself ogling memorabilia such as the original clay “buck”[2] of Volkswagen’s new Beetle (a life-size design prototype, which happens to be made out of a traditional artist’s materials, by hand); on the shop side, I found myself browsing books and editions. The application of an admittedly very nice tile job had effectively merged the two areas into a sort of double vitrine, by reducing their separation to floor-to-ceiling glass: two tableaux-vivants, each offering the other an arrangement of glazed people and products.
The rules and limits of Design can preempt the presumed deregulation of Art, and art consumption (think fuel). Think back to the last time somebody said “content” to you, as in “the content of the piece.” One may speak of “designing a program” without having to come right out and say “arranging the content.” This word, like “program,” “product,” “audience,” says less about the phenomenon to which it refers than it does about a vast distance between the speaker and what he or she is naming. Meanwhile, the tiny gap between content and nontent approaches zero.
Design and construction are now fully alienated, in a way they never could be when R.M. Schindler built his own house in Los Angeles in the twenties. At this writing, however, there’s a show of his drawings and photos at L.A. MOCA. A team of architects, modelmakers, graphic designers, and photographers, et. al. have been brought together to make the show really big. I had been in the King’s Road house an hour before, but it took me a minute to recognize contemporary pictures of the interior—they had been shot so as to make the low ceilings look high, and to make the simple carpentry look perfect.
A drama is being performed at this level (inflation), as another is being played out elsewhere (inversion): the re-orientation of post-structuralist and feminist critiques of “the” phallic modernist commodity-fetish, a stereotypical object capable of erasing (or at least eliding) local culture, identity, and alterity across vast distances in a single traveling retrospective. Over time, as art objects have been de-powered in favor of a self-reflexive vivisection of the conditions of dissemination and reception, museums’ facilities have become monster fetishes of another kind: simultaneously subject, object, shibboleth, figure, and ground (Valhalla), of Conceptual Designs at best, and at worst Designer Concepts. This is not, obviously, to be credited to the evil genius of Frank Lloyd Wright, or Thomas Krens, or the Stepford Wives’ Curatorial Committee. A building can and must be bigger, more expensive, more durable, and more specific than an exhibition.
In fact, Guggenheimlichkeit is just as fundamental to the phenomenon of breakfast cereal as it is to any oxymoronic “contemporary museum.” Go to the supermarket, and walk down the cereal aisle. A tremendous amount of energy has gone into the production of elaborately extroverted graphic design, marketing, and printing. Inside, however, all the boxes contain the same plastic bag, which is not on display. In the bag, there are pellets, or flakes, or colored balls, made of different proportions of a standard mixture, the varieties of which span a very narrow segment of the spectrum food <—> candy.
University-trained artists are particularly susceptible to the toxic effects of this smooth and creamy dead-end. Eventually, the fetishization of the museum-object as Cruel Mistress comes to represent it as determinant, as the Main Event, and Immovable. Within the terms of panoptical deconstruction, I can just relax—the beast will fondle or spank me at its pleasure, and I know what it wants. The real question, the interesting part, will come when I start to admit that the bewildering uniformity of neo-Pop parodies of perfect ease carries something of an ideological order, which has more to do with cultivating identity than cruh-teaking it. Until then, the distinction between art and exhibition design will be real trivial.
There’s a basic rhetorical reason why there can never be a parody of the after-the-fact passive voice of curator, critic, historian. When reading a critique, one often forgets whether the author is bragging or complaining. Attempting to write a dissertation into an object or installation only exacerbates this weakness. Just as museums realize the consensus of public and private sectors, museums are the only art that museums can make themselves, and that will never be enough.
Guggenheimlichkeit is the hole left in the middle of the gallery after the de-centering sinks in. What was obvious before is now just too embarrassing to even talk about: Dissection-display-disclosure-disinhibition of the circumstances and mechanisms of communication is both necessary and insufficient. The more art offers itself up as the condensate of mass-marketing and academic passive-aggression, the more museums are driven into their own (very limited) creative resources to make a spectacle of themselves. This problem can and should be considered in good old-fashioned structural terms, as a simple question of proportion: If your thesis consists mostly of preface and footnotes, don’t publish it yet. It makes no sense for artists to compete with the après-garde—borrow, acquire, arrange, fluff-and-flay. These games may truthfully reflect post-industrial guilt, or exuberance, or a fantasy of enough leisure time to get really, truly, madly, deeply, numb.
They now proceed from the same presumptions of inadequacy as General Mills:
1 That the content/product is somehow insufficient or simply invariant.
2 That its vehicle should expand anyway, which is to say that it can never reach or exceed an appropriate size.
3 That the creation of unsatisfied need and desire are social goods.
4 That conception and implementation can and should be segregated from each other, and be performed by separate social groups.
5 That the seductions of design are a necessary, if not sufficient, supplement.
Why do you think it’s called Culture? Because it comes in a plastic dish?
Let’s at least admit that we think we know that some things still have to be done the hard way, in person.
Special thanks to Ursula Endlicher for her help with the etymology.
Carl Skelton, New York: sculpture, video, installation, long explanations.