Institutional Critique as Countermemory:
Some Current Approaches to the Museum
by Brian Wallis

Museums are the key cultural sites where today we construct our communal narratives, where we tell stories about history and nation, where we neatly separate the materialistic facts of objects from the aesthetic fictions of art. But all museum displays raise the question of whose story is being told and whose interests it serves. Even Leonardo's Last Supper down the street, which epitomizes the conventional notion of the art work as masterpiece, is an ideologically coded image placed in a certain architectural space — now museumlike — to make certain persuasive arguments regarding religion, gender, history, class, even the ritualistic uses of food.
The complicated strategies of cultural identification and discursive address that take place in museums are central to shaping contemporary notions of "the public." Functioning in the name of the community, or the people, or the nation, such overt displays — of art works, or historical artifacts, or cultural trophies — are both the vocal mediums for the expression of communal values as well as prominent forces in confirming and abetting those attitudes. As a result, a wide range of contemporary artists and theorists have, in the past decade, sought too intervene in these museological structures, to challenge their underlying socioeconomic presumptions and to produce a kind of slippage that points to the ambivalence of the kind of "scientific" truths to which museums aspire. In dealing with historical materials, museums often try to normalize certain ideas, to make views that are highly debatable appear true. One way they do this is by structuring class-based modes of order (such as style, chronology, selectivity), and discounting certain types of narratives or iconographies that question order itself.
In graduate school, a professor of mine used to tell a story, which he swore was true, about the art historian Erwin Panofsky and iconography, "that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to form. It seems that Panofsky had been invited to give a lecture at a major northeastern museum (the Wadsworth Athenaeum, I believe) and the curator, in making conversation with the iconographer, said, "Oh, this is great. You will be able to see our masterpiece by Piero di Cosimo, which you have written about so perceptively." To which Panofsky replied, with a straight face according to my professor, "Why should I have to see the painting, I've got a photograph of it right here."
In class, this was meant as a parable about the perils of the iconographic method, and the folly of neglecting the actual work of art in favor of text-based methodologies that attempt to disengage the image from the object. But, to me, the anecdote always seemed to cast an unfavorable light on the archaic, object-based character of the museum. In my reading, it was the curator who was really the butt of the joke, since he was too bound to the art object to see its real meaning and was, apparently, insufficiently versed in contemporary theory. Hence, this was an allegory about the museum's lack — a lack of iconography.
As it happens, many museum curators of Panofsky's day actually prided themselves on suppressing precisely the sort of subject matter and interpretation that iconography seeks to analyze. Until recently, in fact, most museums insisted on a decidedly neutral, even "scientific" approach to the study, connoisseurship, classification, and preservation of artifacts, no matter how arbitrary their collecting techniques might have been. For example, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., director of the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and '40s, proudly claimed that the works in his museum demonstrated "an elimination of a wide range of values such as the connotations of subject matter, sentimental, documentary, political, sexual, religious. Despite the fact that Barr was speaking primarily of abstract art, the assertion that any art or any museum could suppress subject matter and political or sexual connotations demonstrates the fundamentally ideological position — itself masking a rich and complicated iconography of sexual and political power — adopted by most museums.
Recent art historians have demonstrated how, in the case of Barr's Museum of Modern Art, this deflection of content not only obscures any potential iconographic reading of abstract art but serves to inculcate the viewer into a larger pretense of nonideological culture (what art historians Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach have called a "late capitalist ritual". This is the pose that an artist like Hans Haacke aims to deconstruct. In his work Seurat's Les Poseuses (Small Version), 1888-1975, for instance, Haacke simply shows the history of ownership of the small painting. Exposing the socioeconomic affiliations of its owners and noting how actual value was added to the work (what was once a gift was, at last sale, worth over a million dollars), Haacke shows that both aesthetics and the history of art are constructed from particular class perspectives, and, in turn, these discourses reward and reinforce the interests of those classes. Historically, museums have often served to promote cultural domination within developing public spheres or as a way to replicate the mechanisms of that domination in local communities. Museums do not merely reflect or collect culture forms, they actively produce and reproduce them. It is in the general interest of museums, then, to deny iconographies of social difference and subordination — based on class, gender, "race," religious, or nationality — in order to maintain the fiction of shared opinions, which is just another way of defining ideology itself. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz has said, "Ideologies are important in defining (or obscuring) social categories; stabilizing (or upsetting) social expectations; maintaining (or undermining) social norms; strengthening (or weakening) social consensus; and relieving (or exacerbating) social tensions." This is just the way museums function as cultural texts, specialized collections of objects assembled into fictional narratives that proffer certain interpretive readings. The stories museums tell are generally expressed not so much through the overt language of catalogues and wall texts as through the elaborate process of selection and juxtaposition of objects, particularly in what is not said, not shown, or not remembered. Yet, despite this highly propagandistic mission, museums generally try to present their narratives as seamless, natural, and uplifting. In recent years, however, many historians and museum curators have challenged this state of affairs. Suddenly, exhibition narratives have become more subjective and the questions curators ask are becoming more pointed. This dramatic shift in the way museums function and historical knowledge is codified — what might be called the return of iconography-reflects a broader critical approach to culture prompted by feminism, multiculturalism, and postcolonial studies.
Using these new perspectives and methodologies, old objects have been interpreted in new ways. And previously buried or ignored histories have been given particular attention in specialized museums, such as the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., the Museum of the American Indian in New York, and the Museum of African American History in Detroit. But in addition, these museums often present deliberately polemical readings of objects directed to specific audiences, often distinct cultural groups such as blacks or Native Americans. As a recent article in the New York Times noted, "Today's exhibitions are a marked departure from the detached museum presentations of the last two centuries. The museum has become a forum, not a temple. And political messages are to be expected."
Also to be expected are the pained objections that have arisen, primarily from conservative politicians and columnists. At the 1992 Republican National Convention, right-wing presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan spelled out what was by then already self-evident: that America was in the midst of what he called a "religious and cultural war for the soul of America." The so-called Culture Wars that have since consumed American cultural politics have centered in large part on efforts to limit the ability of museums to exceed the shackles of aestheticism, to present critical works that challenge prevailing social values, or to reinterpret the mythical American past. Both of the well-known cases that prompted the current cultural debates — those of photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano — concerned proposed museum exhibitions. And their critics sought to indict the museums for showing "child pornography" or "blasphemous pictures." Ultimately, one museum cancelled its Mapplethorpe exhibition and another was taken to court for not doing so.
More recently, in 1995, conservative politicians assembled a group of Allied veterans of World War II to protest a Smithsonian Institution exhibition on the bombing of Hiroshima. Their complaint was that the proposed exhibition placed too much emphasis on the Japanese perspective on the events, and that in doing so the curators underestimated the Allied casualties that would have resulted if the bomb had not been dropped. In 1996, the respected curator of the Museum of the City of New York's exhibition "Gaelic New York" was dismissed when she resisted the imposition of stereotypical depictions of Irish Americans. And later that year, as part of an election-year gambit, House Speaker Newt Gingrich protested a Phoenix Art Museum exhibition called "Old Glory" because it showed works that incorporated — or, in his words, "defiled" — the American flag.
This new phase of the culture wars shows that it is really a political battle over the ways nationally sanctioned values are policed by public institutions. Mirroring earlier attacks on "indecent" art exhibitions, university curricula, and political correctness, the clampdown on museums is an attempt to establish what is deemed appropriate public discourse, or at least to curb the divisive potential of separatist histories. In the case of museums — art, science, history — the debate is not so much about funding or economics but primarily concerns how these institutions perpetuate or debunk certain modernist iconographies. And, like other debates in the academy, the conflict around museums involves more than institutional practices: it exposes deeper and more profound political anxieties about how American culture is or should be represented, namely, whose culture is displayed, by whom, for whom, and in what way?
In the past two decades, contemporary artists have directly influenced changing attitudes toward how these "realities" are constructed, by developing a theoretical model for a critique of museum practices and by drawing attention to the symbolic patterns and lacunae in museological narratives. The genealogy of what has been called "institutional critique" can be traced through three stages. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Conceptual artists such as Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher, and Daniel Buren sought to expose the fictions of museum narratives and the ideological investments of patrons. A second generation of Postmodern artists (including Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Bloom, and the collective Group Material) examined the language of representation — the value given to originality, the truth value of photography, the authority of assertive speech, the persuasiveness of spectacular display — as it works to structure stereotypes of gender and class both within the art world and in everyday life.
Finally, there is a third group of contemporary artists (among them, Rene Green, Mark Dion, Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, and others) who have often worked in cultural institutions themselves, serving as or imitating curators, docents, or educators. Through these interventions, they have sought to examined the cultural ramifications of exhibition practices as they extend to fields (such as natural history, ecology, diaspora studies) beyond the art world. Their critical approaches to the history and practices of museums themselves have also certified a growing sensitivity to the misrepresentation or nonrepresentation of nondominant cultures in most museums; a greater attention to historical and cultural context; and the reconception of the meaning of a broad range of material culture artifacts.
Such interrogations, often in the form of site-specific installations, constitute a sort of countermemory, a practice that persistently questions dominant modes of constructing the past while at the same time seeking to recuperate submerged histories or meanings. And it is this approach that I want to discuss today. First, I will discuss two quite different but key examples of recent artists who have used this form of institutional critique: Fred Wilson and Andrea Fraser. Their work has moved this highly politicized discourse about the museum from a parochial art context to a wider cultural field in which we can observe historical patterns of patronage, spectatorship, anthropology, colonialism. Then, I want to look briefly at two museum exhibitions — one of underground publications, the other of working-class possessions — that represent similar of parallel strategies of material recovery and theoretical provocation.
Perhaps the most eloquent example of an artist working within the museological context is Fred Wilson's 1992 exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society called "Mining the Museum." Wilson, whose heritage is African American and Native American, was commissioned by the Contemporary, an alternative space in Baltimore, to investigate and interpret the collections of the historical society. What he found was that the museum had almost completely obliterated the cultural history of his ancestors in Maryland. Representations of African Americans or Native Americans, or objects owned and made by them were not missing from the museum, they were just consigned to the basement and absent from the telling of the museum's story, which tended to focus on country estates, duck hunting, and Maryland's contributions to the Civil War. Searching through the museum's storerooms, Wilson found objects that not only clarified his own past but suggested why and how it had been occluded.
By bringing these often unexceptional objects to light and merely altering their contexts — literally moving them from basement to exhibition space — Wilson was able to construct fresh readings and new iconographies. A display of portraits focused on those in which black servants lurked in the background, classical busts of white American heroes were juxtaposed with empty pedestals for their absent black counterparts, a child's Ku Klux Klan robe was laid inside an opulent baby carriage. In one display, titled simply "Metalwork, 1793-1880," Wilson brought together an opulent silver table setting from the late nineteenth century with an early pair of slave shackles. Such unexpected conjunctions within the confines of the museum's own generic categories ("metalwork" or "transportation") generated contrasts and oppositions, which in turn gave ideologically rich significations to overlooked objects and deliberately buried histories. By ignoring the grand and heroic in history and focusing on the miscellaneous and the banal, the forgotten and the everyday, Wilson was able to help others to think critically about the construction of history and its relation to everyday and collective meanings.
The second artist I want to talk about is Andrea Fraser, who is perhaps best known for her performances as a museum docent or tour guide at the Metropolitan Museum, the Philadelphia Museum, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. In these tours, Fraser perfectly replicates the style and manner of the guide, but instead of focusing on the art works, she directs attention to the institutional frame. She looks at things that are overlooked, like signage, light, fixtures, bathrooms, and other supposedly invisible support services. Like Wilson, Fraser focuses on stories that are not told in museums and the ways that these silences support the iconographies that museums do develop.
In 1992, Fraser organized an exhibition at the University Art Museum in Berkeley, California. In a situation quite similar to that of Wilson in Baltimore, she had been invited by the museum to come in and look through their collections and archives, and to develop a work based on those resources. What most interested her in that collection was the history of a single donor, a woman named Thrse Bonney, who had graduated from Berkeley in 1916, and who, in 1984, made a major bequest to the museum. Included in the Bonney donation were "minor" French paintings from the School of Paris (including several works by her close friend Jean Dufy), tapestries, Art Deco furniture, household effects, and one Renoir.
As Fraser painstakingly demonstrated in letters and documents unearthed from the archive, Bonney bequeathed the entire contents of her Paris apartment, hoping that the collection could be preserved intact and displayed as it was in her home. But, after accepting the gift, the museum established a hierarchy of value: in addition to the fifty-five objects the museum chose to add to its collection, there were over a hundred objects that the museum relegated to its study collection. The things placed in the study collection included coins and medals, tourist souvenirs, eyeglasses, glassware and dishes, photographs of Bonney and friends, and unmarked household furniture. Through this sorting operation, the museum curators picked apart the holistic logic of Bonney's domestic environment, putting the art in the museum and consigning the other objects to the basement storeroom.
As Fraser noted, "One of the primary operations of the art museum is the transformation of what is essentially bourgeois domestic culture into legitimate public culture. That transformation is effected in the most basic way by the abstraction of art objects from their social location, first by their displacement from a home to a museum, and secondly, by the introduction of criteria and systems of classification whereby certain objects of determined interest are separated off from other objects that constitute their total cultural context." Fraser's project — to reunite the two halves of this once-coherent environment — raises key questions about what constitutes a collection, personal or public, and, in a larger sense, what constitutes "culture," as the museum defines it.
One of the key lessons of this type of exhibition concerns the false division between high art and material culture. By combining a critical curatorial methodology with an interventionist artistic practice, Wilson was able to make a sophisticated political argument through the judicious deployment of a few simple symbolic objects. Part of the reason the recent museum exhibitions have become so inflammatory is because just such redefinitions of material culture have allowed for the reconsideration of subaltern communities, many of which ignored or consciously rejected traditional European forms of art. New concepts of material culture have also chipped away at the old distinctions between high culture and folk art or between high art and popular culture, in part through tracing specific iconographies across a broad range of mediums and forms.
Material culture can be defined as an investigation that uses objects (along with relevant documentary, statistical, and oral data) to explore cultural questions both in certain established disciplines (such as art history) and in certain research fields (such as the history of vision). But I think we can define material culture even more broadly, to include all types of objects that organize the beliefs and practices shared by a particular community. It involves looking original artifacts (paintings, photographs, clothing, chairs), as well as patterns of object making, display, and interpretation. This expanded notion — informed by theory and critical art practices — embraces local concepts and mass ideas; elite cultural forms that have been popularized, mass-produced goods that have been adapted, and popular forms that have been elevated to the museum.
Responding to the new methodologies of artists and social historians has not been a simple process. Often museum professionals find that their collections do not contain the objects to tell alternate stories. Many objects come from upper class families because they were the ones who had the time, space, money, and social inducement to collect. In addition, past curators — such as those at the Maryland Historical Society or at the Berkeley museum — held certain biases toward convention that excluded "low" or "unesthetic" objects. This lack of relevant objects has forced curators to reconsider their criteria for accepting and rejecting objects and to seek a broader scope of material culture from a wider range of communities.
The idea of recognizing the previously denigrated histories and cultures of various "minority" communities suggests the recovery of a relatively unacknowledged array of objects as well. In the exhibition "Counterculture," which I organized for the alterative space Exit Art in New York in 1996, the purpose was to trace the full history and variety of underground media practices in the United States since 1968. Fueled by skepticism, this critical American cultural movement — which extends from the underground press of the 1960s to today's turf battles in cyberspace — has sought to perpetuate the hope of citizen-based information channels. And in the process, cultural activists — what Umberto Eco calls "semiological guerrillas" — have forced a whole range of radical visual styles as well as strategies for producing an alternative information system through disrupting, parodying, jamming, hacking, slashing, appropriating, and recreating the mainstream media.
Following in the footsteps of the anarchic political manifestations and publications of Berlin Dada and the incisive cultural critique of the French Situationists, these American countercultural practices continued a twentieth-century practice of subcultural intervention. "Counterculture" isolated the contributions of nine specific groups: the radical underground press of the sixties (from political satire of The Realist to the psychedelic San Francisco Oracle to the militant White Panthers); the Black Panthers' information office (including their subversion by the FBI's COINTELPRO); Yippie street theater; ecological utopianism (Whole Earth) and monkeywrenching (Earth First!); the gender politics prompted by the Women's Movement (including the first gay and lesbian publications); the DIY montage of the punk-inspired fanzines (from King Mob to Processed World); the collaborative artists' groups engaged in political issues (Art Workers Coalition, Fluxus, PADD); the postering and demonstrations AIDS activist groups (such as ACT UP and Gran Fury); and the electronic disturbances and networking of hackers. In effect, "Counterculture" sought to recuperate the largely ignored cultural history of the American Left.
In terms of the museological discourse, one of the aims of this exhibition was to foreground a type of cultural material that museums rarely collect, that libraries rarely display, and that even individuals soon tire of. Generally classified as popular culture or ephemera, this stuff is apparently both too omnipresent and too much tied to temporary issues to warrant preservation. Such immediate gratifications seem to violate the aura of timelessness and universality that most museums try to create. On an iconographic level, another of the aims of the exhibition was to show the efficacy of aesthetic design designs in forging a political graphic style. In many cases, the desire to disseminate alternative information to a broad popular audience required new solutions, ranging from medium (cheap offset printing, photocopying, websites) to style (five-color printing, bold cartoons, stylized typography). In any event, the "low culture" graphic forms, now often stashed away in attics or under the beds of aging activists, constitute a largely unacknowledged chapter in the official chronicle of American culture.
The final example I would like to cite is an exhibition called "Goin' North" that was presented at the Rochester Museum and Science Center in July 1991. This exhibition consisted of the lifelong possessions of one person, an African American sharecropper named Alice Mathis. Just before her death in 1990, Mrs. Mathis was interviewed for the museum's oral history collection. When she head that the museum was starting a collection that would focus on material culture and everyday life in Rochester, she willed to them everything she owned, an assemblage that was contained in two old trunks. The exhibition of the contents of those trunks — clothes, quilts, tools, wigs, bobby pins, etc. — provided a window on the life of migrant farm workers through the objects owned by one worker and through the repositioning within the museum of things not often shown in that space.
An art museum might have separated out, for aesthetic reasons, Mrs. Mathis's numerous quilts, for indeed they are extraordinary examples of the abstract qualities of African American quiltmaking. But it is significant that the Rochester Museum chose to exhibit those quilts in the context of Mrs. Mathis's life as a whole because the quilts then fit into a larger pattern of attentive care, purposeful juxtaposition, and prudent recycling. Repairs to a common pail show the same careful conservation efforts; a collage of plaid flannel patches stitched inside a jacket shows a prideful combination of pieces; and a quilt made entirely of pant legs from worn-out jeans shows a wise reuse of found materials. These objects, then embody certain culturally specific attitudes about style, saving, sewing, and work that are often obscured by the universalizing tendencies of most museum narratives.
In summing up this exhibition, the curator, Victoria Schmitt wrote to me, "We had two objectives: One was to shed light on recent cultural influences that have resulted from the migration of significant numbers of rural southern African Americans since 1950. The other was to stress the importance of objects in documenting and presenting life in our community — even everyday life — and to record the testimony those objects can give about the human spirit, regardless of whether the owner was a high or low-profile member of the community."
Such a brief would seem to be, on its face, unassailable. But part of the reason that the historical exhibitions I mentioned at the outset have become so inflammatory in recent years is because of precisely such redefinitions of material culture and of the proper role of museums. For one thing, this revisionism has allowed for the reconsideration of subaltern communities, many of whom did not use or rejected traditional European forms of art, which is the principal form of culture celebrated in American museums. Secondly, concepts of material culture have chipped away at the old distinctions between high art and folk art or between high art and popular culture. And while dealing with the common and the everyday is not necessarily more democratic, it often does offer resonant meanings to a wider range of viewers. Finally, this "return of the real" not only recognizes the power of the ordinary and the commonplace but also disallows the often arbitrary and ideological distinctions between types of artifacts. Instead, this approach asks critical questions about the role of such objects in our daily social, political, and personal interactions. In such contexts, iconography is not a problem in need of a critique, but "a site where ideology and its resistance are lived out in all their messy contingency."
As we near the end of the century that museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art are calling "The American Century," it is important that museums examine not only their putative subjects but also their own ideological biases. This means that curators and artists must rethink methodologies and iconographies for what they say about the constructions of "race," gender, class, and nation. In such cases, critical theory or abstract theorizing is not enough; we must reexamine the cultural objects and social practices or collecting and organizing them to understand the patterns of everyday life that shape the past and imprint the future.