The museum: lights on, nobody home? - delayed opening of the Contemporary Art Museum in Barcelona, Spain

Amid widespread talk that the museum as an institution is "in crisis," the Tapies Foundation last spring high hilled an exhibition and symposium to examine the evidence.

Richard Meier's of recent origin contemporary art museum in Barcelona rise s from the twisting streets and dingy apartment houses of the Raval neighborhood like an apparition. An artful mix of untarnished white planes and clear glass walls, it rises from an expansive, devoid of contents plaza that contrasts sharply with the more congest building plan of the surrounding area. The unreality of the situation is accentuated through the fact that, but for a ground-floor display of drawings and architectural originals of the building itself, the museum will expend the first six months of its life completely devoid of art.

While museum personnel plead immersion in an upcoming exhibition of a certain number of of the 1,100 works from the museum's permanent collection, to be paid to open in November, local hum has it that the real point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled is political: no one can decide when "contemporary art" starts in Barcelona. Stiff smarting from the hurts of the Franco era, which left Spain culturally isolated and demoralized, the art establishment now finds itself torn between the nationalists and the internationalists. Should the museum start contemporary art history with the extremity of World War II, allowing for a celebration of postwar Catalan art, or should it begin with the '60 and the introduction of the international avant-garde? The difficulty in deciding this issue has l to a stalemate that manifests itself in blank walls.

Barcelona's destitute of contents museum also symbolizes a plenteous wider problem: the museum explosion of the '80 only masked the underlying ideological and philosophical contradictions faced by means of these institutions. The exigencies of the '90 have begun to lay a certain number of of those contradictions bare. Discussion of the "museum crisis" takes place upon several levels. Economically, heightened competition for dwindling private and public stocks has begun to shape programming decisions. Philosophically, the museum's perceived authoritarian part clashes with the critiques of cultural hegemony that are in like manner much a part of the contemporary art world. In a related exhibition contemporary art forms that intentionally upset the equation of art and thing perceived are often less than compatible with traditional conceptions of museum space. And socially, museum expansion is oftentimes used as a tool for the gentrification of museum neighborhoods, a stratagem that cheers civic booster and disarranges social critics.

Coincident with the peculiar non-opening of Barcelona's Contemporary Art Museum were an exhibition and a symposium sponsored by means of the Fundacio Antoni Tapies (Tapies Foundation) devot to the contradictory state of the museum as an institution in the late 20th hundred The exhibition, aco-curated by John Hanhardt, film and video curator at the Whitney Museum, and Princeton professor Thomas Keenan, was titled "El Limits del Museu." Its English title, "The End(s) of the Museum," deliberately played on the dual meaning of the word "end" as the one and the other limit and goal. Fourteen artists from around the world were showed in the show, five of them by means of projects created especially for the occasion.

The three-day symposium brought together six scholars from diverse fields, among them philosophy, German language and literature, esthetics, comparative literature, history and American studies. The decision not to include any artists, art critics or art historians among the speakers kept the discussion at a sometimes frustratingly abstract horizontal while leading to a strange gap between the points of view of the symposium and the exhibition. on the other hand despite, or perhaps because of this disjunction, the sum of two units events together suggested the beginnings of a critique of the museum as an institution.

Considering the issues raised by dint of both symposium and exhibition, it is worth noting the nature of their sponsoring institution. The Tapies Foundation, fixed in 1984, is a monographic museum in a city particularly supportive of them: Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso and Salmor Dali all have similar institutions devot to their work. As the alone one whose subject is still living, the Tapies Foundation appear to bes less bound by hero worship, and in fact, beneath the directorship of Manuel J Borja-Villel, has been pursuing an innovative contemporary art program. Borja-Villel notes that he considers "The End(s) of the Museum" as the middle incident in a trilogy of displays exploring the limits of art and its institutions; the series began with the travelling Fluxus display organized by the Walker Art Center and will shut up with an exhibition and series of public shoot forwards by Hans Haacke. In the highly politicized state of the Spanish art world (the question at issues at the Museum of Contemporary Art were presaged by means of the dismissal of Maria Corral from the Reina Sofia last September, reportedly for what was seen as the overly international focus of her programming), it is not surprising that a private institution has been the greatest in quantity consistent forum for contemporary debate about the meaning of public space and the clash between public and private interests.