The seventh museum: a proposal
Andrea Fraser
The Seventh Museum project was initiated by Stroom at the request of the six cultural institutions comprising the Hofvijvermusea Foundation. The Seventh Museum calls for contemporary artists to work in dialogue with the participating institutions to create projects for the public space of the Hofvijver area. In addition to engaging the historical and architectural structure of that space, the project should aim to:
- provide coherence to the six participating museums
- identify the area as a cultural site
- narrow the gap between the museums and the public (1)
The present proposal seeks to accomplish these aims by working with the six participating institutions to create a presentation of material from each of their collections in the park area along the Hofvijver directly opposite the Binnenhof. Taking the project title literally, the central element of the present proposal is the creation of a seventh museum structure without the construction of a seventh museum building. While serving all three aims of The Seventh Museum, this new 'institution' would focus most directly on the third goal -- that of narrowing the cap between the museum and the public.
Many museum are facing a crisis of audience. While collections, expand, the relevance of cultural institution for contemporary life often appears to be diminishing. While private and public sponsors demand justification for expenditures in terms of public impact, museum traditions and ethics often limit their efforts at new form of public address. Museum education programs are only effective with audiences already predisposed to museum-going. Public relations schemes, on the other hand, tend to worsen the problem by putting museums in competition with the entertainment oriented popular culture industry and, thus, misrepresenting their specific purpose.
Museums are public institutions. As such, museum collections -- whatever their character -- function as representative public culture. Like other public institutions in a democratic society, their representative function depends on their openness and accessibility to participation. How open, how democratic, how public can a museum be?. The proposed project will explore these questions through three different aspects of the new institution:
- the public (extra-architectural) presentation of works of art
- the reconciliation in one representation of six different museums
- the development of public educational material for this new institution
The extra-architectural presentation of works of national cultural heritage was first conceived as an important metaphor of the openness of the democratic institution in the Hofvijver area. In the proposed installation it will also form a material foundation on which to build a museological discourse and educational practice capable of engaging publics beyond the sections of the population which are socially and culturally pre-disposed museum going. In cooperation with independent consultants, participating institutions, the artists will attempt to develop a new policy on public presentation. This process and the resulting policy should have a long term use value beyond the boundaries of the proposed installation.
Recognizing the dangers inherent in the extra-architectural presentation of art works produced for indoor display, both the selection of works and the conditions of display will be determined in close dialogue between the artists, institutions, and experts in art conservation. Climate controlled display cases, hours of presentation, security, ect., will be designed to guarantee the safety of the art works. These safety mechanism will become, in turn, a central element of the installation itself and will mark the limit on openness imposed by the need for the protection of cultural property. The proposed installation will in this way explore the relationship between two of the primary aims of post-war Dutch cultural policy:
- to preserve, maintain, and where possible expand the nation's artistic heritage for the benefit of present and future generations and
- to promote the presentation of that heritage and of Dutch cultural achievements to a wider section of the community(2).
What restrictions does the first place on the second? How might these restrictions be overcome? The advanced development of democracy in the Netherlands provides a social basis for a new engagement with these questions, while the fact that they apply equally to almost every existing museum, would give their exploration a relevance far beyond Holland.
2
The second aspect of this proposal -- reconciling six very different institutions in one presentation -- addresses the aim of The Seventh Museum directly. How does one provide coherence to six museums which range in collection from old master paintings to branding irons to candy boxes? How does one conceptualize the integration in private non-profit, city, and state institutions? How does one negotiate the ideological rifts between the discourse of connoisseurship, left social history and the patriotic commemoration of an imperial past? The challenge here is to understand these differences neither as inconsistencies to be overcome nor arguments to be decided but as contradictions correlative to the field of social demands which Dutch cultural institution have been founded to address.
3
The differences and contradictions between the six participating institutions would, in turn, form the basis for the third aspect of this proposal: the development of educational material for the wider audience gained in extra-architectural display in a sense, the proposed installation would be a museum of the museum. Each participating institution -- represented by its discourse as well as its objects -- would be objectified and juxtaposed. The installation would display, not only different kinds of cultural objects, but different ways of dealing with cultural objects; looking at them, interpreting them, appraising their value, identifying and appreciating their beauty or interest. While each such approach would correspond to a particular participating institution, the educational material will try to articulate its correspondence to particular social experience of culture. The aim of public education in the seventh museum would not be for the audience to learn about art museums instead of art, but to learn about themselves -- culturally.notes:
1 Marking the Hofvijver Area, request Hofvijver to Stroom, December 1991
2 P. Fegner: Government and the Arts: The Netherlands, in: Milton C. Cummings Jr. and Richard S. Katz (eds) The Patron State, New York, 1987this proposal