On Empire
It was Cornelius de Jong who drew my attention to the fact that many important museums, such as the Mauritshuis in The Hague or the Tate Gallery in London, were originally endowed by the sugar dynasties or were in some other way connected with the sugar trade. The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said de Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew. One of the most tried and tested ways of legitimising this kind of money has always been patronage of the arts, the purchase and exhibiting of paintings and sculptures, a practice which today, said de Jong, was leading to a relentless escalation of prices paid at major auctions. Within a few years, the hundred million mark for half a square yard of painted canvas will have been passed. At times it seems to me, said de Jong, as if all works of art were coated with a sugar glaze or indeed made completely of sugar...
W.G.Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
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Wherever we are, the ‘white cube’ signifies a map. It can also serve as a tent for that army of nomads made up of artists, dealers, curators, critics, collectors, browsers, tourists who can pitch up in Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, Sydney, Auckland, washed by the tides of capital that flow through the institutions of art. Inside the tent, though, a safe haven. Nowadays, name-brand architecture is recognisable as the spectacle signalling this uneasy collision of commerce and art, but still harbouring inside these gargantuan baubles remain the white walls, the white rooms, apparently impervious to matters commercial, upholding the museum’s status as arbiter of taste and value - the ‘white cube’ an immutable receptacle for Art. It is in part this ambiguous relation between market forces and the supposed autonomy of art, granted symbolic value within the modern art museum, that Dane Mitchell essays in Empire.
Mitchell presents the ‘white cube’ as a readymade, a model-object at once commodity fetish and codified artefact. He reproduces and isolates Modernism’s ideal space – clean, pristine, stark, white. No doors or windows to open the void to the outside world. While devoid of the messy, unnecessary body of the spectator, the chamber is scaled to permit us to imagine clipping across the even, light, artificial wood panels. Domestic in scale and efficient as an Ikea flat packet, ready for sealing an ideal (read privileged) vision. It stands as one of a series of containers at the same time as it is composing the collection, determining its boundaries. Its conventions are understood and ‘…preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values’. (O’Doherty) Hierarchies and values defined and perpetuated by the museum pose as cultural consensus which is disseminated around the globe – the white cube as a framer of value uses subterfuge to carry out its ideological programme within the economies of exchange.
From Le Corbusier’s machines for living, New York’s Museum of Modern Art conceived a machine to show pictures in – simple, geometric, clinical spaces in which Modernism is filed as history, tidied up for inspection. Reproducible standardised spaces to store and show objects. Peering down through the frame of history onto Mitchell’s model white cube gives a sense of the inevitability of that history – it appears as a relic here, but it is also as an unconsciously accepted model. The modern museum as a method for shaping and representing history characterised nineteenth-century Western culture and served to rationalise and classify an ever-increasing body of knowledge and accumulation of artefacts born out of Enlightenment ambitions and gained through imperial expansion. The modes of representation formed to construct a linear and seemingly natural evolution of time act to suppress the extreme acts of violence and questionable impulses associated with the mastery of territory and colonial suppression. Similarly, in the first half of the twentieth century MoMA produced a seductive art history that, as Hal Foster points out, was ‘…infinitely more coherent, progressive and refined than the horrific century at large’. But it was something easy, even noble, to invest in and more, the viewer ‘… could feel, in a mystified way, a bit player in a grand piece’. Circulating through these spaces you are offered a world view in which you are captured (as in a photograph) – you are benignly offered a favourable likeness.
The model gallery space in Empire may be readily recognised as a metaphor for the museum as a container of cultural and even moral value, but Mitchell collages this received ‘truth’ by housing his white cube inside a wooden packing crate used for storing and freighting art. This symbolic space, then, becomes a transportable object of trade, an ambivalent item, adrift from the mother ship of the museum. Far from the seamless exchange of vast amounts of information through cyberspace this packing crate is a product of an industrial mode of commodity exchange. Unlike the figure of the ideal, immutable, ‘pure‘ white cell, reality’ impinges on this object, which is physically susceptible to the elements, or the jabs of the forklift, subject to custom’s inspections and duty. This is a stand in for industrial economies of exchange in which goods and resources (and models, systems, services, morals, ideas and knowledge) are circulated, and for which the colonies were able to offer resources and labour. Increasingly abstracted flows of capital serve to ensure cultural dominance across increasingly connected and amorphous territory – the museum preserves and forges this dominant culture through memory (which is always selective).
Much of Dane Mitchell’s practice focuses on the mapping of the spaces of the art world and the network of relations within it. By turns geographical, socio-political, archaeological and anthropological, his mission seeks to uncover and elucidate the ideological forces, the conventions, modes of behaviour, customs and networks, the pathologies and obsessions, the environments and structures, that construct and detail the architecture of culture. In Empire this study leads us from the generic white cube as one framing convention used to direct the public through cultural institutions accompanied by the stories they promote, towards the state as author and manager of those stories. The packing crate reminds us of that the gathering and presenting (or in less benign terms looting and hoarding) of artefacts and cultural objects from elsewhere created triumphant displays to the greater glory of the state, coinciding with the expansion of empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The power of the rulers materialised through collections of imperial plunder intended to gain a general acceptance of the power of their authority. And the word spread. Just as every village now ‘needs’ a biennale to ‘put them on the map’, every state needs a museum (or several, or many) to fix and represent its cultural authority (and accumulate interest).
After having collected the appropriate data, Mitchell drew up world maps illustrating, in one of the drawings, the size of each country according to the number of museums and, in the second drawing, the size of the country based on museums per capita. These kinds of maps are cartograms, which are diagrammatic maps showing the statistics of different regions and are commonly used to illustrate GDP, so clearly, again, the connection between culture and capital is underlined, as is the assumed hierarchies of progress and accumulation. But what does this data tell us? The first example sees the cultural centres dominating – USA, UK, France and Germany. According to the amount of museums per capita though, Vatican City, Norfolk Island and Niue become the largest three areas. What does this tell us? If, as it might be supposed, the aesthetic and educational experience provided by the museum is intrinsically good, does this mean that the state providers responsible for Vatican City, Norfolk Island and Niue are the most successful in doing their civic duty? Are their populaces further advanced than denser regions populated with fewer museums? Who are the visitors to the museums? What percentage of the citizenry go to the museums and what do they gain, assuming that the idea is to gain anything, from their experience? Do the statistics illustrated in the first example mean that they are successfully ‘proving’ themselves as the greatest democracies, bearing in mind that one of the aims of the early museums was to offer cultural knowledge and aesthetic experiences to all its citizens? Does the data reveal anything about the type of experience the museums afford? Is it the type of experience that simply maintains social hierarchies through its specialised and privileged nature? Certainly the first map illustrates the status quo regarding cultural capital, but how are we to account for the aberrations of the other? The maps are somewhat mute on these questions and it’s puzzling as to where they might be leading us. These sketches of fragmentary information say something about the circulation of the museum model throughout the globe but offer no neat closure as to meaning, leading only, perhaps, towards further maps, more gathering of data, and more searches for the elusive detail.