crafting aura

CRAFTING AURA: A R T MUSEUMS, AUDIENCES AND ENGAGEMENT PAMELA SMART

Art museums, through the past decade, have increasingly turned their attention to reducing the opacity of their representations. This, according to the prevailing logic, renders museums more inclusive and thereby less objectionable politically and sentimentally. I argue in this paper, however, that this call for accessibility by way of transparency in the presentation of artworks rests on a misrecognition of the extent to which engagements with objects in art museums inevitably rest on intricately crafted terms of apprehension. And, moreover, these terms of apprehension are often specifically designed to foster accessibility. Further, in so far as the call for transparency sees a more virtuous future for art museums in the practice of laying bare the apparatuses of mystification that they hitherto have been centrally engaged in, it does so at the expense of the very raison d'etre of the institution, since it is precisely the mystified character of artworks that renders them objects worthy of collecting, preserving, and displaying. In making these arguments I focus particularly on a museum that takes a radically different approach to the problem of rendering art accessible to audiences who might otherwise find it alienating. The Menil Collection, in Houston, Texas, is a museum that seeks to foster an engagement with art that is not confined by the terms of apprehension laid down by art history, or by orthodoxies of taste.f Rather, it seeks to create a public for art, and a kind of liberated experience of art, not by attempting to lay art bare, but conversely by the crafting of a thoroughly mystifying

aura.1 In tracing the crafting of this aura, through the exhibitionary practices of the museum, through its institutional procedures, and through the details of its architectural form, in what together amount to an economy of extraordinary care, I seek to show that techniques of mystification may be mobilized in the interests of accessibility rather than alienation. In my description of the Menil Collection that follows, I delineate the character of the aura that it produces, and some of the techniques by which it is crafted, in order to show how it might operate in the constitution of particular kinds of relationships between persons and objects. Central to Dominique de Menil's conceptualization of the Menil Collection, and throughout its operation, has been the concern that the character of this engagement should compromise neither persons nor objects. In contrast to the now widely held view that the mystifying seductions of aura are politically objectionable, here they are taken up under the flag of freedom.2 Whether or not one is persuaded by Dominique de MenU's assertion of the liberatory character of aura, the elaboration of this commitment at the Menil Collection does serve to illustrate the operations by which an auratic experience of art might be conjured. In so doing, it also draws attention to the extent to which the mystification of the art object inevitably remains a central (though increasingly unrecognized) element of museum practice more generally. Further, in presenting an account of the Menil Collection's very particular

t The Menil Collection is the formerly private collection of some 15,000 objects acquired over the past 50 years by Dominique and John de Menil. Opened to the public in 1987 in the form of a purposely built museum, designed by Renzo Piano, the Menil Collection now stands at the heart of a sustained project of patronage that was pursued by John de Menil, until his untimely death in 1973, and his wife Dominique, who died at the close of 1997. Having left their Paris home in 1940 to take up residence in Houston, they exerted considerable influence over Houston's cultural institutions and were very actively engaged with issues of spirituality and social justice internationally. These projects were sustained by wealth generated by Schlumberger Ltd., the oil field service company that grew out of oil sensing technology developed by Dominique's father, Conrad, and uncle, Marcel Schlumberger..

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organization of relationships between objects and subjects, and between a museum and its public, I seek to open up a consideration of the museum's relationship with its audiences that does not conform to the familiar and apparently self-evident oppositions expressed in the terms of elitist opacity and democratizing transparency. TRANSPARENCY

The impulse to reduce the opacity of its representations is most powerfully expressed in museums in the rhetoric of museum Education or Outreach departments, and in their growing budgets. Public funding is now very often closely tied to notions of community building and inclusivity such that close attention is increasingly paid to an institution's ability to attract "underrepresented" audiences, and populist sentiments—expressed in an overarching commitment to a mass audience—seem now to dominate museum press releases. So, whether the imperative is couched in terms of "under-represented" audiences, thereby evoking an appeal to a range of "minority" audiences with particular interests, or as "populism," wherein the idea of a single more or less unified mass audience is invoked,3 what is at stake is not only the financial wellbeing of a museum.4 It is also the very legitimacy of the institution, read in terms of an expanded audience base. Efforts to achieve this broadened audience-base very often sail under the flag of "inclusivity," posed as the corrective to the supposed historic elitism of museums. This rhetoric of inclusivity tends to conflate these two very different conceptualizations of audience—as consisting of various special interest groups or as a single mass—obscuring their divergent trajectories. The acknowledged division is not between these differently conceived audiences, but between two distinctive approaches by which a more inclusive audience might be engaged. In one, the museum is crafted as a place of entertainment, considered to be all the better for it being of a morally uplifting sort; in the other, the museum is conceived first and foremost as educative in its function. Indeed, these differing modes of address are widely identified as central to a considerable division among professionals in civic museums, and among trustees too. Within this configuration the supposedly inclusive notion of the museum as a place


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of entertainment is asserted against what is often characterized as the more elitist agenda of art historical education, wherein the museum takes on the authoritative voice of instruction.5 As a place of entertainment the museum selfconsciously offers itself up to new audiences, to people who would otherwise regard museums as either uninteresting or intimidating. A senior staff member in the thirteen-strong education department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the administrator of a six million dollar grant from the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Foundation for "outreach" activities, told me that the funding would be devoted to making the museum more accessible to a broader public; "visiting a museum," she explained, "should not be like going to the doctor, it should be fun." Consistent with this approach is the view that audiences should be given what they want, whether that takes the form of popular blockbuster shows or exhibitions that purport to show a community to itself through the exhibition of local work. By contrast, the more earnest project of education preserves the conventional grounds of legitimacy for modern museums, just as it preserves the authoritative status of the museum. But increasingly, and in response to precisely the same pressures that drive the more populist approach, education is presented in a manner that is meant not to remind the unschooled of their ignorance and unworthiness, as it so often has done in the past,6 but to equip new audiences with the means by which they might come to experience museums and the objects within them as "accessible." Despite the divergent character of these two strategies they have much in common; both conceptually and operationally. In the interests of securing a strong audience base, and employing the rhetoric of the "democratization" of these bastions of high culture and privilege, inclusivity is sought. To that end, museum visitors are at every turn encouraged by the provision of interpretive assistance, in the form of volunteer docents, audio tours, and explanatory textual panels. Art, in this attempt to overcome the alienation of potential audiences, is thus demystified, it is claimed, and thereby rendered politically less objectionable, since insofar as museums are understood to serve the interests of power they do so most powerfully through the mystifying opacity of their representations. This latter reading of course has its intellectual roots in critical theory. It has gained a good deal of momentum

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and popular legitimacy, however, under the trope of "transparency" currently fashionable in the discourse of management and politics. Under such a regime, true meaning, it is imagined, is rendered visible to all. Despite its demystificatory pretensions, then, transparency must surely be seen as a deeply obfuscatory trope itself. In the purportedly demystificatory procedures of art museums it is neither the political nor the symbolic economy that sustains art and its institutions that is laid bare; rather art is merely rendered accessible through a variety of techniques that afford audiences a means of apprehension. In this manner bafflement and alienation are held at bay,7 and a new audience and source of legitimation and revenue is fostered. It is this failure of art museums to render transparent art and the aesthetic that sustains it that Tony Bennett objects "now seems increasingly willful as notions of access and equity come to permeate all domains of culture and to legitimate public expenditure in such domains" (Bennett 1995: 10). But, as I will argue, the kind of transparency that Bennett calls for here opens up a fundamental contradiction with which art museums increasingly struggle. On the one hand, they are called upon to relieve art of its opacity and thereby make it accessible to a mass public. On the other hand, however, were they to genuinely seek to relieve art works and exhibitions of their esoteric character, museums of art would lose their grounds of legitimation, since it is precisely the exalted status of art that renders it worthy of collecting, conservation, and exhibition, whether as history, or as aesthetics. Moreover, I will argue, it is not only legitimacy that is at stake here, but the very possibility of aesthetic experience. This paper seeks to explore these issues through an examination of an institution that has, until now, refused to submit to these "democratizing" imperatives. The Menil Collection, open to the public since 1987, but still bearing the character of its formation in private hands, and run by a board of trustees that has been dominated by family members, has not felt compelled to attract a mass public, in part because it has not had to seek significant public funding. The absence of outreach initiatives on the part of the Menil Collection and its unwillingness to produce exhibitions in response to some real or imagined public interest is

often read to be indicative of an elitist disregard for "the public." While it is the case that the Menil Collection does not seek to gratify "popular" taste, for the late Dominque de Menil this refusal is not designed to serve the maintenance of high cultural distinction, rather, it is in the service of spiritual remediation. In so doing the Collection seeks to foster a public that is not passive in the face of the authority of high culture; it seeks an engaged interrogation between subjects and objects, albeit one that is achieved through the seductions of an elaborately crafted aura. In its commitment to a poetic rather than didactic experience of art the Menil Collection self-consciously seeks to foster uncanny traces of the unseen, offering up these realms in the form of "incantations."8 This is done in such a way as to invite, if not demand, an active engagement on the part of the viewer. Far from rendering art and its exhibition transparent, the management and presentation of artworks as distinctively auratic objects exemplifies both the regime of mediation between the visible and the invisible that has characterized the Menil Collection, and the character of the invisible realms within which it has sought to operate. More broadly, however, it draws attention to the thoroughly mediated character of aesthetic experience and to the peculiar character of the relationship between art museums and their publics. The account that follows, then, does not seek to persuade the reader of the virtue of the project of the Menil Collection, nor does it make any claims as to its success in achieving the kind of relationship between objects and subjects that I argue it aspires to. Rather, in the face of an overwhelming tendency for "transparency" to be rendered as self-evidently desirable, the Menil Collection is invoked here as a counter-model, and one that self-consciously takes a critical stance on the assumptions that centrally underpin what has come to be the orthodoxy of museum "democratization." In elucidating the critique that the Menil Collection mounts, I take up the idioms through which the Collection and its personnel articulate their commitments. The vocabulary of my discussion is, therefore, infused with the, at times extravagant language of the French Sacred Art movement, of secular humanism, and of modernist aesthetics. In taking up Dominique de Menil's critical engage-

Pamela Smart completed her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Rice University in 1997. She currently heads the Visual Culture Program at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

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ment with modernity, and more specifically with the processes of rationalization as they have become manifest in museums, I do not present it as a model for emulation. While her own project invites a critical scrutiny to which it is not exposed in this essay, here it has considerable heuristic value in so far as it resists overarching assumptions about the politics that define the relations that the museum establishes between objects and subjects, and between museums and their publics. In drawing attention to a radically different way of understanding the operation of aura and its political imperatives, the Menil Collection serves as a provocation to further scrutiny of what has come to be an unexamined orthodoxy. VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE

Bennett's (1995) characterization of the emergence of the modern museum allows us to look at museums as places in which both people were rendered visible as a public and objects were rendered publicly visible. But, as Bennett observes, while objects became visible with the opening of museums to the public, their character remained opaque. Museums, collections, and exhibitions, offer up objects framed by the terms of apprehension established by the contexts in which they are made available. These terms of apprehension render meaningful what may be viewed, mediating the relation between that which is visible and the invisible economies of meaning which underpin it. Krzysztof Pomian (1990) argues that all collections are involved in organizing an exchange between the fields of the visible and the invisible that they establish. Bennett characterizes it thus: The visible is significant not for its own sake but because it affords a glimpse of something beyond itself: the order of nature, say, in the case of eighteenth-century natural history collections. Looked at in this light, Pomian suggests, collections can be distinguished from one another in terms of the ways in which their classification and arrangement of artifacts, the settings in which they are placed, etc., serve both to refer to a realm of significance that is invisible and absent...and to mediate the visitor's or spectator's access to that realm by making it metonymically visible and present (Bennett 1995: 35).

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It is here in the crafting of relations between the visible and the invisible that much of the project of the Menil Collection is focused. The architectural space of the museum, exhibition installation, and curatorial regimes, expressions of what has come to be regarded as "the Menil aesthetic," together serve in the management of that which may be seen and the terms by which its underpinning logics might be revealed. Mediation of these dual spheres is central to every museum, though it is this that tends to be elided in the various calls for the democratization of art museums. The specific character of this mediation and the particular unseen worlds to which it invites a glimpse, however, distinguish the Menil Collection and are central to an analysis of its project. In the Foreword to the catalogue for Islands Beyond (1959), the first exhibition mounted by the de Menil funded art department at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas,9 Reverend Flahiff speaks of the invisible realms to which the show gives access: The significant word is "beyond," for the pieces have been selected with a view to manifesting the power of art to evoke what lies beyond the world of the senses....The work itself is more than a material thing. It is a veritable "incarnation" of a glimpse of reality that the artist has caught and that he has to express not in a logical statement but only in a work of art through a material medium like sound, lines, colors or masses. It is for this reason that the deepest joy attendant upon the experience of contact with a work of art i s not that of the sen ses or the emotions, but that of the intelligence as it grasps intuitively rather than rationally realities beyond the senses and reacts to their beauty.l0 For some, these realities float like distant islands on the horizon of another world: for others, they constitute but a single all-embracing realm: for all, they are, willy-nilly a part of the Reality beyond, in leading us to which, art has intrinsically an affinity with religion (Flahiff 1959: 5). In this description of the structuring principles of Islands Beyond, Flahiff gives a characterization that maps remarkably neatly onto the central project that drives Dominique de Menil's various engagements with art." This primary association with religion.

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rather than with history, also foregrounds a central divergence between the Menil Collection and civic museums. The specific terms of apprehension and the realms to which they give access are conjured not only through the objects exhibited and the design of any particular installation, but also through the architectural framing and the organizational practices of the museum. This artifice is particularly potent in the Menil Collection because of the notably seamless character of what has come to be known as "the Menil aesthetic."' This coherent signature is in part due to the Collection bearing the character of a singular vision, but it is sustained through an economy of extraordinary care. While it might be argued that all museums care for their objects and for the spaces in which they are displayed, the excessive character of this care in the Menil Collection and the seamlessness of the effect produced is distinctive. It is widely commented upon and highly valued by the artworld elite that travels routinely across the Atlantic and from throughout the US to attend its exhibitions,12 and the willingness of the Menil Collection to finance this economy of excess is regarded with considerable envy by museum professionals working in other institutions.11 It is exemplified throughout the museum's representations of itself; in its architecture, in the care that is expended not only on the artworks but also on the walls on which they are hung, in the installation of exhibitions, in the Collection's publications, media profile, and so on. ARCHITECTURE

Designed by Renzo Piano, the Menil Collection was conceived in response to Dominique de Menil's primary directive that the building should "'look small on the outside and be big on the inside." In contrast to the monumental structures characteristic of civic museums, she wanted the museum to sit comfortably in the residential neighborhood of small clapboard houses adjacent to the Rothko Chapel, the non-denominational chapel they commissioned in 1964.IJ The 400 ft. long, horizontal building is clad with wide-board swamp cypress15 in a white steel frame, its cladding stained the same soft gray of its surrounding wooden bungalows. At first glance the building is self-effacing: it is neutral in color, non-monumental in scale, and bears no signage or inscription to identify it. But rather than accommo-

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Fig.1. North Entrance Facade Left of entrance: Michael Heizer, Charmstone, 1991. The Menil Collection, Houston Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston.

Fig. 2 (below). Twentieth Century Galleries. From left to right: George Segal, Seated Woman, 1967; Yves Klein, Requiem, blue (RE 20), 1960; James Rosenquist, Promenade of Merce Cunningham, 1963; Jim Love, FLowers, 1965;Georges Braque, Grand Interieura la Palette, 1942. The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston. This images demonstrates the Menil Collection convention of hanging paintings lower than at other museums. Walter Hopps refers to it as "the MacAgy rule" evoking the person who the de Menil's have been importantly quided by in their installation of exhibitions. The tendencyinothermuseumstohanghigheristoaccomodate heavier traffic, so that people can see over other people's heads. The lower hanging at the Menil Collection is to create a greater feeling of intimacy with the work, allowing people to engage with the work "eye to eye."



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1 Fig. 3. The Menil Collection, Exterior View, East Facade. The Menil Collection, Houston Photo credt: Paul Hester, Houston. !

dating to its context, it is actually the centerpiece of a carefully curated environment that is as steady a rendering of the de Menil signature as the museum's interior. The Rothko Chapel and Newman's Broken Obelisk are on the next block, separated from the Menil Collection by treed lawns. Across the road is the Cy Twombly Gallery, designed by Piano exclusively for the permanent exhibition of Twombly's work.16 And at the end of that block is the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum, designed by Dominique de Menil's architect son, Francois, and opened in 1997. Just a block beyond that is the University of St. Thomas, which the de Menils hired Philip Johnson to design in the late 50s. But immediately around the land on which the museum is sited are several blocks of 1920s wooden bungalows of which those belonging to the de Menils have since 1970 been painted the same white-trimmed gray, all with interiors remodeled by Howard Barnstone. Bought up quietly by John and Dominique de Menil initially during their period of ambition for the University of St. Thomas,17 and with some vigor through the early 80s once the site was decided upon for the Menil Collection,18 some of these houses are used by the Menil Collection and others serve as the administrative base for the Menil Foundation, while many have been turned over to various arts organizations. Others are rented out, initially to participants in the arts community, though now drawing on a rather broader catchment. There is a sense in which the occupants are as carefully scrutinized and managed as are the buildings and grounds. So, as Richard Ingersoll observes, The context hasn't been saved but invented by reassembling existing buildings into a more coherent collection; some of the buildings that were on the site of the museum were redistributed to the surrounding lots like checkers on a newly set checker board (Ingersoll 1987: 43-44). Despite its refusal of the massive authority typical of monumental buildings, the Menil Collection is not entirely anti-monumental, as Ingersoll suggests: The profane aspects of the consumerist art experience have been removed and, consistent with the respect for spirituality, the building has been sited like a primitive temple in a temehos: it sits alone on its block, set off by a peripheral portico that rings

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it with a special filtered halo of light (Ingersoll 1987: 46). Light was the other key concern, both for Dominique de Menil and for Walter Hopps, the inaugural director of the Menil Collection, and subsequently a consulting curator. The problem was to come up with a means by which natural light could be used in the galleries without subjecting the artworks to lux levels that would harm them. This was complicated by Dominique de Menil's particular desire to have daylight in the building that would visibly change with the time and season and weather conditions. This preoccupation was surely informed by Rothko, who had battled so adamantly with Philip Johnson over just this issue in the design of the chapel. But also, the mode of handling natural lighting was central to the success of Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, a building that Dominique de Menil knew and liked very well. Certainly Piano's response to the problem of light has become the defining feature of the structure.19 Piano developed a system of baffles that would prevent direct sunlight from entering the interior spaces, but would reflect this light, in its changing conditions, into these spaces. These ferro-cement baffles, or leaves as they have come to be called, attached to ductile-iron trusses, together form the roof structure. The trusses also carry ducts for return air and these air ducts go some way too to removing the solar gain that is intensified by the ultra-violet proof glazing that covers the roof above the truss structure. This roof system forms a unifying platform for the building, pulling together the galleries, internal gardens, and the internal and external walkways. If the Menil Collection can be said to have a logo, it is the elegant cross-section of the leaves. The very dark stained pine floors accentuate the height of the 16 ft. ceilings, though they are informed by other imperatives. Wooden floors allow for internal walls to be moved with ease, since they can simply be anchored to the floor with screws. But more crucially, perhaps, the floors have been used to carry air into the building, through the use of intermittent sections of finely slatted boards through which treated air is pumped. What might appear as a trivial detail of design takes on some significance in the Menil Collection. Not only are walls rendered readily moveable because they are not made to carry ducts or any other service



technology, but their surfaces are thoroughly clean. This is of particular significance in a museum that hangs the very large works that are characteristic of the New York school painters—indeed it is an issue at all museums that show contemporary painting, much of which is made with the vast spaces of contemporary museum galleries in mind.20 But at the Menil Collection, close attention to the location of potential visual distractions like air ducts and thermostats takes on a particularly marked significance, since its exemplary attention to detail has come to be central in conjuring the aura that characterizes the Menil Collection. The seamlessness of its appearance is complemented by the quiet that prevails in the galleries, not so much because people feel compelled to be silent, but because Dominique de Menil went to considerable expense to ensure that the air conditioning would create no noise.21 A great deal of care was also expended on the walls themselves. Steve McConathy, the building manager, told me with notable satisfaction that the sheetrocked interior walls of the museum were "the truest walls in all of Houston."22 In its care with the walls upon which art works are to be hung, the Menil Collection demonstrates its commitment to the preeminence of the art object, ensuring that one's engagement with it is not compromised by extraneous utilities. But there is also a sense in which the walls themselves have value; exhibitions department staff routinely inspect them for marks and touch them up as necessary, guards are instructed not to lean against them, and a great deal of care is taken in their finish in preparation for the installation of exhibitions. They have value as part of the economy of care upon which "the Menil aesthetic" is sustained. The entrance to the building opens into a lobby, intersected by a long luminous central promenade. To the south of this axis are restricted access service areas, to the north, public galleries. In the interior layout Dominique de Menil was concerned to minimize the experience of fatigue that so often accompanies visits to museums. So instead of cavernous galleries opening one onto the next, that engulf and overwhelm, galleries can be entered one at a time off the central passageway. In this manner each of the four major galleries and a minor gallery are constructed as more or less discrete spaces that may be reached independently of each other. The large open spaces of the galleries are themselves subdivided,23 some temporarily in response to


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the requirements of specific installations, others more or less permanently, to create more modestly proportioned spaces for some of the semi-permanent installations.24 What was sought in this arrangement were intimate spaces for contemplation, in which individual works are not inevitably subordinated to the whole. In this spatial organization the Menil Collection does not replicate the conventional arrangement of art museums that represents art as the inexorable unfolding of history, an historical narrative that is inevitably recapitulated by one's progress through the galleries. Describing James Stirling's celebrated design for the addition of modern and contemporary art galleries to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Crimp observes just this tendency in Stirling's reiteration of the layout of the original picture galleries, even to the extent of continuing the sequential numbering of these galleries, such that they "open on to each other enfilade....The idea of art as an uninterrupted historical continuum that can be laid out in a suite of connected rooms is never for a moment interrupted" (Crimp 1993: 313). That audiences typically move through museums barely pausing before the exhibited objects reflects not only this conventional architectural organization of museum experience, Philip Fisher argues, but expresses the very character of these institutions: That we walk through a museum, walk past the art, recapitulates in our act the motion of art history itself, its restlessness, its forward motion, its power to link. Far from being a fact that shows the public's ignorance of what art is about, the rapid stroll through a museum is an act in deep harmony with the nature of art, that is, art history and the museum itself (not the individual object, which the museum itself has profoundly hidden in history) (Fisher 1991:9). Consistent with this, the space of museum galleries is reduced, Fisher argues, to a "path" as one follows the images around the wall, moving from one room to the next. "In so far as the museum becomes pure path, abandoning the dense spatial rooms of what were once homes, or, of course, the highly sophisticated space of the cathedral, it becomes a more perfect image of history, or rather of the single, linear motion of history preferred since Winckelmann" (Fisher 1991: 9).2