Is a Factory a Museum?

I read Hito Steyerl's essay "Is a Museum a Factory?" with great interest.¹ Not only because she quotes me and announces in the most affable—if nonetheless unmistakable—way her doubts about my remarks, but because she touches on subjects I have been thinking about for some time and that are relevant for a broader audience.

The basic argument of "Is a Museum a Factory?" could be summed up as follows: Now, because more and more factories are being converted into museums, it is about time to ask what these two seemingly diametrically opposed institutions have in common that makes it so easy to transition from one to the other. And if that is the case, what consequences does this transition have for (a) the concept of production in art and society, (b) the experience of space and time, (c) the relationship of the masses and the individual, and, finally—here I add my own point—(d) the formatting or programming of the human senses and body? All of this is focused on the question of the fate of the socially committed film and political cinema that once was shown in factories as well and now leads a hybrid and conflicted existence as installation art in museums, exhibitions, and galleries.

The areas of tension cannot be discussed in detail here, so let me just try and extend Hito Steyerl's essay to include a further thesis: At one time people did physical labor in factories and sought to relax with viewing pleasures and feasts for the eyes. Today, "to look is to labor"—whether at a monitor in the office, on a screen or at home, in the cinema, or at the museum. We experience leisure, if at all, playing sports, working in the garden, at the fitness studio, or in other activities and performances even more obsessively oriented around the body; that is, at leisure we are still subjects of the "societies of control" described by Gilles Deleuze and the body-oriented self-maximization that became famous in Michel Foucault's writing as the "care of the self" and "biopolitics."

The premises of such an argument are, on the one hand, closely linked and focused—political cinema, installation art—and, on the other hand, very far apart: they refer to our postindustrial societies of crisis and their atomized, fragmented subjectivities, experienced and affirmed only as participants in "multitudes."

Hito Steyerl puts her finger on a number of sore points and striking paradoxes. The fact is that several of the most-visited museums are either former factories or power stations, such as Tate Modern in London, or they look like factories, as in the case of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. To put it more generally: in recent decades, more and more factories, warehouses, turbine halls, gasometers, harbors, and large market halls have been converted into museums, exhibition spaces, or artists' studios.

If Tate Modern can be said to be the most famous case in Europe, there are countless other examples: the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, near Newcastle (a former grain mill), the Santralistanbul Museum of Contemporary Art in Istanbul (a former power station on the Bosporus), the theater and photography museums on Helsinki's harbor (in a former ship cable factory), or the Centre for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe (a former weapons and ammunitions factory). In her essay, Hito Steyerl alludes to Rem Koolhaas's newly designed Contemporary Art Museum in Riga, a coal-fired power plant that was already decommissioned during the Soviet area.

On the website of Rem Kohlhaas's firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture, this tendency to transform factories into museums is addressed directly: "It is an open secret that the presentation of art is not the only function of the contemporary Museum. The very success of the institution—a pivotal centre of contemporary society—has accrued additional interests and powers that require their own infrastructure, in addition, but independent from the viewing of art." The infrastructure demanded here includes not only the museum shop, a large cinema, performance spaces, and surrounding greenery but also "educational, media-related and production...