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12 Monologues Without Words: Museum Displays as Art Historical Narratives This essay had its beginnings in a paper written for a public forum on the visual arts which took place in January 1993, as part of the International Conference on Cultural Criticism. Such forums have become a welcome part of Hong Kong life, useful democratic public spaces for debate about a wide range of issues. Museums tend to present themselves as neutral containers for art. Paintings, particularly modern ones, are characteristically displayed against bare white walls. An even, regular spacing prevails, an isolation of objects from one another. In fact, however, the neutrality of the museum is always fictional. A gallery exhibit or display is always more than the sum of its parts - it is an argument about the works present (and absent). And it is an argument all the more powerful for being presented obliquely, disguised as an array of objects rather than revealed as a series of propositions. The museum so often presents itself as a non-space, rather than as the historically specific kind of site or frame for art it is. That much Western art of the 1970s and 1980s sought sites outside of the museum1 demonstrates that art had by that time become aware of the museum's power to contextualize the objects it contained, but art of a slightly earlier period of modernism was often quite happy with the museum environment. Modernist art like that which Frank Stella produced in the 1960s, for instance, seems designed without any specific site in mind, with a deliberate obliviousness to what is happening beyond its edges. The self-containment such modernist artworks willingly chose is imposed by the modern art museum onto all of the objects it displays. While some artworks Monologues Without Words: Museum Displays as Art Historical Narratives are eager to seek asylum in this no-space, others are unhappy inmates, severed from different - perhaps broader - contexts in which they could have a less purely aesthetic meaning. The modernist artworks of Frank Stella and the modern museum displays in which they fit so well can both be said to be embodiments of formalist critical theory, of which Clement Greenberg has been the key exponent.2 This influential mode of criticism, with its emphasis on the formal aspect of art considered in isolation from questions of meaning, can however be traced back at least as far as early 20th-century writers such as Clive Bell. When Bell wrote that 'to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space',3 he was describing a condition similar to that imposed upon the contemporary museum-goer, who is generally expected to encounter the artwork as a transparently available isolated object needing no context or interpretation. One could elucidate how formalist notions came to be embodied in museum displays by considering the work of Alfred H. Barr, a formalist historian of modern art who became the director of the first modern art museum, the influential Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. The display he adopted told a story of modern art's development as an immanent, formal process understandable in its own terms, having nothing fundamentally to do with broader social and intellectual history. This display, in its later incarnations, represented European modernist art as leading to American modernism - like Greenberg's critical writing,4 it helped perform a triumph of American painting while seeming merely to describe it.s That non-American art museums such as London's Tate Gallery should follow the basic outline of the MOMA display in the presentation of their own permanent collections only demonstrates the power that model had acquired, as well as the desperate need for some kind of organizing narrative for modernism.6 It would be possible to go further with this idea of the museum as the embodiment of a certain historically specific Western way of seeing. Donald Preziosi, for instance, has described7 analogies between the art museum's display and the notion of the mastering subject position found in pre-modern Western art employing an Albertian perspective scheme. If the museum is implicated, even as regards its very structure, in a certain way of seeing art no longer credited by either the newer wave of art historians or a great number of contemporary artists, one may wonder how useful it can be. Would it be possible to have a museum which...

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