RICHARD KOSHALEK AND ERICA CLARK
The world today is entering a new creative agenda. Social power, long tied to government and business, is rapidly shifting to embrace input from provocative new voices in other quarters, especially artists and creative practitioners. Individually and together, these are becoming the true change agents whose original, deeply thought solutions to the most complex challenges facing society—education, communications, democracy, sustainability—are driving innovation in the broadest arenas, and will do so to an ever greater degree in the coming decades.
Since contemporary art is increasingly shaped by the issues of our time, any contemporary museum that hopes to remain vital and sustainable must also respond to and promote this new social equation. This response can take many forms, but ultimately it must serve to transform the traditionally passive, presentation-based museum environment into a dynamic forum that convenes and supports creative thought, action, and output on many fronts. Regardless of its location, a contemporary museum must become a profoundly relevant cultural resource that gives diverse audiences the tools to engage with the work at hand—and to actively communicate with and become participants in the development of the institution.
More than ever, the vibrant contemporary museum must embrace artists and creative practitioners as the lifeblood and essential tool givers in this newly charged environment. With their unique capacity to operate (literally and figuratively) beyond the walls of the institution, artists are capable of reaching new audiences—and interacting with the broadest spectrum of disciplines—in content-rich ways that transcend the superficial marketing approaches used by more conventional institutions. The appropriate use of technologies further expands these audiences while also bolstering the artists’ larger presence and influence.
To fulfill this expanded mission, the contemporary museum must, above all, take both clues and cues from its particular locale and context. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which occupies a unique position in many respects, makes a powerful case for site-specific relevance: as the contemporary arm of the Smithsonian consortium of nineteen museums, and hence, part of an institution dedicated to lifelong learning; as a museum in the very center of the nation’s capital and in proximity to nearly two hundred embassies and five hundred think tanks; and as an institution sited directly on the National Mall, one of the world’s symbolic touchstones for democracy and freedom of expression. Individually and together, these factors inherently demand that the Hirshhorn function as a creative forum capable of embracing and broadcasting a range of perspectives on art and society in our time—as nothing less, in other words, than “the nation’s museum of contemporary art and issues,” with equal emphasis on each.
Virtually every initiative and program at the Hirshhorn now reflects this expansive outlook, from its emphasis on multidisciplinary curatorial research to greatly broadened options for the permanent collection, exhibitions, communications, and institutional collaborations. Of special significance as well is a new approach to “curating” all of the museum’s public spaces—the lobbies and interior and exterior plazas, heretofore lifeless—as vital environments supporting a range of artistic and education-oriented programs. In early 2012, for example, using video and state-of-the-art digital technologies, the multimedia artist Doug Aitken created a new commissioned work, Song 1, a film projected on the entire 220-foot exterior circumference of the museum’s circular building. Embodying a unique response to the architecture at hand as well as a poetic vision of social alienation and connection, the film drew rapt audiences and became a true urban event throughout its evening showings over the course of three months. Visible across the National Mall, Song 1 animated the usually deserted spaces that surround the Hirshhorn at night, transforming them into a singular new environment for “mass contemplation” of art by an enchanted public. Similarly, the museum’s bookstore, formerly an awkward commercial structure wedged into the entrance lobby, has been relocated as part of a powerful site-specific, word-based installation by the artist Barbara Kruger: an ideal union of a social vision, creativity, and education, and an immensely successful revitalization of a previously “dead” lower-lobby space. Most dramatic of all will be the forthcoming transformation of the museum’s central atrium via a radically innovative architectural structure by the renowned firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro: an inflatable, fifteen-story, dome-topped “bubble” that fills the atrium every spring or fall, and that serves as a perennial “anti-auditorium” facilitating first-person and digital dialogues, performances, and interventions by internationally known artists, thinkers, and students in many fields.
None of these initiatives would function similarly—or at all—at another museum. Only the Hirshhorn’s setting and context could provide the necessary cues for these particular transformations. Other museums must identify their own site-specific opportunities, and from these, fashion ways to connect with the broader world that both preserve their institutions’ unique qualities and extend their relevance. Technology will inevitably play an ever-broader programmatic role in this process, with museums of all kinds confronting its myriad effects on art making and cultural spaces from many vantage points. A forthcoming Hirshhorn exhibition, for instance, will explore the astonishing proliferation of animation throughout the entire visual landscape, from cellphone screens to urban spaces. The Hirshhorn’s presentation of this vast subject will be quite different, however, from one that could be organized by a Los Angeles museum, in the heart of the film industry.
The critical thing, as ever, is balance. Despite the allure of new media and new types of institutional events and presentations, a contemporary museum must never abandon its fundamental artistic commitment—in the Hirshhorn’s case, to painting and sculpture. There are always artists advancing these mediums, always something new. In a world changing at warp speed, we will simply see greater complexity in the work produced—and hence, greater complexity in terms of its role and place in the overall museum context. Most excitingly, the dialogue between artists (in all media) and audiences will become ever richer. Thanks to the energetic play among disciplines already evident today, one can even begin to imagine that in the not-terribly-distant future, art making and the creative professions will not be perceived as exotic or marginalized, but rather as “normal” modes of existence.
This, then, is the ultimate role and responsibility that a contemporary museum can fill: to present a vision of life lived with greater imagination by bringing the public into contact with artists and creative practitioners in settings that the museum is uniquely able to provide. This involves varying degrees of risk, depending on how far afield the individual institution is willing to venture in terms of engaging other disciplines, cultures, and regions, but this bold approach is increasingly the sine qua non of a contemporary museum’s artistic prosperity and well-being into the future. Just as artists have the passionate curiosity and ceaseless desire for new ideas, museums must follow suit. When this happens, museums will be part of a new leadership equation in the world—a new order in which creative institutions and practitioners, along with traditional political and corporate leaders, make the major decisions that shape our society, and especially the urban environments in which most people will soon live. Entirely new types of artists will also emerge from all of this ferment and collaboration. As ever, these artists will be opportunity seekers who transform the world around us. More than anyone, they will serve as the ultimate reminder—to museums especially—that while the future may be unknowable, it is not unthinkable.
After this essay was written, the Smithsonian decided not to move forward with implementing the fifteen-story Diller Scofidio + Renfro dome-topped “bubble” described here.