The museum holds a mirror to itself
Concept of the exhibition at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art
MúzeumCafé 25.
The Ludwig Museum opened its first permanent exhibition 20 years ago, at the time under the auspices of the Hungarian National Gallery. It was Peter and Irene Ludwig who donated or placed the starting collection on long-term deposit. The exhibition Site Inspection was conceived by the museum curators – Barnabás Bencsik, Nikolett Erőss, Kati Simon, Krisztina Szipőcs, Hedvig Turai and myself – thinking together. The greatest challenge for us concerned the issue of simultaneously representing two essential aspects – that of art and that of the museum – especially when the museum with its exhibition space and institutional existence cannot escape from its own circumstances. Yet a contemporary art museum inevitably faces art criticism which questions its very existence, role and significance. Therefore, besides addressing such views one of our starting points was historical – the fact that since the first half of the 20th century artists have continually criticised museums as institutions. One of the first and most important museum critics was Marcel Duchamp whose La Boîte-en-Valise (Box in a Suitcase) (Series C, 1958) is a treasured possession of Mumok. It has been loaned to us only after long negotiations. Duchamp’s box-museum questions the role of museums: the display arranged from the small-size reproductions of his own works not only makes the original artwork unnecessary but also the museum environment that exhibits and holds it. Works that Duchamp’s box obviously inspired include Ivan Moudov’s Fragments – box#5, 2002-2011. The young Bulgarian artist compiled his box from insignificant pieces of great artworks stolen from exhibitions in different museums of the world. This almost criminal attitude features in several works, for example Tamás Szentjóby smuggled his gift for Pope John Paul II into the Vatican Museum (MOTO CROCE, 1987), so that security guards would remove him from the building.Institution-critiquing art not only addresses a narrow professional circle, “the art world’. Artistic (and non-artistic) attacks on museums are often also directed against societies which establish and fund these institutions. Hence the exhibition puts special emphasis on Hungarian and international Neo-avantgarde art. The documentation of a demonstration outside MoMA, New York, by Henry Flynt is the opening work of the exhibition. Endre Tót’s museum guide compiled from his “far away pictures”, Night Visit to the National Gallery, 1972, Károly Halász’s Whatnot Museum (1972-1975) displaying his favourite art objects preserved in jam jars similarly to Gyula Pauer’s “file-museum” were created as a result of what Neo-avantgarde artists in Hungary of the 1970s may have felt for the art they regarded as valid but which could not be exhibited in museums and public galleries. As for compiling the exhibition, it can also be regarded as a gesture of self-criticism that it includes the Portable Intelligence Boosting Museum created by NETRAF (Neo-Socialist. Realist. International Parallel Union of Telecommunication’s Global Counter-Arthistory-Falsifiers Front) in 2003 to showcase the inadequacies in processing, interpreting and collecting Hungarian art. At the same time the Ludwig Museum’s own collection has also provided an opportunity for self-examination: the action-documentation of Judit Kele’s I am a Work of Art (1979) purchased this year, Sean Snyder’s video Exhibition (2008) and the large-scale installation The Collector of Art by Nedko Solakov offered a good opportunity to re-think our own collection strategy – if for nothing else but for the fact that the most valuable pieces of the collection can be seen in the hut of the black chieftain-cum-art collector who is compiling white art. Solakov showed European/Western art in the milieu of ‘black people’. In the video The Body of Nefertiti (2003) by Little Warsaw, now being shown fully for the first time, the artists fit the several thousand year old bust to a body they created, thus questioning the possibility of contemporary discourse with art objects held in museums. The success or failure of museums depends on several factors: for example the museum building is decisive not only as an architectural phenomenon. The current research project of the Space Detournement Working Group examines the environmental effect of this particular type of building. A museum’s name can be an important marketing factor – see Attila Menesi’s projection of the Ludwig Museum’s façade lettering. Mark Dion’s cabinet recalls the Wunderkammer, the historical antecedent of museums, a model which aimed to display the whole created world as well as human creations. Museums gave up this attempt at totality a long time ago, but the aspects highlighted at the exhibition indicate that museums continue to be complex models of the societies funding them, thus criticism directed against museums is extremely diverse. The Neo-avantgarde artists who wanted to remain outside the institutional art world and contemporaries who, on the other hand, take this institutional world’s operation for granted present opportunities which we hope serve as a lesson not only for museums.