Taking Up Space: Museum Exploration in the Twenty-First Century

by Tiffany Sutton

Museums have become a crucible for questions of the role that traditional art and art history should play in contemporary art. Friedrich Nietzsche argued in the nineteenth century that museums can be no more than mausoleums for effete (fine) art. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, curators dispelled such blanket pessimism by showing that what keeps historical art museums, both comprehensive and modern, "alive" and relevant in the modern art world are the things that curators do with the artworks in their collections. In certain cases, I will argue in this article, the focus on artworks and the relationship between them can be rewardingly shifted onto the spatial aspect of the museum. I will try to show what such a shift of focus entails, show that it involves a gestalt shift (in Wittgenstein's terms, the "dawning of an aspect"), and illustrate the limits within which this can arise. The foremost of these limiting factors is museum architecture, and I will discuss this to the extent that it determines the limits of what curators can do. How architects do things with museums, however, lies outside the scope of this article.