Off the wall
A storage depot, a former bourse, a museum of tiny exhibits on the moon: Around the world, art is breaking free of the white cube gallery. As museums and galleries compete with virtual worlds, the online world and Netflix, they are reaching out. Asking, how can we make this an inviting two-way street?
Aspace for art can be many things, once the white cube is broken down: A tiny art gallery on the moon; an artists’ residency at the foot of Mount Everest; an all-access warehouse museum in the Netherlands. The effort must be to surprise, inspire awe, offer a one-of-a-kind experience, says museologist Vinod Daniel. After all, today’s art and heritage spaces are also competing with the digital world, the online scroll, amusement parks and Netflix.
“Dubai’s Museum of the Future offers a sense of make-believe and future possibilities, which appeals to a demographic that museums miss out on: the young. It’s a massive blockbuster show,” says Prateek Raja, founder of the Experimenter art gallery in Kolkata. “We’re at that point where public accessibility is also the objective.”
It’s interesting to think that museums themselves were a revolutionary pivot towards democratisation, when they first opened. Until the inauguration of the Louvre in Paris in 1793, for instance, the most magnificent collections of art and artefacts were private, belonging to the Church, royalty and aristocracy.
Now, in Paris, things are coming full circle, with a 250-year-old former bourse building being used to house the massive collection of a single man, the French billionaire François Pinault. He’s opening it up to the public too. And that’s just the least surprising way in which museums and art spaces are changing.
There is now a gallery on the International Space Station, a prototype for one on the moon by 2025; an artists’ residency and exhibition space near Nepal’s Everest Base Camp; and Rotterdam’s Boijmans Van Beuningen reopened as a depot / museum in November, where visitors can access its entire collection of over 1.51 lakh pieces.
Even in India, things are changing in surprising ways. A new museum in Kerala lets visitors “talk” to a late chief minister’s hologram; last year, Experimenter took an exhibit on the Sundarbans to the Sundarbans, where it still stands.
“It’s all a question of how spaces are responding to the present climate,” says art critic and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote. “In terms of technology and in terms of a much more diverse public than ever.”
We’ve been here before
Among the catalysing factors driving the change, two stand out: evolving technology, and the pandemic.
“No serious museum at any time after, let’s say, the end of World War 2, has taken its audience for granted,” Hoskote says. “That is when complex, turbulent shifts of world view, generational attitude, and collection practice came into play. Today these shifts seem exaggerated in magnitude because of the huge technological shifts we’re experiencing and the general precarity of life.”
After the shutdowns of the pandemic, spaces are asking, how can we engage individuals with varying levels of cultural capital, Hoskote says. How can we make our collections seem more available?
This kind of move also has precedent. It caused ripples when London’s Victoria and Albert museum first opened its restaurants and souvenir stores, inviting people to sit, chat and buy things. Henry Cole, founding director of the V&A, got the idea for a museum restaurant (tea and a bun or a hot meal) while managing the Great Exhibition in 1851. The museum opened in 1852; its refreshment room in 1856.
“As the Industrial Revolution, with its world’s expos, showcased new technologies, arts and crafts, it opened up the idea of the museum as exhibition, as something everyone regardless of differences in social standing or class could engage with,” says architect and artist Rajeev Thakker, former curator of Studio X Mumbai, a space for experimental art, design and research.
There are risks, Hoskote warns. “The whole point of the museum is to function as a forum where you think through, with greater depth and intensity, major questions of identity, belonging, inclusiveness. You don’t necessarily need the museum to amuse people with light-weight displays of technological novelty.”
The role of galleries and museums is to invite the viewer in, but also challenge them. It’s the question of how you use technology, Daniel agrees. And the way to use it best is to first get the message right.
Who is it for?
The early 21st century saw diversity play a pivotal role in the shifts of museum practice at the time.
In Europe, there was a strong awareness of the large immigrant populations and questions raised about how to make a collection of Baroque paintings relevant to people of Turkish or Ukrainian origin.
The question: Who is it for, immediately alters how one views an exhibit, says Raja of Experimenter. In 2021, Experimenter hosted a project on the Marichjhapi massacre of 1979, the forcible eviction of Bengali lowercaste refugees from this island in the Sundarbans and the deaths of thousands.
After asking, ‘Who was it for’, the gallery moved the project to Kumirmari, an island across from Marichjhapi, as a series of enlarged images. The outdoor exhibition will stand until it falls apart or is destroyed by one of the region’s too-frequent cyclones. Art is also about what discussions it brings about, Raja says.
TAKE A TOUR: FOUR MUSEUMS STEPPING INTO THE FUTURE TODAY An art depot thrown open
It was a storage crisis that prompted the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam to hit reset. Its five storage spaces spread across the Netherlands and Belgium were old, even flooding and leaking at times. If they were going to build a dedicated depot space, the museum decided, why not also find a way to throw it open to the public?
In November 2021 the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen opened next door, its entire collection of 1.51 lakh art works on display within its new storage vaults.
While museum depots have been opened to the public in the past, Depot Boijmans is the world’s first art institute to make its entire collection accessible to visitors. This includes works by the Spanish surrealist master Salvador Dali and British-mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington.
Most works are mounted on movable frames, just as they would be in storage. Guided tours allow visitors, wearing special dust coats, to enter compartments for limited periods. To protect the works, a 90-minute gap is maintained between groups, to allow the climate to re-stabilise.
Because the art works are organised by size and climate zone (rather than genre, era or artist), visitors must necessarily browse, discover new names, make new connections.
Art and the museum need to be sites for dialogue, says Yoeri Meessen, head of education at the depot. “The public depot enables the Boijmans museum to be more participatory and transparent. The purpose is to democratise the cultural institution.”
As for the museum, it is set to reopen in 2029 and function as it always has. “This will be an exciting new dynamic,” says press officer Jeroen van der Hilst. “In one building will be precise and insightful exhibitions; in the other, visitors can see all the goings-on behind the scenes.”
At a former bourse
In a museum that is a clear reflection of its times, a former commodities exchange near the Louvre in Paris has been repurposed to house a massive collection of 10,000 works, all belonging to a single French billionaire.
François Pinault, founder of the luxury group Kering and the investment company Artémis, has leased the neo-classical heritage structure built as a grain exchange in 1763 and turned into a commodities exchange in 1889.
It was reopened in May 2021, as Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, following a three-year restoration.
The building will house a collection that ranges from a Picasso and a Piet Mondrian to works by 400 contemporary artists, including Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.
To continue the conversation between old and new, the museum’s restaurant, La Halle aux Grains, is centered on grains, beans and cereals. The museum is open to the public six days a week, at €14 (about Rs 1,100) per head.
A ticket to the moon
What might art look like in an inter-planetary future? The Moon Gallery aims to explore that question. The plan is to install it on the Moon by 2025, as mankind’s first permanent extraterrestrial exhibition.
A prototype, also called the Moon Gallery, is currently housed at the International Space Station. It will orbit Earth until December, when it will return here. It consists of 64 tiny art works and one engraved AR work, each no larger than 1 cubic cm (1 cm x 1 cm x 1 cm). The eventual gallery will hold 100 such artworks, installed on a segmented metal tray, riveted to the exterior of a lunar lander.
A seed, a shell, ideas of home… each of the works in the prototype represents how perceptions change once an idea leaves its home planet. American artist Minna Philips’s work, Memory, is a tiny cement cube with a hole cut into it in the shape of a cone, evocative of a piddock’s shell. It’s an absence that still speaks of presence, long after the piddock is gone.
The Seed is simply a preserved seed that had begun to sprout. On Earth, this is unremarkable; but as the first seed sprouting on the moon, it would seem almost a miracle.
The Moon Gallery is an initiative of the non-profit cultural organisation Moon Gallery Foundation.
What could it do for how art itself is viewed?
The white cube has become so synonymous with the idea of a gallery that even when one discusses a gallery on the moon, “people think we are literally somehow building a structure with paintings to hang on its walls,” says Elizaveta Glukhova, co-curator of the gallery and co-founder of
the Foundation. “Placing art in an alien environment will allow us to rediscover things about art and creativity.”
The fact that it’s also “almost silly… actually sending exhibits to the moon, makes it a very nice entry point to the conversation,” says Moon Gallery communications manager Lejla Sarcevic. “To me the democratisation of art is people thinking about the gallery as absurd, but fun and neat, but also then moving on to think about what’s in it. And suddenly people who weren’t really thinking about art at all, are thinking about it from a different perspective.”
A new mission at Everest
The Denali Schmidt art space sits at 3,775 metres, about 30 km from Nepal’s Everest Base Camp. As the snows around it melt amid the climate crisis, it makes a statement on sustainability.
The space is offering artists from around the world a chance to visit and work , and turn some of the tonnes of waste left behind by climbers each season into art. The first artist on site, Lukas Zeilinger from Germany, arrived this April and created an installation inspired by the Tibetan prayer flags strung up in the mountains.
Starting May 13, American painter Emma Fern Curtis of the Denali Foundation (set up in memory of the mountaineer Denali Schmidt who died while attempting K2) will spend five weeks here, conducting art workshops with locals.
The residency space sits adjacent to the Sagarmatha Next Centre of upcycled art. Both are part of a larger project led by the non-profit organisation Himalayan Museum and Sustainable Park, with the residency also supported by Denali Foundation. “Our mission is to create a sustainable waste-free zone in the Khumbu / Everest Region in the high mountains of Nepal,” says project director Tommy Gustafsson.
“Right from the start we want to establish that this gallery is for everyone; for the people living in this high-altitude region, for visitors, and for the artists that we hope to bring in from different communities, countries and cultures.”