Some years ago, it must have been four or five, my friend Cutter Wood had an idea for the expanding MoMA in Manhattan. In doubling its building size, the museum had to demolish some of its neighboring buildings. One was an apartment building with an old Irish pub on the ground floor. Cutter’s idea then was to slice the side off the apartment building facing the museum, turning it into an exhibit of live New Yorkers. Forget about reality TV shows; this would be a reality exhibition show. Think MTV’s Real World without the careful editing–the “real world” in all of its dramatic mundanity.
There are plenty of people that have already criticized MoMA’s expansion: if you search the New York Times for “MoMA expansion,” you will find articles like “Where MoMA Has Lost Its Edge” and “Architecture Curator’s Challenge: Warm Up A Frosty MoMA Inc.” Leaving the particular criticism to the art critics, I want to here imagine, beginning with Cutter’s idea and with help from Mario Perniola, what a modern museum’s expansion could look like. Essentially, I want to consider how to turn a museum into an art installation.
The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic redefines modern architecture on the basis of a new way of feeling, what many would say is a lack of feeling. One example of this is Inorganic’s affinity, as I see it, for Cutter’s idea. Take for example this passage from the chapter “Plastic Landscapes”:
“The fundamental confirmation of the inorganic orientation of architectural experience…The rejection of functionalism, the critical revision of the fundamentals of architecture, the often indeterminate, porous aspect of interiors of buildings that lack any clear delimitation, the privileging of a public building topology destined for transit, performances, cultural tourism, the dissolution of housing units, attention to spaces of transit rather than residences, are similar aspects of a tendency oriented toward the abandonment of any organic character”(86).
The deconstruction and assimilation of an old apartment building into a massive modern museum seems an exemplary project for demonstrating the above aspects of modern architecture. Slicing off one or more sides of the apartment building would enact a becoming-porous. And would there be a better way of confusing a museum’s limits than incorporating alien bodies like a common-place apartment complex? The museum would dissolve not-so-much the housing units as their organic sanctity, opening them up to public spaces of transit. To be sure, this would be an extreme experiment in cultural tourism!
More than simply a fanciful idea, the connection between Perniola’s Inorganic and Cutter’s idea jumped out at me towards the end of the book, when Inorganic describes what it considers to be one of the most “radical examples of inclusive metaliterature”(125). This is in keeping with Perniola’s aim of cutting the sanctity of life into an infinity of pieces, turning life into things. At the same time, Perniola faults Perec for de-sexualizing his book; for Perniola, sexuality essentially belongs to the kingdom of thins rather than either the spiritual or vital dimension that both Perniola and Perec displace. Perniola suggests that the lack of sexuality with Perec’s Life (“life” is in italics!) is due to a lack of a philosophical perspective that could impregnate the book’s thinking with an “emotional rapidity capable of unleashing a neutral and abstract excitement”(126). Taking a cue from another Perniola chapter, “Philosophical Cybersex,” this philosophical perspective, I think, consists in creating a virtual reality that would be less voyeuristic (and hence more sexual) than Perec’s novel.
Instead of an outsider looking into the apartment building from the street, IoMA would have to displace voyeurism by turning museum visitors into performers rather than observers. This would involve additions to Cutter’s basic idea.
For starters, as I alluded to above, it would be important for the apartment building and museum to merge. The museum would engulf the apartment units from the sides and maybe even above, making it a dysfunctional and somewhat unsightly appendage. What would be important is for the museum to abut the residential units on at least two sides, allowing transit between the two buildings to vary from seamlessness to absurdity. A few floors of the apartments could be remodeled to be a simple extension of the museum space; on other floors, the apartment building could remain essentially intact.
For the Real World exhibit, on those intact levels, the apartment would keep most of the standard amenities of any other New York apartment building. The biggest difference would be the dissolution of the walls in favor of a glass surface. This glass barrier could be a sometimes one-way mirror, other times transparent window. Thus the “real person” living inside the museum apartment would be capable of watching the museum-goers, even if only as brief distractions from their daily routine. This would complicate the atmosphere of the exhibit, undermining the immutable god perspective of a complacent and gawking visitor. There would be potential for extreme misunderstandings: imagine, as the real-world person, you check your teeth in the mirror of your glass wall for a bit of stuck food; on the museum side of the glass, exhibit-goers lurch back at the brisk appearance of you approaching the mirror and then barring your teeth. Not only would the motion be unsettling in itself, the exhibit-goers would not be sure whether it was a one-way mirror or transparent window, whether you meant it as a joke or were irritated by something stuck in your teeth. Probably both.
Essential to the exhibit would be a continual shifting of the museum-goer/real-world person relationship. This would frustrate participants’ reflexive wish to fix the exhibit into one thing, thus making the participants realize that they, we, are the things. Perniola says of installations, they “are a kind of happening represented by things rather than people…Installations must not be considered the object of a visitor’s evaluation…It is the installation that feels the visitor, welcomes him, touches him, feels him up…One does not go to exhibitions to see and enjoy art, but to be seen and enjoyed by art”(107). Between Perniola and Cutter, the Museum of Modern Art would become the Installation of Modern Art.
With the proper framing of the Real World Exhibit, visitors would be likely to experience awkward feelings of ambivalence. One such framing would disseminate the atmosphere of petty surveillance to everyone involved in the exhibit. Imagine cameras on the interior of the glass barrier, photographing people’s reactions, the IoMA store selling prints of the most memorable and forgettable, the New Yorker running one snapshot in their caption contest. Those willing to watch the “real people” would be required to become “real people” themselves, entering their faces and clothing into the public record as well. With attention passing through both sides of the glass, there would be an element of instability of feeling that would ensure that all involved would become a thing.
The exhibit would unsettle at least one political debate, that of privacy. As a card-carrying member of the ACLU, I appreciate the worthiness of defending privacy. Such an exhibit would, first, showcase surveillance technologies: it is one thing to know that many institutions record your presence, but to do it with an extreme of fidelity and clarity coupled with the ability and willingness to publicly disseminate the material, that is something altogether different. In addition to those who will have their fifteen minutes of fame, there would be embarrassed people who feel humiliated and violated, people upset who would not have expected it. In all of this is almost a moral: we should not oppose the government’s domestic spying program on the basis of an already non-existent right to privacy. We should oppose the government’s spying because the government is, among many other things, a violent organization with a taste for scapegoats and witch hunts. American citizens, like myself, will not stop the government from using its surveillance resources; we can only, ourselves, surveil the government itself. A less attractive subject than relatively impotent and anonymous people.
Exhibit-goers, I hope, would, in realizing the extent and pettiness of their surveilling drive, would divide their attention elsewhere. You, the neighbor whose eyes and ears perk up at anything out of the ordinary, or, God forbid, something indecent, do us all a favor and train your eyes, ears…your feeling on something much more indecent and dangerous, a police state. But perhaps, we are expecting too much from the Real World exhibit; it would just be another trip to the museum, right? For now, we can wonder if a museum, even the MoMA, might experiment with a Real World exhibit.
Tags: Architecture, Inorganic, MoMA, Perniola, Philosophy, Sex Appeal, sexuality
