Stuart Hall, 'Museums of Modern Art and the End of History'
In: Annotations 6: Stuart Hall and Sarat Maharaj: Modernity and Difference. Edited by Sarah Campbell and Gilane Tawadros. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2001, pp. 8-23.
I have no authority to address this occasion either as an art critic or as a historian - a lack which I find curiously liberating in this distinguished company. I am very involved in some areas of the practice of visual arts in Britain at the moment, as I have the honour to chair the Boards of both the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) and Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers. I therefore know something about the area of contemporary artistic practice which I regard as one of the liveliest, most vigorous and most creative sectors of the contemporary arts anywhere. It might therefore be useful to say something from this non-specialist point of view about what I would call the cultural 'conditions of existence' for the exhibition and production of contemporary art.
I put 'exhibition', out of sequence, first because the question of the museum is foregrounded in the conference title; and I use the expression 'cultural conditions of existence' in the specific sense that all important practices, art practices included, always have prior conditions of existence. 'Conditions of existence' are different from the notion of a determining force, in the strong sense of determinacy. Conditions do not determine either the form or the content or, indeed, the tendency and direction of a practice, but nevertheless without conditions of existence, a practice could not exist. A practice is always a labour - a 'work' - on pre-existing materials and traces. Conditions therefore have a bearing on how those practices are actually executed in the world. Those who in a professional capacity are specifically related to judging, assessing and exhibiting the results of a practice come high in the pecking order and those who are actually producing the work come highest of all - though they are not always accorded the status and rewards they deserve - which leaves me as a lowly handmaiden in this operation. But I want to pick out certain aspects of these conditions of existence for contemporary art and, in a simple way, relate them to the themes and questions signalled in the title.
Rather than 'Museums of Modern Art and the End of History', I am tempted to suggest that the title of this conference should be 'The End of Museums of Modern Art and the Beginning of History'. We could learn a great deal simply by reversing all the terms. What I want to talk about is exactly the sort of 'ending' signalled by that kind of reversal. Of course, it would be too easy to think that simply turning all the terms of a dominant paradigm upside down will help us to understand what is going on. In that sense, I am not interested in endings; instead, I am going to talk about 'turns'. The idea of museums in general, but also museums of modern art, is in trouble as a result of certain deep historical shifts or 'turns': transformations of theory and consciousness, but also shifts in the actual cultural landscape itself.
This 'crisis', if we may call it that, is the cumulative effects of a rather dispersed set of developments - what I refer to as a series of turns - which constitute the end of certain ideas of the museum, of the modernity of modern art and, indeed, of history. That notion of a turn is important for me. A turn is neither an ending nor a reversal; the process continues in the direction in which it was travelling before, but with a critical break, a deflection. After the turn, all of the terms of a paradigm are not destroyed; instead, the deflection shifts the paradigm in a direction which is different from that which one might have presupposed from the previous moment. It is not an ending, but a break, and the notion of breaks - of ruptures and of turns - begins to provide us with certain broad handles with which to grasp the current crisis of modernity, and thus of the museums of the modern.
This is clearly related to the much abused notion of the 'post', which has already been referred to, so I must spend a moment dogmatically reiterating what 'post' means to me. I do not use the term to mean 'after' in a sequential or chronological sense, as though one phase or epoch or set of practices has ended and an absolutely new one is beginning. Post, for me, always refers to the aftermath or the after-flow of a particular configuration. The impetus which constituted one particular historical or aesthetic moment disintegrates in the form in which we know it. Many of those impulses are resumed or reconvened in a new terrain or context, eroding some of the boundaries which made our occupation of an earlier moment seem relatively clear, well bounded and easy to inhabit, and opening in their place new gaps, new interstices.
Let us look at three examples. The post-colonial is not the ending of colonialism but is what happens after the end of the national independence movement. All those contradictions and problems which constituted the dependency of colonial societies are reconvened, partly now within the old colonised societies, but also inside the metropolis, which was previously regarded as standing outside of this process. Similarly, post-structuralism spends all its time and energies saying how it is an advance on structuralism, and yet the first thing to recognise is that, without structuralism, post-structuralism could not exist. It continues in its bloodstream, but in a disseminated or deconstructed form, which allows the original structuralist impulse, transformed, to take on new directions. I think the term 'post-modern' is exactly the same.
I do not want to evoke any of the enormous rubbish that has been talked about under the title of 'post-modernism', but instead want to focus on the kernel of significance in the term once it has been stripped of some of its many accretions. It seems to me that 'the modern' has ceased to be an ever-increasing present form or state of existence and is becoming a moment in history. When that happens, our understanding shifts from an awareness of the ground on which a practice stands to seeing where it came from, how it evolved and this enables us to ask the question: 'What might come after it, 'post' it?'
There has always been something contradictory about the relationship between modernity and history, which is bound to problematise the notion of art history itself. Art history has given the museum its principles of organisation, providing the practices of curating, exhibiting, collecting and classification with a scholarly ground. The historicisation, therefore, of what was previously perceived as an entirely new historical moment inevitably leads to a sense of operating in a gap between a past which is not quite over and a future which has not yet started (and may never happen in the totalised form in which we imagine it). Writing the history of a phenomenon or of a movement or of an epoch does, in a very complex way, suggest that one can trace its genealogy - what its evolution has been, define the principle forces which will drive it forward and ask the question of whether it has a conclusion. But this historicising tendency is seen as contradictory in the context of modernity, since modernity was precisely a fundamental rupture with 'the past' in that sense. It was a break into contingency and, by contingency, I do not mean complete absence of pattern, but a break from the established continuities and connections which made artistic practice intelligible in a historical review. It focused as much on the blankness of the spaces between things as on the things itself and on the excessive refusal of continuities. It was always caught between the attempt, on the one hand, to turn the sign back to a kind of direct engagement with material reality and, on the other, to set the sign free of history in a proliferating utopia of pure forms. Writing histories of modernity is not impossible, but I think they have always been extremely difficult to suture back into the more confident historical organisation of the history of Western art, which extends roughly from the Renaissance until the modern itself. I think we have reached the death of that idea of the modern, the logic of whose architecture, T.J.B. Clark (Farewell to an Idea. Episodes from a History of Modernism, 1999) argues, we can no longer intuitively grasp.
I want to talk instead about the turn from modernism, but using 'turn' in the sense I have already established. Let me return to that version of post-modernism, which cites modernism as if the entire modern movement can be condensed forwards to the point of its elaboration under the aegis of American art and architecture - the 'American' moment. The notion of modernism which reads as if it came to its apotheosis only at its very end seems to me to misunderstand, misread and grossly oversimplify the radical, aesthetic, social and cultural impulses which made modernism the dynamic movement that it was. American cultural critics have a great deal to answer for by trying to subsume the many modernisms under the aegis of what we might call the age of the American empire.
It seems that something significant has to be taken on board about the persistence of the impulse of modernity itself within post-modernism. I cite three examples. The first is what I would call modernism in the streets. I think post-modernism is best described as precisely that; it is the end of modernism in the museum and the penetration of the modernist ruptures into everyday life, which is closely related to my second example, the aestheticisation of daily life. This might puzzle people in this room who think of contemporary life as the very antithesis of the aesthetic, but personally I think the symbolic has never had such a wide significance as it does in contemporary life. In earlier theories, the symbolic was corralled into a narrow terrain, but it has now entirely imploded in terms of late-modern experience and we find the languages of the aesthetic as appropriate within popular culture or public television, as they are within the most recherché rooms of the Museum of Modern Art. There are aesthetic practices distributed by a massive cultural industry on a global scale and the aesthetic is, indeed, the bearer of some of the most powerful impulses in modern culture as a whole, including what we used to think of as its antithesis - the 'new economy' which is, par excellence, a cultural economy. This notion of a modernism that is to be found inscribed on the face of everyday life, in everyday fashion, in popular culture and in the popular media, in consumer culture and the visual revolution, does obviously jeopardise the whole concept of gathering together the best of all this in one place and calling it 'a museum'.
Alongside all of this is my third example, the proliferation of media or, in other words, the means of signification. I read recently that it is completely ridiculous to define modern contemporary visual art practices in terms of the media in which they are executed; instead, we must consider the proliferation of sites and places in which the modern artistic impulse is taking place, in which it is encountered and seen. This is not just a reservation about the white cube gallery space. This is an explosion of the boundaries - the symbolic as well as physical and material limits - within which the notion of art and aesthetic practices have been organised. Young intellectuals - barely able to spell intellectual, let alone call themselves that - who are working somewhere within the cultural industries, with visual languages, are as deeply and profoundly implicated in the breaking point of modern artistic practices as the most fully paid-up members of the most academic, scholarly schools of art. That they came in through the back door and went out into industry is not important. What is relevant, however, is the proliferation of these practices and the degree to which this proliferation sits most uncomfortably with the prestige attached to the process which attempts to sift, on some universal criteria of historical value, the best that is being produced and gets it displayed inside some well-patrolled set of walls. Modernism in the streets, the aestheticisation of everyday life and the proliferation of sites and means of signification are some ways of re-reading post-modernism, or the post-modern 'turn', as the aftermath of modernism.
Post-modernism is not a new movement that kicked modernism into touch, but, instead, by building on and breaking from modernism, it transformed it by taking it out into the world. Similarly, we might talk about the post-museum - not in the sense of the necessary end of all museums, but in terms of the radical transformation of the museum as a concept. I would call it the relativisation of the museum, which can now be perceived as only one site among many in the circulation of aesthetic practices. It is certainly true that the museum remains a very privileged, well-funded site, which is still closely tied to the accumulation of cultural capital, of power and prestige, but in terms of the real understanding of how artistic practices proliferate in our society, it is only one site and no longer enjoys the privileged position that it had historically.
Now I want to look at what one might call 'post-history'. In exactly the same way that I have been talking about the post-modern, post-history is not the end of history. In fact, some of the most important critical and theoretical developments have arisen from the greater historicisation of aesthetic practices, which we have tended to talk of as if they were universal. The historicising function has not therefore gone away; but History, with a capital 'H', which is now increasingly understood as one grand narrative among many narratives, has managed to situate itself, or substitute itself, in the place of the Universal. The history around which the practices of the arts have organised and ordered themselves is the lifeblood of the museum's self-understanding and opens connections which I find so delicate and impossible to understand that I only cite them. There is an almost impossibly refined and elaborated exchange between history and value, which you might think are antithetical terms - after all, if something was important in a particular period, it is highly unlikely that it will be important in all other periods - and yet value reaches for a universal horizon from within a deeper and more profound sense of historical understanding.
In what sense then, do we have a post-history? Firstly we should be aware that histories are narratives and that accordingly we have histories rather than a singular history. These narratives are a discursive imposition of beginnings, middles and, indeed, endings on to histories which do not naturally produce themselves in this convenient form. Therefore, we are not talking about the history of art, but about how we have chosen to narrate the identity of the histories of art to ourselves; the notion of narrative has interrupted and deflected the purity of the historical impulse.
There has been a similar deflection from what I would call history to culture - the 'cultural turn'. If you think of the historical as having always provided the context within which art historians and critics sought to embed particular practices and texts, then I think we have seen an increase in the use of the notion of cultural context, which of course has historical overtones. At the same time, it seems that there has been an important shift from being interested simply in the historical context of a text or an artist or a practice to embracing its cultural conditions of existence. This destroys or subverts the traditional work and its context approach, which has underwritten art historical understanding for so long. It has to do with what one might call the spatialisation of time, which is a prominent feature or phenomenon of a contemporary sensibility.
In terms of post-histories, it is the cogency and compulsiveness of evolutionary explanations which have been broken down, that is to say explanations which trace continuities and look at traditions as unbroken, as unfolding webs of influence, trailing from one moment to another. We have been alerted, not to the absence of traditions (plural), but to the inhabitation of traditions - particularly for where they break and for where they turn back on or away from themselves and on to something else. Tradition must be understood as a discursive field. There is always something of the present at stake in how it is inhabited. We are more aware of constituting the discursive ground on which histories have to be constructed as the difficult ground which enables us to connect this to that or this particular text to that particular work. Talking about the history of a practice, of an artist, of a body of work or of a text, as it is read and re-read from one moment to another, simply does not support that organic evolutionary conception of the historical or indeed of tradition, genre or convention - the staples of the museum's self-understanding. I am not suggesting that this approach has not had profound pay-offs for art history and for critical understanding, but I am talking about it more as a space which the modern sensibility can no longer inhabit with confidence in the old way. It can no longer rest there in the knowledge of having found a scholarly and evaluative foundational ground from which to organise and classify the objects of a particular collection.
The next 'post' that I wanted to talk about is what I want to call post-culture. You will say there is nothing post about culture; it is the ever-present, ever-evolving signifier of our times. Everybody is interested in it, the prime minister most of all; whenever you offer him an institution which seems resilient to reform, he says we need a 'culture change'. So culture is the ground on which everybody is somehow now said to be operating. But what is entailed in this conception of culture? We can no longer inhabit a notion of culture in the old anthropological sense, as something which is clearly bounded, internally self-sufficient and relatively homogenous across its members, which sustains and regulates individual conduct within the framework that it offers. Cultures, in that anthropological sense of specifically defined ways of life, have been broken into and interrupted by cosmopolitan dispersals, by migration and displacement. I think that the collapse of that anthropological definition - culture as a way of life - has to do with the point at which the West began to universalise itself. It is connected with the attempt to construct the world as a single place, with the world market, with globalisation and with that moment when Western Europe tried to convert the rest of the world into a province of its own forms of life. From that moment onwards - the moment of modernity - we could no longer think in terms of cultures which are integral, organic, whole, which are well bounded spatially, which support us and which write the scripts of our lives from start to finish. The ending of this moment of Euro-centric closure and its panoptic project has been a long and protracted one, but it has been increasingly prized open.
The movement from an anthropological to a signifying conception of culture does not mean that cultures become less important. Instead, we are now talking more than ever before about the domain, the importance and the proliferation of meanings by which people live their lives, understand and contest where they are and develop aesthetic and artistic forms of expression. What has disappeared is the ability to carve those forms of expressions into strictly classificatory boxes, so that the primitive and the ancient fit like two rooms inside the modern, with the modern itself boxed inside the ancient. The modern has been inside the primitive and the ancient since 1492 roughly speaking, so what is this 'new' discovery that all of a sudden there are more than one set of modernities? They have been proliferating ever since the world began, only ever tentatively, unevenly, contradictorily, to be convened under the rubric of Western time. This does not mean that we are merely moving everywhere towards a cloning of the West. Instead, those sharp distinctions which underpin our classification - that fixed notion of primordial cultural difference - between tradition and modernity simply do not explain any longer the way in which individuals and their practices are both embedded in certain cultural languages or repertoires and at the same time reach across any frontiers which they construct to those which lie beyond - the phenomenon of vernacular cosmopolitanism which is globalisation's accompanying shadow. This is nothing other than the shift from the notion of difference as an either/or concept to Derrida's notion of differance, in which you cannot make an absolute distinction between a here and a there, inside and outside.
The history of the relationship between the West and its others is a history of the transformations which have changed both out there and here. It is true that these changes are more dramatic under the conditions of modern globalisation, in which, undeniably, a lot of out there is actually in here now and vice versa. They are in here, trying to become like you, but also making you different, more like them in their differance.
The idea that we live in a well-bounded, well-policed, well-frontiered set of spaces, in which you can move from this room to that, tracing how that became this and how the practices governed by a particular culture evolved to become something different, simply misses the degree to which cultures can no longer be clearly categorised. With the modern and even the post-modern condition, the process of cultural translation means that cultural languages are not closed; they are constantly transformed from both within and outside, continuously learning from other languages and traditions, drawing them in and producing something which is irreducible to either of the cultural elements which constituted it in the first place. The most dramatic example of how the notion of cultural translation is the only way in which the cultural process today can be properly grasped is found in the history of modernism itself. The latter has been written precisely as if modernism was a set of triumphal artistic practices, located in what you might think of as the West. However, a small number of deracinated artists out there were drawn to this pole of attraction and did relate to it, but of course, in the dominant way the history is read, they cannot be considered to have contributed in any central way to the history and evolution of modernist art practices. In reality, the world is absolutely littered by modernities and by practising artists, who never regarded modernism as the secure possession of the West, but perceived it as a language which was both open to them but which they would have to transform. The history therefore should now be rewritten as a set of cultural translations rather than as a universal movement which can be located securely within a culture, within a history, within a space, within a chronology and within a set of political and cultural relations.
The final 'post' I would like to talk about has to do with the question of the post-West. In the light of what I said earlier, we are aware that modern museums of art and other kinds of museums now function in the context of a widening and expanding process of globalisation, which is often seen from within the West as a kind of inevitable homogenisation; it is as if unfortunately everybody in the world is determined, predetermined, to end up looking like 'us'. In that sense, the process is sometimes referred to as the 'end of history', but I do not believe it is. If you think about contemporary forms of globalisation - which are of course driven by Western technology, by Western capital on a global scale and by the flows of international finance which has the capacity to undermine societies far removed from ours by the proliferation of the cultural industry - then I quite understand that a dynamic exists, which is grounded and rooted in the development and over-development of the West. However, I think that its actual impact on the rest of the world has not been simply to homogenise it, but also to expose it to differentiation. The impulse of 'difference' operating in and across the world is, to me, as powerful and as unintended a consequence of capitalist globalisation and modernity as the impulse towards the McDonaldsisation of the world. I do not believe any law of history exists which will guarantee that the one must prevail over the other, although I recognise the grim unevenness and contradictoriness of what we may call the 'global balance of social forces'.
If we look at the way in which contemporary art practices locate themselves within an awareness of the slow decentring of the West, we see the constitution of lateral relations in which the West is an absolutely pivotal, powerful, hegemonic force, but is no longer the only force within which creative energies, cultural flows and new ideas can be concerted. The world is moving outwards and can no longer be structured in terms of the centre/periphery relation. It has to be defined in terms of a set of interesting centres, which are both different from and related to one another. Inhabiting this uneven language of a more common planetary or cosmopolitan consciousness - and I know that this process of globalisation is one which has enormous inequalities built into it - is a deeply and profoundly unequal process. This does not necessarily mean that the game is already so wrapped up that we can designate it with the term 'the end of history'. Any museum which thinks it can incorporate or grasp the best texts and productions of modern artistic practice, believing the world is still organised in a centre/periphery model, simply does not understand the contradictory tensions which are in play. On the one hand are all those lines of force which continue to draw energy, resources, exhibitions and circulation to a very narrow metropolitan centre and, on the other, is the disseminating force of what is happening laterally. On the edge of our consciousness, we are aware that some of the most 'modern' artists are practising in the most 'underdeveloped' places. The account of what matters in the artistic world, from the point of view of the declining, diminishing cultural authority of the West, is expanding in its potential to gobble up everything and yet this is not happening.
If you think about where important movements are being made, sometimes they happen in the centre, but the most exciting artists are those who live simultaneously in the centre and at the periphery. In terms of the conditions of consciousness within which these people start to make artistic practices, they inhabit a world which is torn, on the one hand, by the centralising force of Western modernity, with all the goodies it entails, and, on the other, by the dissemination and proliferation of notions of what it would be like to be vernacular and modern. We are embarking on a hundred different ideas of 'the modern', not one, and therefore, of a thousand practising modern artists, who require recognition within the terms of the criteria that we have stitched into our museum space. Is that the end of the museum? I do not believe it is.
Museums have to understand their collections and their practices as what I can only call 'temporary stabilisations'. What they are - and they must be specific things or they have no interest - is as much defined by what they are not. Their identities are determined by their constitutive outside; they are defined by what they lack and by their other. The relation to the other no longer operates as a dialogue of paternalistic apologetic disposition. It has to be aware that it is a narrative, a selection, whose purpose is not just to disturb the viewer but to itself be disturbed by what it can not be, by its necessary exclusions. It must make its own disturbance evident so that the viewer is not entrapped into the universalised logic of thinking whereby because something has been there for a long period of time and is well funded, it must be 'true' and of value in some aesthetic sense. Its purpose is to destabilise its own stabilities. Of course, it has to risk saying, 'This is what I think is worth seeing and preserving', but it has to turn its criteria of selectivity inside out so that the viewer becomes aware of both the frame and what is framed.
The viewer should be able to read a particular narrative in the context of other narratives and understand that its identity is always positional. The museum of modern art has a history, a space, a funding, a tradition; it speaks a language but knows that it is no longer the only language in the world. This is a difficult exercise because museums, in spite of what we would like to think, are deeply enmeshed in systems of power and privilege. They are locked into the narrowest circulation of art in its diminishing terms and are consequently locked into mindsets which have been institutionalised in those circuits. The process of breaking free is likely to be a long and nasty business. But it can not be long before museums of modern art come to look more and more like what the architect Cedric Price in the recent show at inIVA described as 'cultural centres', characterised by 'calculated uncertainty and conscious incompleteness'.
This keynote address was given at the 'Museums of Modern Art and the End of History' conference at the Tate Gallery, London, May 1999