Page 59 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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to an art of the present day. The museum was a graveyard, the past associated
with death, all past art and monuments merely corpses. To cultural conserva-
tives, Marinetti had conceded a ritual in the form of annual visits to lay flowers
before the Mona Lisa, but Malevich suggests a new kind of exhibition: ‘In
burning a corpse we obtain one gramme of powder: accordingly thousands of
graveyards could be accumulated on a single chemist’s shelf. We can make a
concession to the conservatives by offering that they burn all past epochs, since
they are dead, and set up one pharmacy’ (cited in Groys 1994: 148). As the art
historian Boris Groys says, Malevich sees the destruction of the past and of the
museum as a kind of ‘conceptualist act’. Art, for Malevich, is not something
which can be preserved in museums, but produced through the processes of life
itself, and so the artworks preserved in museums are just corpses – the empty
husks of art (Groys 1994: 148–9). Nietzsche had described how the monuments
of past art (the masterpieces) could become a weapon used against present art
and action because of the overwhelming authority they gain as historical cult
objects. For Nietzsche ‘monumental history’ could, in the right hands, act as a
spur for life and for heroic action, but in the wrong hands (of the ‘inartistic’)
it could be used to slay art itself (1997: 70–2). Similarly, Malevich viewed the art
museums as a threat to both art and life, and especially to the bringing together
of art and life.
Groys argues that the Soviet avant-garde regarded the museum from within
terms set by the museum. He says that the distinction they drew between
the art of the past and the art of the future is drawn along art museum lines,
as differences in style and form. Ironically, the whole Soviet avant-gardist
approach to making art, with its emphasis on the tangibility and ‘thingness’
of the artwork was, according to Groys, only possible once art had been
isolated in the museums and torn from its representative and utilitarian role
in social life (1994: 146–9). Groys argues that ultimately it was the Soviet state
and the socialist realist art it sponsored (the arch-enemy of the modernist
avant-garde) which destroyed existing conceptions of art and museums, by
employing the museum as a didactic tool in the new totalitarian society.
When the new socialist museum reorganized the collections seized after the
Revolution, it gave all museum art a uniform significance: all was evidence of
a progressive ‘folk’ culture, everything an expression of a dream for socialism
and a critique of the class structure. In the 1930s, socialist realism made
art into a utilitarian practice, as a vehicle for ideology, and museum art
was indistinguishable from the visual propaganda saturating the society.
Nineteenth-century historicism was replaced with an ahistorical uniformity,
but overaccumulation continued, as the relationship between the museum and
the artists’ union resulted in a massive overproduction of artworks (Groys 1994:
155–61).