I’ve been thinking about the museum as a site for possible (cross)cultural didacticism: a reinscription of the spectaclized social order that still manages to drive itself beyond the seemingly clear hegemonic strictures it reproduces and codifies—a tenderly productive idea thoughtfully presented in the first essay we read for this course: “Escape From Amnesia: The Museum as Mass Medium,” by Andreas Huyssen. This “driving beyond,” (not his words) as Huyssen presents it, has the possibility of being performed by curator, artist and spectator. Given this, I found a case par excellence upon viewing Erwin Wurm’s work “One Minute Sculptures” as displayed in the Berlinische Galerie. The work asks the viewer for direct involvement with the objects presented: one has to put their own body directly into the situation of the work by making a prescribed “sculpture” with the books, chairs, refrigerators, and other common objects. I was immediately pleased with my own embarrassment and hesitancy to place my self within the “performance” of the works having gone to the gallery by myself. So, instead, I relegated my viewing to look at others who were sharing their interactions with the art through looking at each other and taking photographs of themselves doing as such: people sharing the wearing of a large sweater, placing their legs awkwardly through a chair, laying on an arrangement of tennis balls, sticking their heads into both sides of a small doghouse, standing within a folded lawn chair, and so forth.
This sense of being forced, or rather, permitted, to directly negotiate the bodily is continued in Wurm’s “Narrow House,” a “faithful reconstruction of his parents’ home in every detail, except that the artist has compressed it into a depth of just over a meter” (from the gallery’s web site). While the copy explaining the house lettered on the wall in the museum refers to this narrowing as symbolizing the strictures of provincial life, the main difficulty in viewing the work is found within the difficult negotiation between everybody trying to view the work. How can we all move through the space to allow for a full glimpse? (I can’t imagine what it’ll be like during high tourist season.) Hence the happy, if subtly disquieting embarrassment I found in these works: as embodied viewers, we must constantly question how we are engaging with the material at hand. We are not just bodies to be pleased. It was a wonderful reminder to take account of what it is to look at things and engage with them as others, without and within.