This Art Is Your Art, This Art Is My Art ~ at America's Museum

Sunday, 01 July 2007 20:21

"WELCOME to the Smithsonian — America’s museum !” Lawrence M. Small, the Smithsonian’s recently ousted top executive, wrote in a peppy preface to the latest edition of the institution’s official guidebook. “Our goal,” he declared, “is nothing less” than to “set the standard of museumgoing excellence for the world.”

Whatever his criteria for excellence, Mr. Small, whose title was secretary, hightailed it out of the Smithsonian this spring after being faulted for squandering its money on personal expenses and for moonlighting on corporate boards. On June 19 the Smithsonian Board of Regents (seconded two days later by a scathing report from an independent panel) rebuked itself for having given Mr. Small and his deputy the green light every step of the way.

Few people familiar with the Smithsonian in Washington and its various underperforming, weirdly performing and, in some cases, barely existent art and culture museums were much surprised by any of this. The institution has been deteriorating for a while, which has come to seem like part of its musty machinery. One reason is selfish: As taxpayers we are footing the bill. The nut budget that keeps the Smithsonian’s museums up and running comes from federal tax dollars. Museum admission may be free, but we pay every time we walk in the door and even if we never walk in.

Mr. Small was right about the Smithsonian being America’s museum. It is and has been since 1836, when the government accepted a gift from James Smithson, a British scientist who wanted to found “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge” for a young nation. (Smithson, who never set foot in America, is buried near the Smithsonian Castle.)

That national identity is the real reason to care about what shape the Smithsonian is in. Through its museums of African and Asian art, it defines our view of the larger world. Through its museums of American, African-American and American Indian art and cultures, it presents our view of ourselves. The Smithsonian is a national self-portrait, one we sit for every day.

It is by no means, however, unitary. Each museum has its own director, staff, specialty and style. Some of the museums have risen above the troubles of recent years. Others have succumbed to them. Still others have wandered off in their own direction. Here follows a highly opinionated snapshot survey of what these art and culture museums (the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York is not included) look like as the Smithsonian enters, or doesn’t enter — we’ll see — a reform phase in its long and instructive, for better and worse, life.

FREER GALLERY OF ART AND THE ARTHUR M. SACKLER GALLERY : The best first: Let’s begin with the joined-at-the-hip Freer and Sackler galleries, which together form the national museum of Asian art. Of all the Smithsonian museums the Freer started out with the greatest advantage: a stupendous collection. It was assembled by Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919), a self-made entrepreneur who made a fortune in railroads, retired in his 40s and spent the rest of his days shopping for art. At first he went for the new. He became a friend and patron of James McNeill Whistler — his rococo Peacock Room is a Freer Gallery centerpiece — and brought a villa in Capri where he mingled with artists and writers from the United States and Europe.

By then, though, he had also made his first trip to Asia. And his timing was heaven-kissed. In colonial India, where the British were bringing ancient treasures to light, he walked off with carved panels from the stupa at Bharhut and stunning Chola bronzes. Japan, in a Westernizing frenzy, was tossing out art left and right, and Freer made a haul. He also bought Chinese art from Japanese collections, then went to China for more: bronzes, ceramics and painted scrolls, all of which he gave to the Smithsonian, along with money for the Freer building on the Mall.

The Sackler, with its own collection, opened next to the Freer in 1987, but architecturally it’s unhappy. Most of it lies underground in descending levels of dim, narrow galleries in an all but unnavigable space. So a bad design, but the only thing that Freer could complain about.

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN : Like the Freer, the Hirshhorn, our national museum of contemporary art, originated as a private collection. And like the Sackler, it is saddled with an ungainly building. It resembles a drum on a stool, with snaky galleries and escalators like those at Macy’s. The Sculpture Garden is no garden. It’s an unshaded pit: an oven in summer and a killer of sculpture year round.

The Hirshhorn manages to transcend all this with shrewdly chosen and mounted shows. Recently a gray-walled survey of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs tapped into the building’s Sputnik modernism. Robert Gober looked good here a few years back; the constricted space suited his art of repression and release. A current show of work by Wolfgang Tillmans fares less well: In a museum that has a problem with intimacy, his studiously casual style stiffens up. You can’t be Smithsonian and subversive. You can’t be avant-garde and on the Mall.

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY AND THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM (DONALD W. REYNOLDS CENTER) : But I have seen subversive shows at the Smithsonian: the American Art Museum. I think particularly of “Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory” in 1999, which mixed Winslow Homer, 19th-century genre art, second-string Modernism and material culture in setting out to show the complicated politics and consumerist impulses that underlie aspects of our national history.

The American Art Museum organized several shows in this vein, subtle and bold, and took a lot of heat for them. Now that critical approach is out of fashion, and there’s little evidence of it at the museum, which reopened last summer after having closed for extended renovations.

Its collection now overlaps and is interwoven with that of the National Portrait Gallery, resident in the same building. There’s a logic to this. It’s all American. The American Art Museum has some terrific likenesses and the Portrait Gallery has some fabulous paintings; check out John Singleton Copley’s dishy self-portrait. But the merger as executed is a jumbled mess, with the American Art Museum the loser.

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN : Overstuffed seems to be the Smithsonian style du jour. It’s the one that prevails at the National Museum of the American Indian, the latest Smithsonian addition to the Mall. For decades the core collection was displayed in dusty quarters in Upper Manhattan, a holdover from an earlier age of ethnology, its vitrines filled with some of the most beautiful objects in the world.

In 1994, now under the auspices of the Smithsonian, it relocated to the Custom House in Lower Manhattan and became a different thing. The anthropologists departed; the new museum was designed largely by American Indian artists, scientists, historians and tribal elders. Only a fraction of the collection was on view, augmented by a battery of technological bells and whistles — voice-overs, touch screens — and evocations of an Indian spirituality. In short, what some people had understood to be an art museum had become a cultural center. Identity, not aesthetics, was the focus; agency was the dynamic. The museum does itself no favors when it closely skirts theme-parkism, the feel-good, anti-intellectual take on culture that has long been the American way. The National Museum of the American Indian’s break with mainstream museology delivered a healthy shock a decade ago. Now it feels stale.

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN ART : The American Indian museum’s exhibitions don’t feel nearly as stale, however, as what’s been presented at the National Museum of African Art in recent years. True, the museum came with disadvantages: no significant collection and a twin of the subterranean premises occupied by the Sackler. But rather than be inventive with its limitations, it has generally gone the conservative route, renting tightly packaged traveling shows or mounting bland ones of its own, like a current exhibition, “African Vision: The Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection,” which gives little sense of the objects’ complicated histories in Africa or in the West.

This is maddening to behold, given that African art history is one of the most exciting fields going. For fertile cross-cultural thinking about what art is and does, it tends to leave other disciplines in the dust. But the news seems not to have reached this museum. In a city with a majority African-American population, where a museum of African art might be a cultural driving force, it has been asleep at the wheel, and to some of us a symbol of the Smithsonian’s demoralized state.

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE : Finally, there is the case of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, at present a homeless institution, with an unsettled future and a puzzling past. The Smithsonian Board of Regents favored establishing the museum in the existing Arts and Industries Building next to the Castle, but Congress repeatedly rejected the idea.

Eventually Congress assigned a piece of Mall real estate for a National Museum of African-American History and Culture. Why did this take so long? More useful to ask how long it will take the building to materialize. Nothing can happen without more private money, and during Mr. Small’s tenure, private giving declined.

And so America’s museum wanders on. What to do? Needless to say, there are no easy answers; maybe no right answers period. More money from the government to the Smithsonian, and from the Smithsonian to its art museums would be a start. Even more useful would be some organized way to generate private donations. With some extra cash, the Hirshhorn could buy more art and the American Art Museum could buy better art, and get back to doing the kind of think-piece shows it does well. These shows will never be blockbusters. So what? James Smithson’s gift wasn’t for blockbusters. It was for information, knowledge.

But whatever changes are made to the Smithsonian under a new regime, enforced uniformity should not be one. Yes, the museums make for a motley architectural array. Yes, some of the museology is a little off the wall, some of the standards and goals questionable. Yes, diversity is a complicated matter: ethnic diversity is good; ethical diversity is a problem. But diversity is the name of the American game, the color of the American portrait. We question it, we chafe at it, but we continue to live it. Bless us at least for that.

.....by Holland Cotter