Real Detroit Weekly

September 2000

 

Art for the Moment

By: Natalie Haddad

 

What makes a museum a museum?  It sounds like a basic question.  Size is an obvious consideration; the average gallery is far smaller than the vast museum.  Content, as well, is a reasonable giveaway.  While galleries comment on the present, museums often resonate the past.  And, of course, the availability of the art for public purchase is always a sign.

            While the latter of the three examples is practically the definitive line between the gallery and the museum, fine art, itself, is an exercise in blurring boundaries.  So who’s to say that a museum needs a space?  Who’s to say that it needs the past?  A contemporary museum stakes its claims on the future.  Indeed, if art knows no future, the people coming into a museum don't have to be artists, but they could certainly understand the work on display - because it is about today, about the visitor's moment in space. 

            "Contemporary art can’t be contextualized because it’s of the moment,” Jef Bourgeau, founding director of the Museum of New Art (MONA) likes to say.

            An artist, himself, Bourgeau’s own work brought him to galleries around the country.  However, when the practical difficulties of transporting and selling his video art outweighed the benefits, he turned his attentions back home.  “I was showing all over, but I thought, I live in Michigan.  Everybody always talks about leaving here, but there’s an untapped art world here and audience.”

            Per his audience, Bourgeau feels that in recent decades the key players in any art exhibit – audience and artist – have been superseded by a behind the scenes, often disconnected, group of decision makers.  As a result, he’s chosen the concept of documentation to inaugurate the museum.  "The idea came from Germany," he explains. "Every year they have a big show that examines art in the world.  The show uses all of the materials from before and after an exhibit.  Submitted slides, postcards, interviews.  Who’s to say what gets accepted to the show and what doesn’t?  We wanted the audience to be involved.” 

           Thus the show, Documenta USA, billed as “the largest art exposition in the world,” is a massive analysis of the puzzle pieces that make an exhibition.  Slides and pictures are displayed with no discrimination, as the audience is invited to, in effect, make their own show.  As an extension of MoNA’s viewer-friendly attitude, no piece is untouchable or, certainly, unapproachable and every 100 minutes pieces are changed, taking the phrase “of the moment” to a whole new level.  The show also includes a video component, Fifteen, that features artists talking about their work, as well as a mural from the New York based Head Clausnitzer and The Burnt Show from California based Sacha Eckes.  Still, the museum hasn’t traded big names for new names.  Among the exhibited works are pieces of Arman, Jenny Holzer, Sol Lewitt, Christo and sorely underrated Fluxus queen Yoko Ono, along with many others.

            The Museum of New Art knows no boundaries rules than shouldn’t its habitat follow?  While not to the extreme, this revised concept of the museum is what Jef Bourgeau might have imagined over the past few years as he’s led his Museum of New Art (MoNA) along a path that’s encountered various Pontiac locations, a few obstacles and, finally, a comfortable spot in the heart of downtown Detroit.  The incentive behind MoNA, however, comes from a more urgent source: the city’s burgeoning art community.  With Detroit’s physical and cultural reconstruction comes a renewed fervor for local art.  Nevertheless, the artists and the aficionados continue to reside in predominantly separate camps and even within the “artist community,” camaraderie and, hence, considers the contemporary museum to be the missing link.  “In other cities, contemporary museums tie the art community together and the general public is hungry for such an explosive alternative to going to the movies.”

            As the museum prepares for its grand reopening in the Book Building on Washington Boulevard, it seems like a natural addition to the city’s impending revival.  Like anything new, though, it wasn’t without a fight.  “It started as an artist’s project.  I was only supposed to be involved for a few months and then I would hand it over,” Bourgeau explained.  “But nobody else took it.”  Thus, for five years the project existed, for lack of a Detroit location, within the quietly functioning gallery scene of Pontiac.  “We were told that Detroit is not sophisticated enough for contemporary art,” he said of his search for a downtown location.  “Pontiac showed us that people have an interest."

            If contemporary art is “of the moment,” it looks like it’s getting to be the moment for Detroit.