Artbound episode MOCA: Beyond The Museum Walls explores the programming of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, investigating new programming and curatorial methods that are redefining what it means to be a 21st century museum. This documentary features the The Underground Museum, Wolvesmouth, and Public Fiction. Watch the episodes debut Tuesday, May 31 at 9 p.m., or check for rebroadcasts here.How do you define a museum in the 21st century?
We approached Helen Molesworth, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, with this complex question. Founded in 1979, technology and social movements have greatly influenced the institutions relationship to art. And in a recent interview for our upcoming Artbound episode, Molesworth details one recent collaboration and two exhibitions that break the traditional mold: A partnership with the Underground Museum, established in 2015, has brought MOCAs dormant archives to life in the community of Arlington Heights; chef and artist Craig Thornton transforms the dining experience into performance art with exhibition Wolvesmouth: Taxa; and creative Lauren Mackler, a kind of human museum, reconfigures creative space by setting up Public Fiction wherever she may be.
For Molesworth, museums today arent just repositories of art, they are generators of culture as well.
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How we you define a museum in the 21st century?
This is a vexing, infuriating, and completely enthralling question, simultaneously. Historically, our modus operandi has been you go out, you conquer, you pillage, you return with more booty. More loot. Thats what museums are filled with. Loot from other peoples cultures, to be put on display, to have some sort of ennobling idea about who we are as human beings, what is human civilization. Its offered to us for posterity, so we know about the past and were leaving a mark for the future.
I love that idea. I love the time machine quality of the museum. I love the extraordinary history of what humans have made. But were really different now than we were even 40, 50 years ago. We carry the world in our pocket, in our iPhone. We fly where we want to. We Skype with people across the globe. Those geographical boundaries and those boundaries of time have really eroded in extraordinary ways. I feel like the 21st century museum has to in some way be tenacious and hold on to what is right and good about the previous idea of a museum, but also expand and let go of some of its older ideas.
One of the things that art has always done is ask you... The best art always asks you, How do you want to live your life? What matters to you? As we move into the 21st century, we have to reimagine what matters to us. For me, the Underground Museum and Wolvesmouth are ways of pushing at the bricks and mortar boundary of a museum, to start seeing if we can think non-hierarchically about what matters. It used to be painting, opera, like these were these big things, and then cookings over here, but we dont really believe that anymore. How do you make a playing field that shows the public and that enacts that you dont believe that anymore. That you believe something else is happening.
Helen Molesworth, MOCA chief curator. | Image: Still from Artbound episode MOCA: Beyond The Museum Walls.
I think what were trying to do is stay close to the people who are experimenting. Stay close to the people who are at the edge of their field, and trust that even if theyre way past the edge of our bricks and mortar museum, that if we just stick close to the artists who are pushing, that we will somehow end up in the right place. Even if we dont know what that place is going to be, or what the implications of that are going to be for us.
Part of what were trying to do actually, is make a museum thats ready for the next generation. Thats part of the game. The museum isnt necessarily for us now. I think in order to really be the artists museum, you have to be on the one hand, totally present in this moment now, and on the other hand you have to understand this moment now is just this moment now. Whatever we do, were trying to remain as nimble as possible, because we understand that the acceleration of change is the newest development. Change is, as the poet Charles Olson once said, the only thing that doesnt change is the will to change. Change is happening. What were trying to deal with is the acceleration.
Kahlil Joseph, m.A.A.d video projection installation view. | Image: Still from Artbound episode MOCA: Beyond The Museum Walls.
Why did you choose to lend Noah Davis and the Underground Museum MOCA's permanent collection?
Most of every museums collection is in storage. As a contemporary person, that actually sometimes feels just really bad, that we acquire a work of art and what we do is actually send it to purgatory. We send it to storage. What Noah was offering was a way out of purgatory. He was offering a way for artworks to have a totally new life, at the Underground. That just felt really exciting.
MOCA has long had this history of calling itself the artists museum. Ive always been really fascinated by what that might mean. For me, what it started to mean in relationship to Noah and the Underground was that if youre the artists museum, what your job is is on the one hand, to introduce artists to a general public, but its also to make things possible for artists that they cant do without you. Thats what it means. It means to take all of the authority and all of the capacity that the museum has as a cultural institution, and instead of hold all of that wealth internal to yourself, you actually give that power and authority and wealth to the artist. Thats what working on the exhibitions with Noah felt like to me. Like the museum was this great big engine and we hooked it up to Noahs dream, to aid and abet Noahs dream.
Image: Still from A
