Challenging Authority, Part I: God Hates Renoir
- Rebecca Sykes
- Nov 16, 2015
- 2 min read
Recently, you might have seen some amusing pictures like this one in news headlines:
The photo shows a protest by the @renoir_sucks_at_painting movement outside the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The movement began as a social media page satirizing the late paintings of renowned artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
"Barf Glaze"?
As a former art history student, it may come as a surprise that I not only find the account hilarious, but that I also think Max Geller, the movement's leader, makes an important point.
Geller expressing his feelings for Renoir
But that point is not that Renoir sucks.
The way that these "guardians of the High Altar of Art" use the type of elitist vocabulary one would expect of "art snobs" is actually a rather effective way of critiquing the museum from within, a practice that has a long-established tradition in art historical and museum discourse:
Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. Interestingly, Duchamp began his career in the arts as a late Impressionist painter.
When Marcel Duchamp "created" this work, called Fountain, simply by designating a urinal as art, it was seen as a destructive act. In an interview, Duchamp stated,
I don't care about the word art because it's been so... discredited. [...] I wanted to get rid of it because [there's] sort of an unnecessary adoration of art today.
The problem to which both Geller and Duchamp allude is the question of curatorial authority. Who decides what is or isn't worthy of its reverential place in the museum?
Into the Heart of Africa, an exhibit curated by anthropologist (later turned postmodern artist) Jeanne Cannizzo at the ROM, attempted to explore how collecting practices shape museum and exhibition narratives. However, the exhibition failed due to a lack of collaboration with the African population, whose cultural history was on display, and Cannizzo's insistence on claiming the authority to impose her interpretation of the collection upon this minority group.
More successful was artist Fred Wilson's exhibition Mining the Museum, at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore. Like Cannizzo, Wilson uses found objects from the museum's collection to intervene with museum practices. In "Metalwork", seen above, Wilson placed an iron shackle in the middle of a display of silverware to make a poignant critique of the gaps in traditional museum displays. The shackles remind us that such luxury goods would have been made using slave labour - an uncomfortable history that is erased when the silverware is displayed on its own.
The difference between Cannizzo and Wilson's museum critiques was that Heart of Africa read the museum's collecting practices along the grain to show its colonialist structure, while Mining the Museum read gallery displays against the grain, retrieving histories traditionally excluded from the museum. The first had the unintentional effect of replicating the same colonialist practices it aimed to critique, while the latter raised questions about the portrayal and inclusion of minorities in museums and galleries.
In Part II, I will explore the different forms in which authority is being re-imagined and shared in order to include and give voice to such minorities in history.
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