Museum Offices and Gypsy Encampments
Can we envision the art of the 22nd century from 1950s workspaces?
I moved to New York City in 1998 to work at the Education Department of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. I was thrilled to join the hustle and bustle of New York to pursue my career as artist. One of the odd aspects about that job— to which I didn’t give any thought at the time, given my enormous excitement— was that the museum practically had no room for staff offices in its building. The curatorial staff had to work from an office in SoHo. As for us in the Education department we had to work in a rented office space on 6 East 87th Street, the upper floor of the Liederkrantz Society — a German- American Club that promoted music, in particular German lieder. It was an odd experience to go to work every day and entering an old lobby with a grandfather clock, dusty old furniture and the subtle smell of sauerkraut coming from a mysterious kitchen in the back. The basement of that building, which I explored once, was lined with old portraits of past members.
It is a well-known fact that Frank Lloyd Wright, in the creation of the architectural masterpiece that is this spiral museum — his only public building— did not seem too concerned with practical considerations, which included the difficulty of hanging artworks onto the curved and angled walls of the spiral he designed. There was a system of protruding poles from the walls to hold the paintings, but it also had its limitations—not least that it assumed that modern art would always be made in a certain format and medium.
Installers at the Guggenheim before the museum’s inaugural opening, 1959
The design also did not seem to consider the enormous cost that would entail to maintain the gun-placed concrete in good shape, dealing with corroded steel structures and multiple cracks. In addition, for all his visionary prowess, Wright did not appear to anticipate a museum that would hold hundreds if not thousands of visitors a day— instead he envisioned small groups of visitors leisurely strolling through the magnificent rotunda.
Wright’s famous temple of the spirit also didn’t seem to give too much thought about the people who would work there. When you look at historic photos of the Guggenheim shortly after it opened, you can tell that office space was already a challenge. The Thannhauser Galleries — where some of the permanent collection is displayed— have cozy curvatures overlooking 5th Avenue where some desks with typewriters were awkwardly placed. In the period of 1984-92, the Gwathmey Siegel Architecture firm made an annex that helped add some exhibition and office space to the building, but it still did not allow enough room for the museum’s growing staff.
Wright probably would not have imagined that the museum’s staff would have to write —like me— gallery activity plans about the work of Kandinsky while listening to faint amateur renditions of Schubert’s Winterreise. Around that time, the movie Office Space had just come out, and I identified with the character of Milton Waddams, an introverted and socially awkward cubicle worker overly attached to his red stapler who is at some point placed in the dark basement of the building.
In my journey through museum offices over the decades I have found it fascinating that, while the focus for innovation in these forward-looking institutions has always been the gallery and other public spaces, the non-public spaces are treated instead in very traditional ways and, often, they become afterthoughts. When I first arrived to work in the offices in the Education department at MoMA—not to long after the Taniguchi expansion— I found that the ceiling height of the department’s offices was lower than the one from the other floors which included various curatorial departments. All of them have generous large windows that overlook the Sculpture Garden while our floor was mostly enclosed. I was told — but I can’t prove this— that the architect had forgotten to make room for the Education offices in the building plan, and thus they placed us on a floor that was initially destined to include rows of archives. Our sole meeting room was next to the elevators, and at every meeting every two minutes one could hear the loud murmur of their upward or downward sounds coming from the shaft.
The exhibition committee meetings, ostensibly the most important programmatic meetings at MoMA, take place at the Founders Room— a severely serious corporate boardroom adjacent to the director’s office where the trustees often meet. Curators present their exhibition ideas in the presence of a couple dozen curators and top leadership. The air of those meetings is often tense and has the vague feeling of a doctoral defense panel site or a courtroom; the stakes are very high for the presenting curators whose exhibition proposals can easily be sent back to the drawing board or simply rejected.
What always struck me about being at these meetings was the disconnect between the pressure to present radically innovative and forward thinking around contemporary and modern art ideas and the conventional and conservative nature of the spaces where this forward thinking is supposed to take place. It is understandable that in the process of creating new museums the priority in both money and design should be given to the public areas of the museum. However, this prioritization tends to reveal that not enough thinking is put into how the process of collaboration, research, thinking and planning in the 21st century has evolved, nor how this thinking is required to produce the required innovative programming. So in some cases you might have museums with have galleries looking at the 22nd century with staff working from offices modeled from design ideas from the World War II era. Some might say that this is the equivalent of having a restaurant where the dining room is large, luxurious and comfortable while its small kitchen in the back is designed for short order cooking. But the problem is not always space or money related: it is the way in which the design of those spaces conforms to established modalities of production of knowledge. It also is not necessarily about the size of an event’s space: it is the fact that the auditorium is designed in the shape of a traditional lecture hall.
In the past I have written about the relationship between environment and creativity. The recently deceased psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the world authorities on creativity and inventor of the concept of “Flow”, once told me about how several decades ago he and Martin Seligman organized a gathering of renowned psychologists in Acumal, on the Riviera Maya of Mexico, renting a couple of homes owned by the Grateful Dead. As he described it, “We invited 20 of the most promising young psychologists to come there for free, and spend a week discussing how psychology could shed its clinical mantle. We spent a week in swimsuits and flip-flops discussing various ideas, and in between we would dive in the cenote behind the house, and swim with the fish.” This turned out to be a significant gathering for the field: from that experience was born the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA), which organizes a conference every few years and in recent gatherings has had around 1,500 participants from all over the world.
There are many leading thinkers out there considering questions of innovative thinking as it is applied in the work space in museums. Elizabeth Merrit, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, has given thought and attention to co-working museum models, finding ways of collaboration that recognize the importance of more fluid environments that allow for a less hierarchical and more integrated collaborative process for exhibition production.
Co-working models, however, have also had their detractors pretty much from their rise to popularity a decade ago or so, more memorably by writers like Susan Cain who in the New York Times critiqued the new office philosophy as what she termed the “New Groupthink”, a set of approaches that inhibit individual creativity in exchange of some kind of forced collective work.
What these criticisms reveal to me is not so much the skepticism toward fads of architectural design for collaboration or co-working models, but the very notion that there should be a secret formula—whether in design or management— for creativity. And we know that physical spaces don’t produce great ideas if there aren’t talented thinkers involved in the first place.
This is perhaps why the anecdote told by Csikszentmihalyi always comes back to my mind. What created the spark in the case of that informal psychologist gathering in Mexico was not just the ingredient of the beautiful environment and the brilliant individuals —although those factors certainly were important — but rather the unscripted nature of that gathering: placing the actors outside of the traditional meeting room or academic space, in a context where there are no set frameworks for how they should speak or act, or how they should speak or act.
Last week I was in Madrid and had a chance to get a tour of the offices of the Juan March Foundation— a major art foundation in Spain with museum sites in three cities. As I was being taken around to see the foundation’s library and galleries, we passed by a space in the middle, flanked by freestanding walls, where the planning of an exhibition project was clearly underway. The room, at the center of the offices, had an exhibition model in the middle and several images and other references on the walls. The foundation’s director, Manuel Fontán del Junco, explained their working process to me: they work primarily in teams, initially with curators but then integrating others including exhibition designers, educators, editors, and more. “The idea behind this is that curating is a choral enterprise, that the idea of the star curator is false and obscuring of the group work that goes on, and in general the excessive difference between curators and other project leaders produces bad exhibitions.” Fontán goes on to say that the exhibition production process is in the end “a public form of research, since in the end its result will be physically presented to the public. The result is this form of working where each exhibition has a headquarters that they describe as “labs”. Fontán: “the Labs are like gypsy encampments where all the project participants collaborate and work temporarily. The encampment is lifted when the exhibition ends; it gets picked up, evaluated and archived. And the space is cleaned to receive the next project.”
The “out of frame” format and the public nature of the research are key. They highlight how institutional hierarchies, secrecy and regimented forms of interaction are often interconnected and reinforcing of one another. It could be argued as well that once those elements disappear, it might open the door to a more fluid exchange of ideas that can generate something new.
The fact that this experiment takes place in an average office space made me think about how, while we certainly can become prisoners of architectural structures, we, again, can’t expect to be able to farm out the job of creativity to the physical location. It’s the interrelation of space and social interaction that can produce the results. The future of the museum’s brain might be one that borrows from (and builds upon) elements like the co-working space and the gypsy encampment, on a location that is less architectural masterpiece and more social imagination outside of pre-established scripts.