Endnotes:
Henry James, The American (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1877).
Architectural manuals for museum planning include Gerald George’s Starting Right: A Basic Guide to Museum Planning (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004), Paul von Naredi-Rainer’s Museum Buildings: A Design Manual (Basel: Birkhauser, 2004), and Walter L. Crimm, Martha Morris, and L. Carole Wharton’s Planning Successful Museum Building Projects (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2009). Cultural histories are much more attentive to the full design aesthetic inside the museum gallery, though even the best of these studies, Charlotte Klonk’s Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) and Victoria Newhouse’s Art and the Power of Placement (New York: Monacelli Press, 2005), mention the bench only in passing. Both cultural histories, however, are invaluable resources on the history of displaying and viewing art, and they make possible the type of study we engage in here.
Charlotte Klonk, in “The White Cube and Beyond: Niklas Maak, Charlotte Klonk and Thomas Demand on Museum Display,” Tate Etc, no. 21 (Spring 2011), http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue21/museumdisplay.htm.
See Klonk, Spaces of Experience, 43-44 and 2.
See Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999), especially chapter 1, “Modernity and the Problem of Attention,” 11-79.
Clement Greenberg outlines his aesthetics of abstraction in numerous essays, including “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 23-37, and “The New Sculpture,” in Art and Culture; Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 133-54. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 7.
Brian O’Doherty discusses the affinity between the abstract modern canvas and the white gallery wall in chapter one of his Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, expanded edition (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999). Orig. pub. 1976.
O’Connor, Francis V. and Eugene Victor Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, Vol. 4 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 253.
Victoria Newhouse argues that the most successful installations of Jackson Pollock’s work have been in, not the big museums, but more intimate spaces like the Betty Parson Gallery (1948-51) and Ben Heller residence (1960), both of which encouraged viewing the artist’s canvases from a distance of approximately twenty feet, the depth of Pollock’s studio space. Newhouse provides a comprehensive history of the many Pollock exhibitions in her Art and the Power of Placement, 142-211. It is difficult to judge the precise distance of bench from wall in the 1967 MoMA show, however this bench may be the least awkwardly situated in relation to Mural, as compared to those in later Pollock retrospectives, since the gallery itself was comparatively smaller.
Henry McBride, “Opening of the new Museum of Modern Art, May 13, 1939,” in The Flow of Art: Essays and Criticsms, ed. Daniel Catton Rich (New Haven: Atheneum, 1975), 371.
Klonk, Spaces of Experience, 148.
Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 15.
See two lengthy footnotes in section four of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1930), ed. James Strachey, Vol. 21 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), 99-100 and 105-7.
Interestingly, today the pendulum may be shifting as some museums, in search of revenue, are once again promoting themselves as places of leisure, with music, food, cocktails, and even overnights.
Female visitors were especially central to the nineteenth-century view of the museum as a protected public space devoted to the cultivation and education of a mass audience. For more on gender and the changing demographics of museum attendance, see Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
Interestingly, the original MoMA benches did have backs, providing more comfort than most modern museum benches. Only later did MoMA switch to less comfortable seating, perhaps because the solid bench backs obstructed interior views, signified everyday furniture, or simply resisted aesthetic abstraction.
Kiesler defines his correalist design doctrine as the articulation of “the interrelation of a body to its environment: spiritual, physical, social, mechanical.” As Stephen Phillips explains, this doctrine resulted in design research that explored architecture, furniture, and bodies in motion, in an effort to correlate visual and tactile information between mind, eye, body, and the built environment. See Frederick Kiesler, “Notes on Architecture: The Space-House,” Hound & Horn (January-March 1934), 292, and Stephen Phillips, “Toward a Research Practice: Frederick Kiesler’s Design Correlation Laboratory,” Grey Room 38 (Winter 210), 91. For more on Kiesler’s correalist furniture in the context of his numerous installations, see Cynthia Goodman, “The Art of Revolutionary Display Techniques,” in Frederick Kiesler, ed. Lisa Phillips (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and W.W. Norton & Co., 1989), 57-83.
In both galleries, the subjects of the media projections are women engaged in acts of self-spectatorship: women reflecting, literally or figuratively, on their own bodies or lives.
Current debates about contemporary museum architecture often find themselves preoccupied with iconic museum exteriors and mired in evaluating the pro’s and con’s of “stararchitecture.” Typically, these discussions of style do no more than oppose the bravura buildings of signature designers like Frank Gehry and Daniel Liebeskind with the restrained buildings of architects like Renzo Piano and David Chipperfield. One way to break new ground is to shift the emphasis from the exterior of the museum to its interior, considering the precise ways the museum gallery orchestrates embodied spectatorship.