Global Museum: Antwerp's opportunity

How does one design a global museum?  Any museum that is not a website, needs to contain its collection within a building and make sure to secure funding from a specific political entity, which usually means attracting the right kind of influential audience.

The new MAS in Antwerp has all the holdings of a museum about globalization and its history, but it has not put them all together into a coherent form. The MAS holds diverse collections brought together from many smaller museums.  The topics range from paintings and porcelain, the history of Antwerp, anthropological artifacts from tribal peoples in the Pacific, African and the Americas, the history of shipping, traditional folk culture in Flanders. 

How did the MAS end up with this hodge-podge?  It does not take too much imagination to realize that the content of these collections reflects the interests of Antwerp's ruling elite during the nineteenth-century. Some of the upper class wanted to demonstrated their refined taste by collecting European decorative arts, others were filled with civic pride and another group traveled the world.  All three could be spun together into a narrative of globalization.  If Antwerp were not such a major port, we would hardly have found a collection of Indonesian and African masks in the MAS.  Why not link the presence of these collections with Antwerp's colonial and global economic history? 

As the exhibits now stand, the history of the city is told compellingly in terms of the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Golden Age as art historians sometimes still call it.  This historical narrative structures the most coherent and exciting part of the MAS, but with a broader and longer view, the history of Antwerp would easily be placed within the context of colonialism and the spread of European capitalism across the globe.  The curators have all read Ferdinand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein. Thus, it would not be so difficult to link Antwerp's history within the Spanish Empire and the later nineteenth-century anthropological collections.  But such a curatorial approach would require presenting Antwerp as more than just the gorgeous sacrificial victim of the Eighty Years War.  It would require the museum to address the question of nationalism, Flemish, and as well French and German.  It is not so hard to see how one group of nineteenth-century collectors would become fascinated with African art, while another would focus intensely on Flemish village life.   Domestic ethnography is the nationalist response to colonial expansion.  Finally, the museum's vast collection on Antwerp shipping provides the obvious link between all the other collections.  

Why not turn the museum into an investigation of Antwerp's global past?   The answer surely has everything to do with Belgium's awkward political present.   The conflicts between Walloons and Flemings are so exhausting that most Belgians just discreetly refer to them for fear of unleashing yet another ideological cavalcade.    This reticence, this desire not to wade into the broader terms of Belgian political history, stymies museums such as the MAS who are obliged to present more than their local heritage. 

Touring the Site

Architourism has for centuries concentrated on ruins of great old buildings, but now we could turn it around so that we travel to sites to experience how buildings are constructed.  The first example that springs to mind, of course, is the World Trade Center site where for the last nine years visitors have stood to watch the slow progress in rebuilding the destroyed Towers.  Lately you have been able to see actual buildings emerge and I remember a particular thrill last time I was there just chatting with three construction workers leaving the site. 

Sometimes you stumble across construction sites by accident. There are maps of Antwerp that list the Red Star museum, with exhibits about the history of emigration through the port. If Ellis Island stands at one end of the Atlantic migration, then it would make sense that European harbor cities would build museums recounting the process whereby emigrants left their homes behind.  Fittingly, there have been conferences and publications on the topic, and I have even spoken with a professor who took a tour through the old Red Star ship line facility for processing emigrants. So when you are in Antwerp, and you're from New York, you might want to visit this historic point embarkation.

Alas, the maps are deceptive and the story about the tour not conclusive, because when you stand at the site of the Red Star museum as indicated by your official museum guide to Antwerp, you quickly discover that it is but the shell of a facade and a big muddy construction zone.  Sure, there is a giant placard with a computer generated image of what the museum is supposed to look like in two years, but the thing itself is just a husk of a building.  So when you get over your dismay, you realize there is another level of tourism, watching to see how an old, run down, relatively modern structure is transformed into an interactive cool space.

  

The construction site is porous, it allows you to wander through the empty lot, thereby revealing just how thoroughly historic buildings are stripped down before they are renovated.  Indeed, throughout Antwerp you can find late medieval buildings under historic renovation where nothing stands except the four outside walls.  The interior has presumably been catalogued so that it can be rebuilt wholly anew.   The historic character thus resides solely in the exterior walls and not at all in the high tech interior spaces.  A visit to the construction site makes all too clear how little history remains in contemporary preservation projects.  The creaky old floors, the tacky tiles, the moldy corners, the dim light, the labyrinthean layout have been replaced with a space that allows large groups to shuffle through an exhibition.

The latest architectural sensations foster in this fascination with the construction of museums.  The MAS, Antwerp's striking new city museum, has a book available for 20 euros that depicts its own construction.  The folks in Antwerp have learned plenty from Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin.  When the Libeskind museum first went up, a variety of books were published recounting its design, yet these were published while the success of the museum was not yet obvious.  The folks in Antwerp have take a more aggressive approach.  They had a book recounting the construction of the MAS available on opening day, as part of a rather over aggressive strategy to turn the building into a Frank Gehry/Daniel Libeskind icon.  Pictures of its construction have become a necessary component in creating the myth of the building's uniqueness.  In won't be long before the next innovative museum project offers cognoscenti guided tours of the construction site just as you can tour the Roman forum to learn about what once stood there.  In Lower Manhattan, the lines would be too long and the large crowds would interfere with the construction work, to say nothing of the insurance and legal issues involved.  So for now, it is best to just walk onto an unsuspecting site on your own.

Antwerp's Museum at the River

There has been lots of warm, friendly buzz about Antwerp's new high-rise museum in the harbor district: MAS, Museum aan de Strom.  Check out Roman Hollenstein's excellent piece in the NZZ, available here in English translation:  http://www.signandsight.com/service/1284.html

The building is a  marvel and a delight, rising 60 meters high in a wide open area of docks and water.  It stands all alone; it has no need to integrate itself into an urban context, instead it allows visitors the opportunity to enjoy increasingly higher panoramas of the historic city and the industrial harbor. 

Each floor has a serpentine glass wall facing out into a different direction.  The floor are layered on top of each other in 90 degree turns, like a disheveled pile of books.  The red sandstone sets the building off from the rest of the city while also keeping a rough natural feel of quarried rock.  The stone has a raw, tactile feel even as it so obviously suggests a desert environment far removed from northern Europe. 

The architectural firm of Neutelings and Riedijk have raised a number of buildings through the Netherlands and Belgium that look like viewing platforms, and soon they will bring their techniques to the new Cincinnati Art Museum, their first project in the United States.  Cincinnati has already an avant-garde art museum designed by Zaha Hadid, which like MAS leads the visitor through a carefully arranged series of stairs, or escalators, so that the building becomes a spectatorial apparatus.  The visitors are guided along an ascending path with turns that provide them carefully chosen views.  In the case of MAS, the eye is allowed to wander across a vast panorama, so that each level is literally an elevation above the previous one.  Wisely, the highest floor faces the historic city center, so that the rising alternative views reach their culmination at a point that allows the viewer to enjoy a birds-eye view much like the historical prints shown in the exhibition.

The exhibitions include a selection of Old Masters lent from the royal art museum, placed in dark rooms with precise lighting. You can get your nose up close to a delicate van Eyck. 

The dark exhibition rooms have the added effect of covering over the fact that the interior spaces of the building have a rough unfinished quality, which at times is presented as "honest" reference to the harbor's business of loading and unloading ships, but at other points has the feel of rushed job when for example  2x 6 beams are thrown up to hold Golden Age masterpieces.  To carry on the harbor metaphors, the MAS feels like a ship on its maiden voyage:  the various collections ranging from the history of Antwerp to Indonesian and African ethnography are not given a meaningful connection.  The themes that are chosen to place them together, such as "Representations of Power"  "Life and Death" have all the credibility of a ninth grade social studies text book.  Added to this are distracting sound tracks in the exhibition spaces.  Why do you need to hear a man playing loud violin music as you are contemplating a gold coin with Alexander the Great's profile from the city's numismatic collection?  The staff throughout the museum were nervous and jumpy, especially as the electricity on several floors would intermittently fail.  All of this will presumably be straightened out: the staff will learn the ropes, the exhibits will receive a coherent structure.  As things stand right now, the museum's presentation of Antwerp's urban history is far too fragmented and jumpy, a far cry from Ghent's magnificent city museum.

Right now, the wonderful building (and the interspersed Old Masters) makes the short trip to the edge of Antwerp a delight, eventually the rest of the museum will be ship shape.