ranging from the statue to the bas‐relief, from bas‐reliefs to seal‐impressions, and from these to plaques of the nomads, a “Babylonian style” seems to emerge as a real entity, not a mere classification—as something resembling, rather, the life‐story of a great creator. Nothing conveys more vividly and compellingly the notion of a destiny shaping human ends than do the great styles, whose evolutions and transformations seem like long scars that Fate has left, in passing, on the face of the earth. (Crimp 1993, 55)
Figure 7.2 Maurice Jarnoux, photograph of André Malraux with the photographic plates for The Museum without Walls, 1956.
Copyright Maurice Jarnoux / Paris Match via Getty Images.
In his trenchant critique, Crimp argues that the subject of the museum as archive does more than impose a grid or create a logic to govern its contents’ meaning and value; he does so and then pretends to find in the archive, as if by fate, what he had in the first instance placed there. In a strange form of Freud’s fort–da game, the subject tosses “style” into the museum and then exults when she pulls it back out again, as if discovering it for the first time.
In his effort to expose that charade, Crimp points to something that Malraux, it seems, did not expect to find in the archive. Even in the seeming infinitude of the museum without walls, Crimp tells us, there is a boundary, the outside edge formed by the difference between a photograph of a work of art and a photograph as a work of art. “Malraux makes a fatal error near the end of his Museum,” Crimp warns:
He admits within its pages the very thing that had constituted its homogeneity; that thing is, of course, photography. So long as photography was merely a vehicle by which art objects entered the imaginary museum, a certain coherence obtained. But once photography itself enters, an object among others, heterogeneity is reestablished at the heart of the museum; its pretentions to knowledge are doomed. For even photography cannot hypostatize style from a photograph. (Crimp 1993, 56)
The totalizing logic of Malraux’s archive is troubled by that which it cannot contain: the photograph cannot simultaneously be a reproduction, the copy or index of another thing (another work of art), and a thing (a work of art) in itself. Malraux’s museum without walls seems to provide direct evidence of Roland Barthes’s (1980, 15) ontological assertion: “Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.” Crimp merely points to the museum’s blindness, or rather to the ways in which, with the introduction of the art photograph, it cannot stop seeing what it had previously ignored. And this in turn leads to a troubling question for the museum as archive. Do we prize the footprint in the dust as an index of its origin (the lovely foot of the once present Gradiva) because it precedes, and thus tacitly promises the longed‐for Gradiva, or because of the beauty and fragility of the trace itself?
The photograph (according to the logic of the art museum) cannot stand both outside, as the archive’s organizing gaze, a tool to pry up style from the smooth surfaces of artworks, and inside, as an aesthetic object to be contemplated, its own effects delaminated. As Geimer (2009, 89) explains, “Malraux reverses the causality that normally is attributed to originals and their copies. The photographic reproduction precedes its model. If we enter the walls of a chapel, the museum without walls is already there.” Malraux’s revolutionary idea is that the photographic copy supplants, precedes, the original; but that idea is thrown into question in the vertiginous presence of the art photograph. We might liken this uncanny effect to that which was produced when, at some point after 2009, Resnais’s film, which looks at and documents the Bibliothèque Nationale from a position outside it, was added to the library’s contents, filed as a film among its countless artifacts.
Despite the patenting of photographic technologies in the 1830s, US and European museums (with a few prominent exceptions, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London) have been slow to see photography, to admit it as a kind of art, as a thing to be looked at and not simply looked through. The Museum of Modern Art in New York began collecting photographs in 1930, but did not establish a curatorial department in photography until 1940. The National Gallery in Washington had no such program until the 1980s, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had no curatorial department until 1992. Photography’s admission into the museum, through the front door rather than the servants’ entrance, disrupts the aura of art, an aura that Malraux’s museum was designed, according to Crimp, to drift over everything like dust.
Crimp points to the work of Robert Rauschenberg, who famously includes silkscreened photographs in his paintings, as an example of the “postmodernist gesture” that photography enables. “The fiction of the creating subject gives way to a frank confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation, and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity, and presence, essential to the ordered discourse of the museum, are undermined” (Crimp 1993, 58). Rauschenberg’s medium is the archive itself, the accumulation of photographs, postcards, calendar pages, newspaper clippings, bits of fabric and clothing, a disused tire, a taxidermy goat, pieces of wood, random sign letters, squeezed out paint tubes, a stuffed eagle, a blanket, pillows, and so on, down, down, down, down, down.
The museum, of course, does not sit idly by and allow its logic of valuation to be disturbed, so it must work to deny such threats and to invigorate the aura of photography (and, in turn, the other works of art that it domesticates) through appeals to the archive as public treasury, appeals that marshal the language of timeless masterworks and apolitical beauty (Crimp 1993, 60). Indeed, a key argument of Crimp’s book is that the museum’s rapacious ability discursively to absorb every object it collects and to launder those objects’ colonial, racist, neoliberal, military, and capitalist stains is potentially unbounded (or at least is imagined to be so). From his point of view, the museum as archive, to the degree that it aspires to a state of what we might call “everythingness,” comes to embody, in Steedman’s (2002, 6) words, “all the ways and means of state power.” The grid seems, threateningly, to expand infinitely in all directions, to spread to “all times, places, and cultures,” as Malraux himself said, like a virus (Geimer 2009, 82).
And yet the limit is a constitutive feature of the archive. Stewart (1984, 159) explains: “In the collection the threat of infinity is always met with the articulation of boundary.” Or, as Derrida (1998, 11) puts it more bluntly, “[n]o archive without outside.” The gesture indicating “this, but not that,” “in here, not out there” is essential. It performatively produces the material, aesthetic, and cultural value of the museum’s (the archive’s, the library’s) collected objects. This might explain Alain Resnais’s visual meditation on the architecture of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the vaulted ceiling and soaring cast iron columns of Henri Labrouste’s magical nineteenth‐century reading room, the exoskeleton of catwalks that offer fine views of the building’s domes and innovative fenestration, the beautiful stonework that decorates the façade. Through a series of exterior and interior shots, he effectively miniaturizes the library and its contents, as though looking at a lively organism or a tiny world through a microscope. From a high vantage, for example, he makes the teeming human population of the reading room appear as a colony of insects, each one of which, the voice‐over remarks, chews on its paper. As the omniscient gaze of the camera cranes back from this scene, the godlike voice declares: “Here we glimpse a future in whom all mysteries are solved. When this and other universes offer up their keys to us.” The universe of the library (or Borges’s universe as library), the universe of the archive, of human knowledge, finds its limit at the gaseous frontiers of other universes, borders marked by mystery and ignorance (Borges 1998, 112). It is at that frontier that Susan Hiller’s work lies.
Hiller,