Conference paper, Saturday, October 20th, 2007, 03:15 p.m.
Rafael Sámano Roo: The Project of the MUAC in Mexico City. Continuing Self-Reflection with Museological Respect
The University Museum of Contemporary Art project and the constant self questioning in relation to a museum
There are several reasons why the idea of what a museum represents should be explored, among which is the fact that it gives meaning to an organization while taking on contemporary needs and participating in a responsible way in the future of culture and particularly of contemporary art within a university framework, as well as the impact the museum has on Mexican society and its international equivalents.
The first public museum originated at the university, but in Mexico the National Autonomous Univ_ersity (UNAM)’s s_ocial commitment goes further than taking care of upper education and research. Ever since it was declared autonomous in 1929, its duties have included the promotion of culture and the benefits this provides to society in general.
Since then, the UNAM has become a cultural apparatus that is unique in Latin America and probably in the world. The university has two philharmonic orchestras, a radio station, a television channel, a film archive, the most important concert hall in Latin America and dance, theatre and film forums; it also runs twenty five science and art museums. All this has given the university a major role in the development, promotion and study of artistic production.
There are deeds that evaluate how much the university has represented the culture and art during each moment of Mexican history ever since the university was founded in 1551 and, of special interest for this presentation, during the last fifty years, since the construction of University City in 1952. This is when the most important artists of the time were included in the development of public art projects and these have contributed towards University City being declared a World Heritage Site.
The UNAM has provided spaces for the exhibition of modern and contemporary art; and that is why it is now focusing its efforts on a space planed ex professo from its conception for the exhibition, interpretation, documentation, experimentation, safe keeping and communication of art produced from the foundation of University City to our days.
The plans for the University Museum of Contemporary Art start off with the idea of a museum, but it keeps this concept at a distance. One of the characteristics of our historical moment is the crisis of the so called modern models (regarding their process of development) in which the museum can foresee and control the future through the knowledge and meaning generated by the observation and analysis of the objects and materials that it contains. This leads one to believe that the contents of the museum were already known and worthy of preservation. In this way, very briefly, we can conclude that the modern museum favours the object as its reason for being, and this is followed by a long and profound tradition that makes it a space that legitimizes and gives a hierarchical structure.
This situation amply justifies the importance of the new building which will protect those riches with an architecture that will impose an order and therefore a way of understanding and evaluating its contents.
On the other hand, there is the relevant role that contemporary cultural institutions have taken on as providers and mediators for the development of artistic projects, placing them as determinant factors in the very circuit of public and private artistic production.
This is the case of the new University Museum of Contemporary Art of the UNAM which not only has ambitious programs aimed at the development of exhibition projects, but also has a buying programme for works of art. The systematic structuring since 2004 of a collection of mostly Mexican works of art that have been produced since 1952, when University City was founded, that can be analyzed, studied, and promoted through a strategic plan that will constantly revise and increase the collection in a reasoned and qualified manner is of fundamental importance for this museum. The international framework, a necessary requirement of contemporary art, will be covered through long term loans from important private collections, which will even buy works of art with the idea of depositing them and bequeathing their administration to the University Museum. In this way the National University takes on this commitment as part of its mandate to extend the benefits of education, research and culture to the whole of society. However, most of these aspects are carried out when art is exhibited; when the work of art is displayed in any public space, a gallery, a fair, a biennale, an open or closed space and also in a museum. This is particularly true of spaces that are temporarily or permanently occupied and that fulfil their mission as promoters, facilitators and, if possible, they develop other parallel projects which add on to the already well known cultural supply provided for a passive visitor. These spaces strictly carry out their duties regarding the preservation, study, documentation, exhibition and communication of the work of art, of the object.
This way the museum is still “useful for something” (and not necessarily for someone) and this is why in many cases particularly university museums are alternative platforms or consolation for those who aspire to be placed in research centres. They diligently study the objects they guard mainly with the aim of publishing and promoting and within these processes they consider exhibiting and pay no attention to the discourses and situations that the mise- en-scene tend to focus on; they tend more towards museology centred on the object, as explained by Peter van Mensch.
The museological project of this University Museum, however, is to necessarily take a step back from the object and from the building and move the centre of attention towards the user who is every individual who makes a decision to relate to the processes involved in the building of meaning.
The University Museum hopes to distance itself from the models that Jose Luis Brea criticises in his article “The Museum as Connectivity Operator” where the exhibition value is the most important as an end in itself, where the spaces must be occupied, where the programming is mainly understood as just a way of offering products and maintaining ones place on the blockbuster cultural circuit making the institution into a prisoner of marketing techniques and of grandiloquent exhibition demands, based mainly on the exhibition value rather than on content. In Mexico there are spaces that show off the amount of exhibitions they put together rather than their quality and meaning, some even have 70 exhibitions a year. We are within the Vernisage synergy as Yves Michaud mentions when he expresses his thoughts on the ceremony and cult of contemporary art.
