Calum Storrie Ltd

Introduction

Museums should be invisible. I like art works and institutions that escape any physical presence. Things you can carry in your mind or in your pockets. It’s not a matter of laziness or frustration: maybe it’s a form of asceticism. With an imaginary museum you can do whatever you want, you can think about it before falling asleep, or you can go out in the morning and build it from scratch. And if it doesn’t work, there is nothing to be ashamed of. You can always say that it was simply an exercise in loss. In the end, I just think there is a certain strength in being invisible.

– Maurizio Cattelan1

The title of this work has two sources. One source is an essay called The Delirious Museum by David Mellor, an introduction to a book of photographs.2 Mellor discusses the photographs in the context of two texts. The first of these is by Jacques Derrida and deals with the way in which the ‘frame’ insinuates itself into the view of the object. The second text discussed by Mellor is Theodor Adorno’s The Valéry-Proust Museum which examines how the spectator is drawn into an intimate relationship with the displayed object through the paraphernalia of the immediate museum environment.

The second source for the title is Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas. This is described by the author as a ‘retroactive manifesto for Manhattan.’3 Koolhaas’ book could also be seen as a selective, maverick history of New York. This book predates Koolhaas’ involvement with museum architecture and is a paean of praise to the urban condition exemplified by the ‘Downtown Athletic Club’ with its fictional representation of naked ‘metropolitan bachelors’ eating oysters in boxing gloves.

1Palais de Tokyo, What Do You Expect from an Art Institution in the 21st Century? (Paris: Palais de Tokyo, 2001), p. 51.

2In Ross, Richard, Museology (Santa Barbara: Aperture, 1989). At a discussion at the Photographer’s Gallery in London David Mellor said he had no objection to my re-use of his phrase.

3Koolhaas, Rem, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), p 6.

I first began to unearth the Delirious Museum in a conversation with colleagues some years ago. We were discussing the pros and cons of museum admission charges. This is a discussion that for peculiar political and historical reasons might only occur in Britain. I am in favour of free admission to museums and I was then. (At the time there was a split between museums in London over this issue. The British Museum, the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery all had free entry. The ‘South Kensington’ museums: the V & A, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum, all charged for entry.) I defended my position by saying that ‘museums should be a continuation of the street.’ I did not mean that they should have to compete with the street in terms of their speed of communication or that they should appeal to passers-by in the same way as, say, a shop or a games arcade. Instead I was suggesting that there should be ease of access to both building and collection which in effect integrates them into the life of the city. This premise has led me to look in more detail at the relationship between museum and city. In some ways any city is a Delirious Museum: a place overlaid with levels of history, a multiplicity of situations, events and objects open to countless interpretations.4 If there was a single starting point for this train of thought it would be Christopher Alexander’s essay from the 1960s A City is not a Tree, in which he describes the city as a ‘semilattice’ of interconnections and overlaps. The Delirious Museum that I will examine has continuity with the street and it aspires to the condition of the city. What I want to do is to reclaim the museum on behalf of the city and vice versa. By shifting the perception of the collection and the container (for want of a better word, the ‘architecture’), it is possible to re-evaluate the relationship between museum and city in terms of shared experience.

4Reprinted in Zone I & II (New York: Urzone Inc., no publication date

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