Invisible Geometry: Modernism brought to Postmodernism

When visiting the Museé D'Orsay last week on the last day of my stay in Paris something really stroke me apart from the extreme renewal in the architectural organization of the spaces that the museum had gone through since my last visit to the city in June 2011. The museum, entirely dedicated to visual arts specially from the end of the 19th century and begining of the 20th, had entirely remodeled most part of its exhibition spaces and the curations that there are now taking place. Special attention must be given to the post-impressionist section such as the ones dedicated to Seurat, Luce and Cross and another one to Van Gogh and his "surrounding" artists such as Gauguin. Another special high point is the entirely new, and well deserved, section for the impressionists ranging from Manet to Monet (if the reader kindly permits the slight joke), and ending in a charming new café designed by the Campana Brothers. And, what could obviously not be forgotten, is the amazing symbolist collection: a touching range of works from the most relevant names from that movement such as Redon, and speacially Moureau.
Although it was all a very rich and exciting experience to see such an important museum almost completly renewed, this is not a blog about modern art, to which mostly this museum is dedicated to. Although it may seem I am doing so, I am not speaking about modern art nor a modern museum but yes, I am speaking about a modern art museum in the post-modern realm. It was exactly that what thrilled me in that visit. Appart from the astonishing and relevant individual works, the entire museum had a new feeling to itself.

A lot has been discussed about the new museums of the new century: its modus operandi, its appearance, its role in contemporary society. Most of the discussions lead to those new media museums that reach into abstract concepts via new technologies as a way to educate and touch a wider public with lots of videos, flashing lights and interactive teaching methods. Although all that is very relevant to speak to the contemporary public, and appart from it being very recent in its wide establishment, I have a stange feeling of it already beeing dated, almost as if it was some sort of the Emperor's new robe.
The wonderfull feeling that the Museé D'Orsay proposed to me was something more profound, and apparently more related to the museum's role in society (and specially in a post-modern one) than flashing lights and interactive touch screens, without taking away the relevance of the viewer/work interaction (and making it even stronger) the museum found a very precise and coherent way of coming into the new times.
However this may sound extremely conservative, it is just an attempt to "correct" this concept of the "new museum": for hysterical times, hysterical museums? I don't believe that's the most coherent of the ideas. Who needs a touch screen beside a Van Gogh?
The most exciting thing about the D'Orsay was how they brought that institution into the new times without appealing to the new-mediatic-hysteria-in-museums. And they did that by one of post-modernisms strongest powers and paradigms: curation!

There were no architectural screams, no scenographic pantomines, no flashing lights and projections, "just" the power of works relating to each other in a very precise and studied manner even, sometimes, relating to complete oppositions to themselves.

Susan Melrose speaks about this shift witihin the curation, almost as from a conserver, and that I read unfolding from her writing, to being a proposer:

"A key issue raised in the mid-1980s, with regard to the archive, was that of the archive as 'mnemotechnic device', focused on the attempt to preserve 'signs of a life' that are already lost (Lyotard 1988/1991). According to that tradition what is 'lost' is the artwork's constitutive enigma, its particular struggles with "resistant materialities (Hayles 1999); and what is retained is a synoptic re-ordering of the artwork's similarly constitutive technique, its technical aspect, its technicity. Faced with that loss, the archive as mnemotechnic device, it was argued in the 1980s, would tend then to provide not so much a record of expert practitioner product, as a 'testimony to the power to conserve of the curators' themselves.

The most shocking signal of that was what I saw within the new Symbolist section and what openned my mind to this delicate and silent way of approaching postmodernity. Inside that section, in the middle of it, held place a curation named "Nocturnes". The wall text started out in the following way: "This display aims to shake up the sacrosanct classifications of traditional art history. In fact, in the centre of the Symbolist gallery, Nocturnes presents a dialogue between works of art that stylistic cross-refferencing has usually kept appart".
Isn't all that so very postmodern? Just by seeing the key-point: "to shake up the sacrossanct classifications".

And the show indeed did range from a wide variety of tendencies, but allways speaking about the idea of "nocturnes". As can be seen in some images below, taken in a somewhat subversive postmodern way because the museum didn't allow photographs (what isn't in some way post modern at all. In these times of image, how can you avoid it? But that is too much of a big discussion for this already large scaled on), the works go from Rousseau to André Devambez.

The wall text goes on with its powerfully engaged postmodernist way of proceding:

(...) By bringing together in this way and without any contextualization works that are, on the face of it, as dissimilar as Manet's 'Claire de lune sur le port de Boulogne' (1869) and Alexander Harrison's 'Solitude' (around 1893), for example, we hope to move outside the intellectual framework that determines the way we see art, in order to approach it more openly."

The power of the works are within themselves. The institutions don't need to dress themselves and the works in fancy new expensive clothes, just accept the propositions made by the works themselves and let them create naturally new relations between them and the public. That is indeed bringing a historical institution into postmodernism without being vulgar or losing its most precious duties: to educate and to conserve, although understanding the new times.