Interview with Daniel Tyradellis

“The art museum cannot free itself from its boredom through the works alone; it needs more and different commitment and courage.”

Published in 2014 in Germany, Müde Museen, or Tired Museums, was a book with a catchy title that was able to capture the zeitgeist of the time in regard to the malaise that had settled upon the modern museum and its contemporary offshoot. We spoke to its author, the philosopher and curator Daniel Tyradellis, best known for his transdisciplinary and experimental curatorial focus. Since 2020, he has been Guest Professor of Theory and Practice of Curating, as well as Curator at Humboldt University in Berlin. We discussed, among other topics, museum fatigue, curatorial practices, visitor participation and how to make museums more interesting places.

BY PACO BARRAGÁN

Paco Barragán - You published in 2014 the book Müde Museen (Tired Museums). It’s a very poetic and at the same striking title with alliteration. How did this title come about?

Daniel Tyradellis - The phrase “Müde Museen” goes back to the publisher, who wanted an equally catchy and provocative title, also out of concern that the book might appear too much like one written for an academic audience. At first I was skeptical, but then I was reminded of the opposition of fatigue and exhaustion as found in Beckett. And that seemed very plausible to me then. It’s not about discrediting the museums, but about working out that they could be incredibly interesting places. It’s all there; you just have to let it in and out.

Exhaustion also means playing through things in all their possibilities, that is, not laying predetermined criteria and procedures on top of them, but really everything that would be possible in a purely combinatorial way.

P.B. - The subtitle of the book is Oder: Wie Austellungen unser Denken verändern könnten (Or: How Exhibitions Could Change our Way of Thinking). Isn’t it a bit of a contradictio in terminis?

D.T. - I do not believe in fatigue. People are and will only get tired if you offer them variations of the always the same (the “bad infinity”). This in itself is perceived as fatigue, and one may accuse oneself of not being able to devote enough energy and attention to the oh-so-valuable culture. I rather believe that one gets tired because one has to spend so much energy to have to deal with the same things despite all inner resistance. “Exhaustion,” on the other hand, is something completely different: that feeling that overcomes you when you feel at the limits of your possibilities because you constantly feel challenged to explore and try out the new. Only this deserves the term “thinking.” Thinking actually means: I do not know my way around and I try to change that. In the museum—as an institution, as a place of doing and visiting—we could be stimulated to do so in the most positive sense of the word. Museums have the hardware to do so.

P.B. - We are talking about concepts like fatigue and exhaustion. I would like to address them, as they are very pertinent in relation to the museum. The idea of “museum fatigue” can be related to the current art fair fatigue and even biennial fatigue, of which we hear a lot these days. In a literal sense, people tend to end up fatigued when they visit a museum. I see people visiting The Prado or The Louvre and they are physically and mentally fatigued. Why is that? And what can museums do in order to avoid that?

D.T. - There are two possible answers: One is that the dealing/occupation with art requires a lot of attention, is very intense and one is therefore very tired after visiting an art museum. Maybe. The other answer I tend to give is that what is to be seen in these museums is often experienced merely as a repetition and variation of one and the same core message: This is great art! The medium is the message, McLuhan would have said. So, I am approaching an artwork, stand in front of it, look at it and then move on. And so on. It’s boring.

A great deal could be done about it, but perhaps we also have to differentiate here between permanent and special exhibitions. Nevertheless, I would say that even simple activities such as changing the hanging can make a difference-for example, according to theme rather than epoch. Or more provocative: by format, by the dominant color or even by the insurance value. That may be nonsense from an art-historical point of view, but such activities clearly help to awaken a desire for discussion. I think one could and should be more courageous.

EXPERIMENTING WITH THEME, FORMAT AND COLOR

P.B. - This is a very important point you’re making: experimenting according to theme, format, color, et al. I think that this is not happening because the curator is a very complex profession and curators have assumed positions that they are not prepared for. In my opinion, a curator is a storyteller, a museologist and an exhibition designer. Think of the core curators like Wilhelm von Bode, Hugo von Tschudi and Alfred Barr, Jr. and their amazing experiments on all those fronts. The modern curator, of which Harald Szeemann, Okwui Enwezor, Nicolas Bourriaud et al are the perfect examples, is merely a storyteller, but they are not museologists nor exhibition designers. The result is exactly the same boring and repetitive white cube hang everywhere, from the Mori Museum in Tokyo to the Ludwig in Cologne to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Santiago de Chile or MoMA in New York. Hardly anybody experiments with presentation, design, hanging, color and so on. And I think it’s because the majority of curators, and I have been a perfect example of that for many years, have hardly any knowledge of museology or exhibition design. You just don´t learn that unless you decide to do so. And yet we not only tell a story, but we also assume the museology and the exhibition design of the exhibit while we don´t have that knowledge. And all those curatorial courses don´t provide that knowledge. What is your take on this?

D.T. - You are right that this requires different expertise, but I hesitate to link this to a concrete profile. Certainly, it requires the skill to look at things from different perspectives. Undoubtedly, scenography also plays a greater role here than is taught in the usually very one-dimensional training of art curators. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to bring this expertise with you. It can help to know about this factor and to involve people in developing the concept of an exhibition.

You’ve mentioned a few well-known names, and there’s a lot to be said for everyone. In the case of Wilhelm von Bode, for example, we should remember Adolf Bastian, who worked in the same place and dreamed of a completely different kind of exhibition and was prevented from doing so. Or of Arnold Bode, the inventor of documenta, who believed that it was only through the presentation and constellation of the exhibits in space that they really became works of art. Modern star curators like the three you mentioned are truffle pigs who, from within the art world, sensitively change the field of established artists and canonizable works of art. They hardly think about the exhibition space or the visitors as a broader audience. They seem to me to weigh up—consciously or unconsciously—and then decide on the “safe” way, which varies the tried and tested and doesn’t cope with questions of social interaction to the exhibited works. Apart from financial and organizational questions, it is then very easy to curate an art exhibition, as long as you are reasonably familiar with the international terrain. It’s like a marshalling yard, where new wagons are coupled up and others are discarded. It’s something completely different to conceive of the museum space as a potential structure of social force fields, for which the presentation of works of art is only one of the possible options. Here it is certainly an advantage to have the knowledge you mentioned; but it could also be very different. In the end, what counts is what stimulates thought, and I’m happy to use any legal means to do so.

P.B. - Let’s get back to the museum. Is the museum of art exhausted?

D.T. - Certainly not in the distinction I use between fatigue and exhaustion. From my point of view, the art museum has not even really begun to exhaust its possibilities. The art museum is rather tired of itself and its own practices. The art museum cannot free itself from its boredom through the works alone; it needs more and different commitment and courage. Putting oneself in the role of the visitors and not just understanding it as a less educated version of oneself can be a help in this respect.

P.B. - Museums have become extremely popular in the last 30 years. They have become part of pop culture, like visiting a pop concert, going to a movie or watching a soccer match in a football stadium. And yet the large majority has no or very little knowledge of (contemporary) art. How do we confront this situation?

D.T. - The question seems problematic in many respects. For one thing, art museums are only one kind of museums—there are many more. In addition, one must also put the alleged popularity into perspective: In Germany, at least, the situation is such that 90 percent of the population goes to a museum perhaps once a year; it is and remains a minority pleasure. And finally, a lack of “knowledge of art” is perhaps not something to complain about, although that’s not wrong, of course. Nevertheless, I would almost turn it around and say that the problem in art museums is rather the will of the makers to keep their knowledge arcane. One learns far too little about the works in museums and the reasons why they are there. Instead, one hides behind the “direct experience” of works. But this is rarely direct, and rather the result of an educational process.

Behind this lies a much more profound question: why do museums exist? Whenever there is talk of the museum, there is also talk of society. In other words: what is a “we” made up of? Is it based on distinction and exclusion or on participation and exchange about what moves people? The museum should be understood as a place of the social contract and not as a temple of distinction.

TECHNOLOGY AND THINKING IN SPACE

P.B. - Compared to other types of museums you mentioned before, for example the science museum or the children museum, the art museum is the one that innovates less in terms of the way exhibitions are presented. Still today it is hardly interactive, and technology is totally missing.

D.T. - I do not agree on the lack of technology. I don’t know of any museum that wouldn’t work with an audio guide, an app or something similar, and of course there are countless works of art that are interactive and are a kind of technology in itself. I am well aware that you are not aiming at the latter with your question. Nevertheless, in my opinion it does make sense to keep the museum white cube as free as possible from elements that impair the calm perception of the individual exhibit. This is an experience of its own kind and it is valuable. At the same time, it is not a self-runner. In my opinion, museums, especially art museums, would have to explain more about why a particular exhibition dispenses with interactive and technological elements. That this disturbs the ‘aura’ cannot be the killer argument.

Georges Bataille, who really cannot be accused of treating art with disrespect, made it clear almost 100 years ago: the real content of a museum is not the works, but its visitors. Indeed, that seems to me to be central, and this has its own history. Over the past decades, committed curators have said, at least in the case of “theme exhibitions,” that they are concerned with bringing the diversity of artistic positions into one space. Today, I would say, it’s at least as much about bringing together different groups of visitors and their expectations in one exhibition space. This requires a completely different understanding of the works and their role as attractors of diverse perspectives on the world. A technology for mediation can be just as important as a work of art; this can only be decided on a case by case basis. This is the ongoing curatorial task that I understand as “thinking in space.”

P.B. - When I talk about technology and how technology can facilitate mediation and active participation, I talk about a different way of relating to technology. The technology the museum mainly uses like the audio-guides is still the kind of technology that pertains to a word-based society: Habermas’ public society in which the written and spoken word was the rule and with it cognitive attributes like memorization and concentration. Today we have moved to an image-based society, in which different cognitive attributes are at play, like short-span attention and multitasking, especially among young audiences. And these audiences want to go beyond merely watching: they want to participate. And we can think of an app that allows you to engage with the Mona Lisa or Las Meninas and allows you to explore the different parts of the painting you want to, to read the information you want, and so on. A different way of seeing that allows an active participation. Because people want to participate and not passively keep watching. Besides, their cognitive abilities do not physically allow them to stand in front of a painting and look at it as we used to do. And in this sense, I don’t see the museum being very innovative and matching the needs of those young users.

D.T. - Yes and no. Certainly, Habermas’ discourse theory tends to overestimate linguistic rationality and is thus literally blind to visual or physical aspects and their implications. Nevertheless, an audio guide could also consist of linguistically pointing out non-linguistic moments that are involved in the formation of judgment but are usually not specifically named. I admit that this rarely happens, but it is possible. In my opinion, it is precisely the image-based society with short attention spans that you have diagnosed that poses the immediate question of how and in which media it is possible to exchange opinions and disputes without merely repeating existing opinions and wishes. It is still advantageous to start from one medium as a reference.

One more point: you are talking about what visitors want today. That presupposes that you yourself know what you want and that these wishes have to be served. I don’t think that’s the job of a curator. And if so, it seems to me to produce a redundancy or an overload. For me, participation means first of all taking the diversity of perspectives seriously and respecting each one and weighing up their place in the exhibition. To do this, I rummage through all kinds of theories and points of view on behalf of the later visitors, research artifacts, conduct countless conversations, etc., in order to compose an exhibition from them, in which visitors can enter into conversation with each other (or with themselves).

THE MUSEUM AS COMMUNITY PLACE

P.B. - Nina Simone, in her book The Participatory Museum, asked how cultural institutions can reconnect with the public and demonstrate their value and relevance in contemporary life. Her answer was that she believed that this could happen by inviting people to actively engage as cultural participants, not passive consumers. How can we, in your opinion, make the visitor more participative and active? In short: a more audience-centered institution.

D.T. - In Germany, Nora Sternfeld has argued in a similar direction with reference to Jacques Rancière. On the one hand, I am very much in favor of understanding the museum as a community place and strengthening this role. On the other hand, the museum is an exceptional place in that it-in the best case-performs a cultural technique: the distancing from oneself with the help of various artifacts and the affects associated with them. “Curating” represents an expertise of its own, which should in principle be open to everyone, but which no one has just like that, but which requires practice and concrete knowledge. Participation alone does not make a good exhibition, and as a curator, I cannot escape responsibility by outsourcing it as participation. From a curatorial point of view, it is always about strategies of self-disability. As soon as something seems completely evident and self-evident to me, something goes wrong.

P.B. - Let´s talk about your curatorial practice. From what I see, you curate mainly group shows centered around one specific topic. Your shows require quite some research in general depending on the subject you address at each particular moment: wealth, friendship, shame, fakeness. Before we talk about some of these shows in particular, I would like to ask you to elaborate on your curatorial perspective.

D.T. - The term “group shows” only exists in the field of art museums, and I am no more or less interested in them than in other types of museums. For me, exhibitions do not primarily consist of an assembly of artistic positions; I find that too restrictive. I don’t mean that as a criticism of the works of art, but of curatorial practice. It de facto excludes broad sections of the population, and sometimes I have the feeling that this is what is intended: art as a means of distinction. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested above all in questions and contradictions that—in principle—concern all people. For these I would like to create a structure (”Gefüge”) in the space in which the different attitudes, the ways of seeing and dealing with a theme or question complement, comment on and argue with each other. Works of art can play an important role in this, but for me this is not certain from the outset. Sometimes it makes more sense to operate with objects from cultural history, for example, or to dispense with exhibits altogether. But the decision for one or the other is only made in the course of an intensive discussion with a topic. When I think about “friendship,” for example, I first try to find out how many different points of view there are about it and, above all, on what foundations these points of view are based. For me, curating then means forming a texture (”Gewebe”) from these perspectives. It also includes the place where I exhibit, the traditions in which this place stands and the expectations that are connected with it. I always try not only to serve these expectations, but to work with them and transform them.

P.B. - I have also seen that some of your shows are for spaces that are not typical art spaces, like the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden. How does the typology of the space affect and fuel your curatorial practice?

D.T. - The Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden is a very special case. Even if the (historically based) name suggests otherwise, this museum has the widest possible thematic spectrum. There have been legendary art exhibitions, such as “The Ten Commandments,” but also very interactive participatory exhibitions and a permanent exhibition that provides information on topics such as nutrition, sexuality or hygiene in an educational way. I’ve curated there several times, and in a certain way it’s the easiest and most difficult at the same time. Because the house has such a broad range of themes and possible types of exhibitions and an almost equally diverse clientele, it is not at all easy to define criteria for one’s own curatorial approach. On the other hand, the museum management there allows me a degree of freedom that I have rarely experienced otherwise. The exhibition on “wealth” you mentioned, for instance, I conceived of as a satire and literally as a journey on a cruise ship built into the museum-inspired by the ship as a social metaphor and books like D.F. Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again or Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man. Classical museum exhibits played a subordinate role in this.

P.B. - In 2011-2012 you curated a show titled “WUNDER. Kunst, Wissenschaft und Religion vom 4 Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart” (”WONDER. Art, Science and Religion from 5^th Century till Today”) at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg and the Siemens Foundation. What was the idea behind it?

D.T. - At the time, the Siemens Stiftung asked us (I was working with two colleagues at the time) whether we wanted to do an interdisciplinary exhibition. Neither the theme nor the location were fixed, it just needed to have some kind of connection to Siemens. Now Siemens stands for big industry and technology, both of which I am not so much interested in. Then it occurred to me that just a few decades ago people were talking about the “miracle of technology,” although that is obviously an oxymoron. I followed this lead, and after some time it became clear to me that the term “miracle” really helps to understand how and why the Christian Occident has produced this strange amalgam of science, art and religion. This was the theme. The place was not yet fixed. It was only when it became clear that the exhibition would take place in the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, an established venue for contemporary art, that the focal points at the exhibit level and the concrete objectives became clear. My goal: It should be an exhibition that inspires as many people as possible for contemporary art. The result was a course of almost 4,000 square meters that wove a dense network of exhibits. It was important to me to make a strict separation between artworks (there were more than 150 to be seen) and other exhibits. The latter had the role of providing basic information that helped visitors to get closer to the artistic work. They did not explain them, but the cultural-historical and scientific exhibits posed questions that could also be put to the works. I deliberately included a number of works of art in the exhibition that I personally do not find so important, but it was clear to me that these artworks help people to find a way to contemporary art. I know that some curators resented me for this, and in some cases there were arguments with the director of the museum, but I think it was the right decision. The exhibition was a great success, and visitor surveys have shown that the proportion of first-time visitors to the Deichtorhallen was very high, and I was particularly pleased about that.

INTERDISCIPLINARY EXHIBITS

P.B. - Another show you did in 2016 at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden was about shame: ”Scham. 100 Gründe, rot zu werden” (Shame: 100 Reasons for Becoming Red). This was an interdisciplinary show with artworks, but also artifacts, documents and so on. How do you see the relationship between shame and our cultural and artistic values?

D.T. - The exhibition “Shame” was an experiment in the greatest possible involvement of art and science, in this case especially medicine and ethnology and their entanglements. I developed a tour with a fixed sequence of paths, which I usually avoid, and a spatial architecture that involved constant observation of the visitors by other visitors: views, one-way mirrors, reflections. I separated the object genres: the cultural-historical exhibits were located in the central “knowledge machine” that runs through all the rooms. Depending on every exhibition section, there was a sculpture of the human body, from Venus de’ Medici to Terence Koh. It was important to me to show that sculpture as an artistic form is almost always a representation of shame and pride and the respective possibilities of their cultivation.

If I understood your question correctly, it also aims at the fundamental connection between shame and our cultural values. Let me put it this way: the naked person is not the truth of a person; you only become a human being when you put on a mask and assume a role. It is not without reason that theology understands shame as the glory (”Glanz”) of God’s grace, that is, a second skin that surrounds us human beings. And it is formed from culture. That was the actual theme of the exhibition.

For the exterior walls I had selected artistic video works, all of which played with the form of documentary film-from Valie Export to Leigh Ledare. This level was important to me, so that the visitors didn’t put on their art glasses from the outset, which often led to an aestheticization of the reception, whereas many works had a clearly political trait. In the current exhibition, I once saw two 14-year-old boys watching Eric van Lieshout’s film Rotterdam - Rostock, completely spellbound. That was a happy moment forme.

P.B. - And a more recent show was titled  ”FAKE. Die gaze Wahrheit” (”FAKE: The Whole Truth”) at the Stapferhaus Lenzburg in Switzerland. With the advent of Trump and Brexit it seemed a very timely topic. Tells us a bit about the philosophy behind it and the artists included.

D.T. - Again you ask for the artists, as if this were the normal case or the one where an exhibition can best be explained or located. I must disappoint you, there were no artists involved in “FAKE.” That was also due to the location. The Stapferhaus had been given a new, quite wonderful building that was to be used for the first time. I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity and rededicate the house directly and literally turned it into an office (”Amt”). Here then, in a way, everything was participation, because the visitors were declared employees of the office. The “chief official,” in the form of the well-known actor Martin Wuttke, gave an introduction in the form of a film, and afterwards all visitors were able to move through the long corridors with countless doors, behind which there were various subdivisions that traced the theme of truth and lies. By asking the visitors to give their assessments of various lie stories, a constantly updated opinion about the social attitude towards the fragile boundary between truth and lie was determined and evaluated on large screens. In this way, it was quickly realized that the lie is not simply the opposite of truth. For me, this was also an attempt to bring the contradiction between scientific and social truth into the room, in order to counteract many a debate that was very narrowly focused. Of course, current topics such as “Fake News”were also discussed in detail, but they were part of a more comprehensive topic.

CONCEPT-BASED EXHIBITIONS AND BROADER AUDIENCES

P.B. - While the former shows seem to tackle general sentiments or affects like wonder, shame or fakeness, your latest show you co-curated with Philipp Oswalt was of a different take: “Bauhaus / documenta. Vision und Marke” (”Bauhaus / documenta. Vision and Brand”) at the Neue Galerie in Kassel. The Bauhaus movement and the documenta exhibition are two of Germany’s more known institutions. The comparison is surprising to say the least. How did this come about?

D.T. - The idea of the small exhibition was that both the Bauhaus and the documenta reacted to catastrophes of civilization. The Bauhaus against the background of the First World War, the documenta against the background of the Second. And both had the ambition to have an orienting and educational effect on people. What connects the two otherwise very different large-scale projects is precisely this belief: that a different way of living and a different design, or that dealing with (contemporary) art leads to an improvement in the social sphere. The crucial question here is that of mediation/education (”Vermittlung”): what should be mediated here, and how exactly? Particularly for the history of the documenta, it can be shown that from 1972 onwards, mediation became an area in its own right, which has always been perceived with particular ambivalence. This ambivalence has interested me in the subject, because the claim and reality of both “brands” are far apart. If you look at the group of buyers of Bauhaus products and the group of visitors to the documenta, you see social distinctions. Particularly interesting in this respect is the role of the leading curators of the documenta, who each have different strategies for responding to the challenge ofmediation/education.

P.B. - Are these concept-based exhibitions about certain specific topics like shame, wonder, fakeness et al a way of reaching a larger audience and not specifically an art-specialized one? Is this a premeditated strategy? Also, is the idea of working with spaces other than the typical modern museum and the contemporary art center as well?

D.T. - Indeed, the exhibitions are intended to appeal to a broad public. It is often an advantage to choose themes and titles that are low-threshold and appeal to many people and arouse their curiosity. That doesn’t mean that what then happens on site is populist or low-level. Quite the opposite: here you can deal with your own certainties, get to know their reasons and thus put them into perspective and get to know and perhaps even appreciate other certainties. The fact that exhibitions in which I was involved often took place in places that are unusual for art also has to do with the fact that art museums are afraid to open their rooms to exhibits/objects that are not art (unless they are parts of a work of art or an artist who provides them). I have realized exhibitions like “Schmerz” (”Pain”) in Hamburger Bahnhof and at Museum für Gegenwartskunst or “Fire and Forget” at Kunst Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, both classical art locations, but not without a discussion with the respective management. Basically, I curate exhibitions wherever I am allowed to. My goal is then to make the place interesting for a broader range of visitors without compromising the identity of the house. That’s always a borderline activity, and that’s a good thing because the museum in itself is a threshold institution.

P.B. - Finally, I as a curator who likes to curate concept-based exhibitions like you, have on occasion been accused of using artists and their works to illustrate my particular point of view. What do you think of this critique that curators have to bear from time to time?

D.T. - I do think that you always have to be aware that works of art are special objects that should be treated accordingly. This certainly includes that one must not functionalize them as illustrations or limit their horizon of interpretation. Nevertheless, one cannot simply speak of an either/or here. The transitions are fluid. Even an unsuspicious exhibition like, say, “Picasso and His Time” is already the result of an otherwise invisible pre-selection by the curators, and every thematic exhibition already represents a limitation of the possibilities of reception. There’s no other way, and that’s why it’s not a flaw, but a condition of possibility. I tend to go on the offensive: if I suggest a perspective on a work of art I’m exhibiting, I always say that it’s my suggestion. That kind of thing provokes a contradiction, and I like that. All in all, however, in thematic exhibitions that work with various museum object genres, I tend to show works of art that broaden the field, that, despite all the knowledge they convey, refer to possible other contexts and horizons or “only” convey that something is expressed in them that would otherwise have no expression in our language and perception. This is and remains the greatest thing about art, and it is not negotiable.

P.B. - Well, for me it happens that it’s very often the work of art that triggers the exhibition. By seeing different artworks that deal with the same topic I get the idea to systematize it and try to convey an umbrella concept for these works. So it’s basically the artist who gives me the idea and not me looking for works to illustrate an idea. I think it works both ways. Thank you for this fruitful exchange.

Paco Barragán is a PhD candidate at the University of Salamanca (USAL) in Spain and the former visual arts curator of Centro Cultural Matucana 100 in Santiago, Chile. He recently curated “Juan Dávila: Painting and Ambiguity” (MUSAC, 2018), “Arturo Duclos: Utopia´s Ghost” (MAVI, 2017) and “Militant Nostalgia” (Toronto, 2016). He is the author of The Art to Come (Subastas Siglo XXI, 2002) and The Art Fair Age (CHARTA, 2008).