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space of unending eternity: The aura of the museum behaves in keeping with a museum.
It is no longer possible to separate the framework from the contents, the exhibition: The
museum is no longer able to exhibit without putting itself (self-consciously) on show. In
the exhibition Les Immateriaux at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, its subject, the
increasing tuming-into-light (Verlichtung) in contemporary arts, questioned the materiality
of the gallery and the museum itself. The museum of the future - which has dawned
already - will no longer be the solid mausoleum of art and history, but a spatial abyss
punctuated by electronic screens. Sure, it still is a very material effort which results in an
immaterial materiality: Les Immateriaux was staged at substantial material expense, and
a reminder of this is the technological wear and tear of, say, a recorder in video installations;
but here, the effect sublimely blanks out the technology. The museum will continue
to deceive the senses. But where once it installed objects, there now immaterialism
is on the agenda, the relation without substance. There is an alternative in the radical abstinence
from narrative arrangement, the withdrawal to the concept of traces. In the Munich
Kunstverein, Gerhard Merz put on show - apart from a painting of Saint Sebastian
being killed by arrows of looks - the questioning of the (art) history of the museum itself
in the shape of the letters: DOVE STA MEMORIA?, flanked by mirrors that reflected a
gallery space structured by the play of light from the windows. Where is the place of memory?
In spite of an identifiable museum history, the isolated letters of this question formed
an answer: the surrender of memory to its significants, the immemorial.
Walter Benjamin's theory of the age of the technological reproducibility of art is no
longer able to cope with today's electronic data flow. Whilst the photographic reproduction
of objects still conveyed the illusion of an object, its electronic recording meant its
change into simulacra of the real itself. Not only is electronics recording the objects, it
also declares the age of the concrete, history: The era of material production is drawing
to an end and will disappear entirely 42 . Even historical documents amount to deception
since holograms of objects in museums still perfectly simulate the aura of the original.
Such holograms could be transmitted anytime via telephone lines: available anytime,
they undermine the hallowed status of the museum as a privileged place (store) of great
masterpieces, just as Andre Malraux's photo-based Imaginary Museum no longer exhibits
the individual work of art like the classical museum, but- in the spirit of Wölfflin - brings
out the style by facilitating comparative reading. This, then, does not require the singular
work in the museum, but a repertoire of pictures, an archive. And that means: less
museum, more storage." 3 Hal Foster takes this idea further and asks
whether-because in the age of electronic data processing, a system based on images
and texts equalises all the in-put data into digital units - Malraux's Museum without
Walls [...] will be replaced by an archive without museum [...], a system of images and
text, a database of digital terms 44
- where aesthetic differences are simply functions of storage technology.
The Monitor Scene
Pictorial media art can be transmitted - indistinguishable in its appearance from the original
- to every household. As a retro-effect, this circumstance is making inroads into
contemporary museum planning itself: A proposal of the Stuttgart Laboratory for Archi-
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