Museo Reina Sofía’s program revolves around two main reflections. First, to reevaluate the function and constitution of museums today. Second, to ask ourselves if there is an alternative to historical models for this institution: alternatives to the modern museum arising in the 1920s, which portrayed a linear history based on exclusion, and to the postmodern museum proposed in the mid-1980s, in which conflict and dissent were subsumed by a new globalized world.
The Museum is not envisaged as an institution that exhibits universal, self-defined or privileged knowledge, but as a site capable of generating new spaces open to sociality and debate in the public sphere. In this sense, we must understand what models of resistance it offers to a society in which consumption and commodities abound in privatized space; a society in which production has been fragmented and dematerialized, jeopardizing not only an unprecedented geopolitical map, but new social classes, new histories, new subjectivities. Given this circumstance, the three lines of force proposed by the Museum are to question frameworks for alternative narrative(s) to modern history, to think through new forms of intermediation, and to reconsider the viewer—not as a passive subject or consumer, but as a political subject with agency.
Whereas a great number of cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries inscribed art history within grand master narratives that excluded any derivation from them, today we are faced with a pressing need to invent new forms of relating histories that interrogate these conceptual structures. This position calls for us to open up to “other” narratives and discuss the presence of other cultures or other ways of creating in our own practices, without fearing any hypothetical danger of fragmentation.
To understand this poetics of relating histories, we must keep in mind the notion of place. Place is not imagined as a static terrain, but as a field of vectors where the paradigm of dependence between center and periphery no longer makes sense; nor does it produce today, as it has so often in Spain, the revindication of the center from its margins.
History has gone from being written as though it were constituted by large continents to become a kind of archipelago. There are no longer centers or hegemonic histories in dispute, but narratives we have yet to establish and make visible within a shifting map of the arts. In traditional historiography, artists who might be considered secondary, derivative or simply overdue, like Oskar Schlemmer, José Val del Omar, Lygia Clark or Alice Creischer, reach their most complex dimension under this new consideration. Within this fabric of histories, however, the problem resides in that these “other” modernities are subaltern, so to speak. They do not have a voice, for they are required to obey the rules of the Western European world, proclaimed to be universal. In this sense, it is not enough to represent the other. The Museum is aware that forms of mediation must be invented to provide us with models and specific practices in solidarity between intellectual and subaltern communities and the diverse collectives comprising social movements.
Let us consider narrating the Museum's collection. How can memory be created from oral histories? How might we imagine a museum that does not monumentalize what it explains? One answer lies in thinking of the collection as an archive. An archive includes documents, books, magazines, photographs and other works on the same level. Thus, it shatters the aesthetic autonomy that separates art from history, repositions connections between objects and documents, opens up the possibility of discovering new terrain and entails a plurality of readings. The correlation generated between artistic activity and the archive produces displacements, derivations, alternative narratives and counter-models. It returns knowledge and aesthetic experience to us, as well as the opportunity to seize the historical moment.
The very significance of the Museum's collection may be weighed by its contribution to telling narratives that intertwine in a rhizomatic way. Giving a voice to the “other” implies that this other has the means to record and rethink one's own history, to tell it to us. Therefore, one of the key points in the Museum's program is to form a universal archive—a sort of archive of archives—that not only allows us to question property, but also lend a voice and listen to those who have none. It is fundamentally important that these histories multiply and circulate as much as possible. For, if the financial system in the society of late capitalism is based on shortage, then let us found a new narrative in excess, in an order that escapes accountable criteria. In this sense, those who receive these histories are undoubtedly richer, but those who yield (or narrate) them are no poorer. The question resides in constituting federations of free communities and associated subjects in a process that originates from below and discovers new territories to dissociate memory from property.
Finally, we must essentially rethink education, its objectives and conception in museums, as intrinsically tied to educating audiences while upholding that viewers are active subjects. The popularization of art centers in the past few decades alone has made it evident that this is a current and nevertheless, stagnant problem. Continuous debates on the low levels of education, on how institutions see themselves “forced” to address viewers who are increasingly less prepared, on the culture crisis when we are witnessing its most intense moment of distribution, these debates are derived from the association in modernity between education and learning as inscription. This form of modernity viewed education as a means of transmitting knowledge to those who do not possess it, thereby sustaining inequalities between those who know and those who do not. It established a separation between research and teaching, between the work of art and its significance, which presumes and maintains a certain distance between educators and viewers.
The Museum's program advocates education to show the revitalizing capacity of culture, the capacity we all possess to rediscover and redefine knowledge while eliminating hierarchies, given that knowledge is not needed to teach one another, nor is instruction required to learn. This comes about on several levels. On the one hand, the artwork is key in that it establishes a connection between the artist and viewer, or among two or more viewers. Artistic experience stirs the imagination of its viewers, leading us to relate to others and an environment that, albeit external to us, is not perceived as foreign. It makes us see ourselves as subjects and objects of others' perceptions, creating new and liberating spaces of sociability. On the other hand, instituting the Museum as a space for debate and research—by organizing seminars and the first official masters program for contemporary art in university-museum collaboration—abolishes the paternalist, subordinate concept of education. Collaboration endows learning with an entity unto itself and establishes a new dialog from mutual exchange, not dependence, between education and the Museum’s activities in exhibitions, its collection and public programming.
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