This French museum found its collection particularly conducive to sharing online
Marie-Caroline Chaudruc talks about directing Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art amid pandemic.
What does it mean to a museum whose collection prioritizes concept over art object to have to shut its doors amid pandemic? For Marie-Caroline Chaudruc, director of Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art in France, the key was to get back to the roots of the collection.
The museum, set within a medieval castle, exhibits what it calls the largest collection in the world of works from the Art & Language movement. “As early as 1968, Art & Language questioned the necessity of the art object and refocused the foundation of the artistic approach on concepts,” Chaudruc said. “Their radical stance, which broke with Modernism, marked a turning point in the history of art, which would pave the way for the birth of contemporary art.”
Sunset on the Loire river, as seen from the castle/Wikipedia.
I’ve never visited the institution, which Chaudruc described as a “young museum in an old building.”
“It is impossible to describe a museum, and even less a collection. If I describe the museum objectively with reference to the functional character of the building, I will bore you. If I describe it emotionally, you will accuse me of being subjective. If I describe our public, I will be statistical. If I describe the museum’s collection with data, I will be restrictive. If I describe each of its works, I will be exhaustive,” she said.
The unexpected arrival of the pandemic “accelerated the dichotomy between the virtual and physical world,” and it couldn’t be business as usual at museums, which were used to showing works in person to visitors, according to Chaudruc.
“Within a few weeks, the place that was responsible for establishing the connection between the work of art and the public—the buildings—could no longer assume this intermediary function,” she said.
So she and her colleagues asked themselves if artwork can come to viewers when viewers cannot come to museums. “The conceptual nature of Art & Language’s works made it possible to circulate them digitally and without geographical limits,” she said.
The museum’s exhibit “Home from Home”—an exhibition kit downloadable on the museum website, and consisting of 12 Art & Language works to be printed out, assembled, and installed in viewers’ homes— was born in May 2020.
“This operation was a great success, because the museum took over the domestic space and confronted the inhabitants with a curatorial practice,” Chaudruc said.
Credit: Marie-Caroline Chaudruc
“The pandemic has led us to question the permanence of art, exhibitions, institutions in general, outside the physical world. We cannot and must not go back,” she said. “The digital revolution initiated in the 2000s is now practically complete. The last stage, that of the abolition of copyright, should free the circulation of contemporary art and allow everyone to consume it without limit.”
Chaudruc came about her interest in contemporary art late, she said, having grown up in a provincial town devoid of contemporary art. One day she saw a video in a private collection of a Marina Abramović performance—eating a raw onion—and the work made an impression on her.
“I don’t yet know if beauty begins where language stops, but this event gave direction to the years that followed,” she said.
After her studies (human sciences) and extensive travel, she decided to live “where contemporary artists had one day fully expressed their creativity to the world, in the Val de Loire.” She assumed management of the museum in 2016, immediately before it opened to the public.
“In a way, I am trying to recreate the conditions, so that each of our visitors can in turn experience the moment that I had the chance to experience in front of Marina Abramović’s work,” she said. (That Abramović has protected her own copyrights in court raises interesting questions going forward for the kind of transformed museum, inspired by the Serbian artist, which Chaudruc imagines.)