history of museums could be written that would reveal the museum to

be a series of utopian projects. It is the capacity to imagine a world in a

particular key that distinguishes the utopian imagination, no matter
what the medium of expression. While utopia in the strict sense of the
word is a literary genre--Sir Thomas Mores Utopia (1516) is the locus
classicus--the utopian imagination is by no means confined to what can
be expressed in writing. How do museums engage the utopian
imagination and how do their methods differ from those of literary
utopias? The museum is at once an architectural form, a concrete
environment for reflection, a reservoir of tangibilities, a school for the
senses, a space of conviviality, an autopoetic system, and a projection of
the ideal society, notwithstanding the amply documented tensions
between the utopian ideal of the museum and its instrumentalizations
Both literary utopias and museums are engaged in worldmaking. They
engage the imagination in the possibility of a complete and perfect
universe. During the Renaissance, both utopia and museum were
imagined as circular, set apart, and ordered: utopia was an ideally
governed island, the ideal museum was a domed rotunda on a
mountaintop.1 When envisioned in terms of its collection, the ideal
museum was a Noahs Ark, with a complete set of specimens providing
the entire DNA needed to regenerate the world in its entirety, or a
Temple of Solomon, imagined as a miniature world, a complete archive
of knowledge, and a treasure house
While all utopian worlds are built out of other worlds, only better, the
museum literally takes the world apart at its joints, collects the pieces,
and holds them in suspension. Identified, classified, and arranged,
objects withdrawn from the world and released into the museum are
held in a space of infinite recombination. A refuge for things and people
literally, a building dedicated to the muses and the arts they inspire, a
space in which to muse, to be inspired--the museum puts people and
things into a relationship quite unlike anything encountered in the world
outside. The museum brings past, present, and future together in ways
distinctly its own. It is a theatre in the root sense of the word, from the
theater (Greek: thetron) as a space structured to accommodate
viewers, and theory (Greek: theri), which links viewing with
contemplation or speculation. But the museum is also theater in the
sense of dramaturgy, stagecraft, and performance, as Donald Preziosi
explores in his contribution to this volumen
Let us recover the protean nature of museum in the spirit of a Renaissance
idea of the museum as the axis through which all other structures of
collection, categorizing, and knowing intersected; interweaving with words,
images, and things it provided a space common to all. 3 According to Paula
Findlen, the Renaissance notion of museum defined imaginary space[and]
was a methodological premise that translated itself into a wide variety of social
and cultural forms.4 The many terms by which it was known are indicative of
the ways in which an expansive notion of museum allowed it to cross and
confuse the intellectual and philosophical categories of biblioteca, thesaurus,
and pandechion with visual constructs such as cornucopia and gazophylacium,
and spatial constructs such as studio, casino, cabinet/gabinetto, galleria and
theatro.5 The museum was a theatrum (or domus) sapientiae, a theatrum
mundi, a microcosm. It was a treasure, mirror, forest, and archive. 6 As a
physical entity, the museum might take the form of a free-standing cabinet, a
room, a building, a garden, or a book, which provided a defined space for the
gathering and arranging of objects and the contemplation or study of them,
whether according to a pastoral or monastic ideal. Whatever it was called and
whatever form it took, the museum was above all an idea and a set of
practices.

Both utopia and the museum are an art practice. As Michael Fehr makes clear
in his contribution to this volume, the art museum is in a special position
because the very idea of art is itself linked to utopian ideals. The faith in the
power of art to make the world a better place animated the nineteenth-century
Arts and Crafts movement, the Hagen Impulse at the turn of that century, and
the various twentieth-century avant-gardes (Futurism, Surrealism,
Expressionism). These movements and those that have followed continue to
alter the very nature of the museum itself, by intervening in its physical and
social fabric, challenging its ability to accommodate new kinds of art, and
questioning the nature of art and of the museum in relation to society, as it is
and as it might be imagined. Art and the museum are mutually constitutive.

As an art practice, the museum is marked by concreteness, materiality, and

performance. It is a making that is a doing. This making is no less speculative
for being so concrete. Thus, the museum is not simply a place for representing
utopia, but rather a site for practicing it as a way of imagining. This is the basis
for the Museutopia project at the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum. The approach is,
to use Gregory L. Ulmers formulation, heuretic, rather than hermeneutic,
experimental and constructive rather than exegetical and anatomical: as Ulmer
explains, the artists demonstrate the consequences of the theories for the arts
by practicing the arts themselves, generating models of prototypes that
function critically as well as aesthetically. The vanguardist does not analyze
existing art but composes alternatives to it (or uses it as a step toward
achieving alternatives).7 Ulmer proposes to make a theory of method by
bringing together critical interpretation and artistic experimentation, precisely
the program of Museutopia.8

While literary utopias locate their imagined perfect society in a purely

imaginative space, the museum as we know it is both located somewhere and
locational. It is a place and it places, which is essential to its power to mobilize
memory. The museum is a place of deep, not dead, storage. Because, says
Aristotle, in order to remember things, it suffices to recognize the place where
they happen to be (place is therefore the element of an association of ideas, of
a conditioning, of a training, of a mnemonics). 9 The museum as Mnemosyne,
mother of the muses and of memory itself, not only spares the past from
oblivion, saves it for future recall, calls forth and calls back, rememberslest
we forget. The museum is also a place of experience that actively works with
and on memory, which is precisely what Proust so loved about it. Adorno
captures this idea when he writes that He adores museums as though they
were Gods true creation, which in Prousts metaphysics is never complete but
always occurring anew in each concrete experience, each original artistic
intuition.10 This is the museum as force field between subject and object,
with memory the mediating term: works of art return home when they become
elements of the observers subjective stream of consciousness. 11 The same
can be said for many other kinds of objects in museum.

The disjointed world brought into the museum, its pieces arranged in space, is
defined by gaps (gaps in the record, gaps in the collection, gaps in the
narrative) and by leaps (intuitive leaps, poetic leaps, leaps of faith). The gaps,
the air between things, are not simply voids. They are openings. The creator of
the Dennis Severs House in Spitalfields, London, an eighteenth-century house
inhabited by a felt, but never seen, fictional Huguenot family, asks, rhetorically,
In fact, is itthe space between thingsnot as strong as, if not stronger, than
anything else?... The Space Between is the invisible, shared third element that
lies between any two sides.12 This still-life drama, which is how Severs
characterizes his creation, is not to be mistaken for an historic house or set of
period rooms. It is rather an opera in as many acts as there rooms, each filled
with tangible indices of unseen presences and actions interrupted (a half-eaten
pear, a fresh pie, one slice removed, a glass of wine just poured, the rustle of a
curtain, sound of door closing, a creaking floor board) and the intangibles of
heavy air, pale light, flickering fire, cold draft, perfect stillness: The experience
is conducted in silence, and its level is poetic; and like anything soit works
best on those who are endowed, willing and able to meet it halfway. The
houses motto is You either see it or you dont. Post-materialist, it seeks to
remind a visitor of a scientific thing: that what we cannot see is essential to
what we do.13

In contrast with the printed page of the Encyclopdie and of literary utopias,
the disposition of things and persons in the space of the museum organizes the
sensory experience of a mobile observer. This experience calls for spatial and
kinetic intelligence, for an ability to think with and within a materialized space
of a very special kind. The senses are intelligent. The body knows. Facts are
felt. Curiosity is an emotion. Historian of science Lorraine Daston writes a
history of curiosity (and its emotional structure) in relation to the other
emotions as a way of illuminating the history of science in the early modern
period. As curiosity shifted its position in the European map of the emotions
from a close proximity to lust and pride, to a similarly close relationship to
greed and avarice, the curious object came to be associated with the
exoticbizarre, beautiful, rare, novel, monstrous, diverse, small, detailed,
hidden.20 Wonder arose from an ignorance of causes, but a major shift occurred
from a divine explanation of what were viewed as marvels and miracles to a
search for natural causes and the understanding that Without wonder, there
would be no curiosity, and without curiosity, no science. 21

Museums are important here, first, because those with long histories and old
collections are in a good position to illuminate the history of how intellectual
work is saturated with moral, emotional and aesthetic elements at a collective,
and not just biographical level.22 Museums are not only instruments for the
shaping of sensibility, as Tony Bennett and others have argued, but also their
collections hold within them a history of sensibilities, their rise, demise, and
potential for recuperation.23 How might an older constellation of wonder,
curiosity, and intense attention animate the museum as a contemporary
utopian laboratory? This is an invitation to find the utopian potential of the
museum not only in the achievements of the past, but also in its history as a
materialized subjunctive space. It is in the museums capacity to provoke and
sustain speculation, reflection, retrospection, prospection, whether reasoned or
dreamed, that its utopian possibilities lie. What this might look like is suggested
by Lesley Sharp in the manifesto, in this volume, for the National Museum of
Museum and Industry, a family of museums, in the United Kingdom.

The collection is essential to the museum, as envisioned here, not only because
of the value of each and every object in it, but above all by virtue of being a
collection. True, the whole may be greater than the sum of the parts. But it is
the loosely jointed nature of that whole that makes the collection not only a
reservoir from which to draw but also an active field of infinite combinatory
potential, a space of coincidence, accident, and incident. And, a space of
information, if we define information (as cybernetics does) as a function of
unpredictabilityThe more predictable the message, the less information it
contains.24 How does the museum, despite its best efforts to create certainty,
produce unpredictability? Through fragmentation, aggregration, selection,
juxtaposition, connection, contrast, excess, and confusin.

If there are two major utopian models, one the reasoned, ordered world, the
other Bretons utopia of the dream, with all of its surrealist ideals, the
museums utopian potential draws from both. For Proust, the caesuras of the
museumthe severing of things from the world outsideis necessary for the
exhilarating happiness that can be had only in a museum, where the rooms, in
their sober abstinence from all decorative detail, symbolize the inner spaces
into which the artist withdraws to create the work. 25 The utopian quality of the
museum arises not only from the experience of individual works of art found
within its walls, but from the museum experience as an art form. This is an
autotelic experience, one that has its aim and its end, its telos, in itself, as is
also the case with play. Indeed, the autotelic is fundamental to the museum, as
a space of soft rather than hard mastery.

What is the nature of that space? Museums of all kinds are defined by an
arrangement of objects in space that requires the visitor to walk. Indeed, it
could be said that mobility is a defining feature of the museum and that
utopian possibilities lie hidden within the museums psychogeography, that is,
within the felt quality of its navigated space. However carefully planned, no
matter how many maps, signs pointing the way, footsteps painted on the floor,
or guards giving directions, the space of the museums is neither a seamless
continuity, nor a continuous surface. And, while the space of the museum may
seem overdetermined by its spatialized program and master narrative, it is
finally underdetermined. It must be navigated. Those who so desire can move
in ways not intended by the museums plan, letting chance play a part in the
creation of situations, giving disorientation a chance, and allowing uncertainty
in a rich environment to open one to surprise, to connections one makes for
oneself, to things that make ones heart beat faster, to dreamy
excitement.27

Above all, the utopian imagination is about visualizing and modeling, whether
in literary or material form. The utopian imagination catalyzes a kind of
envisioning, a kind of modeling, that reflects on what is, by projecting what
could be, either in the spirit of critique or in the hope of a transformative
program. Utopias at their most utopian are unrealizable. They are neither
models of something that already exists nor necessarily models for something
to be brought into being. Literary utopias are well suited to this ideal. So too
are museums.