Museum Dreams
James Harithas

In the mid sixties, I had a dream that I was standing in an enormous, almost totally empty, and uniformly lit museum interior. There were several other visitors at some distance from me who appeared to be looking intently at the blank white walls. Somehow I realized that they were looking closely at something only they could see. In response to my own silent request, the wall before me dematerialized. The pyramids of Egypt appeared, then disappeared as I requested Autumn Rhythm by Jackson Pollock. The Pollock gave way to the cathedral at Chartres. I began to play catch with art history—The Ghent Altar by Van Eyck, Matisse’s chapel at Vence, and others—and before I awoke, I saw my virtual self enter an ancient city that looked like a set for a Cecil B. DeMille movie spectacle.

At a reception in Washington, D.C., I heard John Walker, the founding director of the National Gallery of Art, tell Mark Rothko that he looked forward to the day when one of Rothko’s paintings would hang in the National Gallery. In those days, the artist was expected to be dead for twenty-five years before he or she was honored. Rothko’s reply was biting: “I have no interest in putting my work in your Gallery. The National Gallery is nothing but a quick tourist trip to Europe.” The year was 1968, four years after my dream.

Rothko was right on target. When I think back to my dream, I realize that my subconscious art images were textbook “tourist” stuff. In a similar way, the problem with most of our art museums is the severe limitations of their European art history bias. They focus primarily on an exclusionary history and aesthetics, and rarely on the wider social, political, spiritual, or personal dimensions of art. They either ignore the art of minorities and outsiders or subordinate it to the art of Europe and New York.

As Houston’s museums were established, they were quick to trade in their Texas heritage for imported cultural ideas and values from New York and Paris. They focused their exhibitions and collections on the established European past and on the fashionable East Coast present, largely ignoring Texas artists, black and Latino artists, and women artists. Less than one-third of the population of Houston has European roots, but its major city museums are filled to the brim with relatively minor works of European art and fashionable or academic art from New York. The exception is The Menil Collection, not only because of its African collection and the major works in its extraordinary Surrealist collection, but also because of John and Dominique de Menil’s passionate commitment to civil and human rights. Nevertheless, for roughly sixty percent of the city there is next to nothing in these museums for them, that is, nothing to identify with or be proud of. By rejecting Texas culture and by collecting so narrowly, Houston’s art institutions lost the uniqueness that they easily could have had, but more importantly, they lost the potential to unify an increasingly diverse city.

What distinguished Texas from the rest of the country was that it had a culture of its own. The cuisine and the machismo were Mexican, and the melodious drawl and distinctive blues style were black. The wonderful sense of independence and the all-out exuberance—the hooting, hollering, honky-tonking, and country music—had their roots in the frontier spirit of the state’s earliest days. Some of this independent spirit still exists in Texas, but now it finds expression only in the desperado lives of drug dealers and of immigrants from third world frontiers, and in the courageously independent artwork of Texas artists like Luis Jimenez, Roy Fridge, Mel Chin, Madeline O’Connor, Julian Schnabel, Celia Munoz, Mark Lombardi, and Jesse Lott, among others.

Texas Southern University, the black community’s intellectual center, boasts one of the country’s most ambitious art programs, founded by John Biggers. The university recently opened an excellent museum devoted in large part to the artwork of Biggers’ students. Another recent, internationally celebrated development to come out of this community is Project Row Houses. This groundbreaking organization provides homes, a daycare center, and a library and resources for unwed mothers. It also functions as a kunsthalle for artists of all stripes. Under the able leadership of artist Rick Lowe, Project Row Houses has opened itself to all of the citizenry of Houston, successfully breaking down racial barriers.

While Mexican-Americans comprise more than one third of Houston’s population, only a tiny selection of Mexican or Chicano work appears in any of its museum collections. Addressing this situation, the little known Mexican-American cultural center, Talento Bilingue de Houston, sponsors high-quality Latino/Chicano cultural events and art events. Their particular success is Nuestro Palabra, a nationally recognized program that supports Latino writers.

Houston’s Artcar Museum has created an additional alternative for cultural activity by focusing on Houston’s art car phenomenon, on artists who are concerned with civil society issues, and on those remarkably creative Texas artists who have languished in obscurity. The Artcar Museum’s goal is to resuscitate the spirit of independence as the fundamental cultural unifier in Houston and in Texas.

As a result of the oil boom of the late seventies to mid eighties, new residents immigrated to Houston from all parts of the country, particularly from the South and the depressed North. Young people from the country in Texas flocked to Houston, and there was a large influx of workers from Mexico as well as refugees escaping either Vietnam or the ravages of the U.S. government-sponsored wars in Central America. The north side of the city became a place where Indians from the deepest jungles of Peten were thrown together with students from Guatemala and El Salvador. Today Houston remains segregated along racial lines. The city’s major museums, the opera, and the theater are overwhelmingly white. I am reminded of Tsarist Russia where only the aristocracy had access to the instruments of high culture. For the cultural establishment, dealing with this transformation is the challenge that lies ahead.

I had a second museum dream during the Gulf War. I was standing at the center of a gigantic geodesic dome. Full-size images of the Capitol, the White House, the Pentagon, demonstrators, and civilian war dead surrounded me. Overhead, giant locusts swarmed to the grinding sound of heavy machinery. I stood transfixed until I discovered that I could install images of my own choosing into the mix—a monumental statue of the Virgin rising from the center of the Pentagon, a blood fountain in front of the White House, the great Buddhist shrine Borobodur on the Hill. Before long, other museum visitors joined me, putting their own images into my museum dream: dream cars, shopping malls, and movie stars. Impelled by an irresistible desire to return to the real world, I exited the museum only to find myself on the dark side of a planet without an atmosphere. Slightly above eye level, the planet earth was visible, shining green among the stars.

Both dreams functioned at the intersection of actual space, video space, and virtual space, providing a conceptual framework for an interactive and truly democratic art museum, programmed not only by professionals but also by artists and museum visitors. Once it becomes practical, such an approach would reinvigorate the museum as a community meeting place—a place where artistic solutions are applied to everyday experiences. This kind of museum could also focus on video art, on the electronic creations of the cybernetic avant-garde, on conceptual art, and on projects that communicate not only new ideas but also new ways of making and viewing art. Such a museum has the potential to provide civil society with the unbiased, non-commercial cultural information that the country needs to reform itself into a truly enlightened society.

I am not suggesting that museums abandon their traditional role of collecting and exhibiting European and American art, only that they should not be shortsighted about the museum’s role in a culturally diverse society. As a community institution, a museum should be concerned with a range of issues from homelessness, racism, and pollution, to political and corporate corruption, to defining and protecting freedom of speech and visual expression. The museum should find ways to communicate these concerns through its exhibitions and programs. A museum’s creativity is ultimately reflected in the freedom given to its curators and the contribution to the education of its public. Exhibitions brought into the community from outside should not simply reflect the fashionable tastes of the board of trustees or the recent trends of New York’s influential museums. A small exhibition from Mexico could in fact be more meaningful to a community in Texas than a blockbuster from New York.

Neither of my dreams began with the museum episodes. Rather they ended there, when fearful montages of war, terror, and death dissolved into these dream museums. In my dreams, as in my waking life, the museum is the haven of the imagination. It is a palace of sensuous and metaphysical delight. At the same time, it is an arena where hard-fought ideas and profound emotions serve society’s sense of beauty and its conscience. It should not be a place where history is sanitized. In this regard, the anti-war, anti-nuclear expressions of several generations of artists are rarely, if ever, seen in U.S. museums. Must Picasso’s Guernica be the only enduring symbol of a century of war and destruction? At the very least, the museum visitor should expect delightful surprises, visual discontinuities, and moral insights, not fashion statements, propaganda, and limited histories.

We are living in a time when democracy is endangered by increased government control and overt corporate influence. In-depth criticism of fundamental museum policies and its increasingly corporate funding sources is almost missing from museum discourse. Worse still is the spineless and increasingly reactionary orientation of many of the nation’s, including Houston’s, museums. Have museum directors and curators forgotten that the artworks that do not “fit the mold” often contain the ideas that reinvigorate the culture? Have they lost their ability to enter a dream?

Copyright©2000 James Hathas