At the end of 2024 the Van Abbemuseum published the book 'The Museum is Multiple' as 'at once a case study of Charles Esche's directorship from 2004–24 and a richly illustrated archive of the period'.
I have some gripes with the book, stemming mostly from the book's lack of a broader perspective.
Esche himself reiterates in his introduction that the book was conceived as 'more of a critical case-study than a celebration or documentation of what was done' and while the book is a case-study of some kind, it can't be said that it's a critical one and at times reads more like a manifesto for the future.
It's impossible for me to discuss every single thing in need of nuance in the book, but I'd nevertheless wish to point out some recurring notions that I found disagreeable.
Firstly, there is a strong prejudice against the perceived provincialism of the museum, which seems to stem from Esche's well-publicised dissatisfaction with local politics. As he writes in the beginning of his introduction: 'In 1936, the Van Abbemuseum was a late entry to this world of museums, just as Eindhoven itself was late to industrialise, but it inevitably inherited the traditions that European museums had already acquired.' Which is kind of a peculiar statement. The deriding tone is obvious, but his view of the situation isn't related to the facts he presents.
It is made out by Esche that the Van Abbemuseum was a tardy and derivative entry to the world of museums, as exemplified by its founding in 1936. Yet if we actually look at some historic data, 1936 is not that late for an entry to the realm of modern art museums and was in fact rather typical and timely.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. was founded in 1937, and the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, now the Centre Pompidou, was only founded in 1947. The MoMA in New York was founded in 1929, but didn't have its own permanent building until 1939, three years after the Van Abbemuseum. Yet it is this MoMA that is seen as the drive behind a codified idea of modern art, as Esche writes: '[...] in the post-1945 period as the early artistic avant-garde began to be canonised and the concept of systematic and separate development of modern art spread from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the new outposts of US-shaped international art in Western Europe.' This is an overly simplistic view that, when written like this, is demonstrably false.
The original impulse for the MoMA came from a trip Alfred Barr took to Europe, where he was inspired by the Dutch museum culture, writing in a letter that 'nothing similar to Holland is possible at present in American museums' and 'to Americans, the success with which this policy of showing contemporary advanced work [in Dutch museums] has been carried out is a sad reminder, and perhaps a challenge.' The initial framework of the MoMA was thus based on Dutch museum policy, which according to Esche it would later help shape. I know the art world loves circular reasoning, but to present history in this way is just a gross misunderstanding of a factually complex interplay of various actors in and out of the artworld whose interests have shaped this quote-unquote canon.
Because those actors are always in motion, this canon, if it exists at all, is at best fluid and open to interpretation, yet the museum sees it as a singular static narrative. Christiane Berndes says: 'The museum was a museum: a white cube that represented the canon, or tried to represent the Western canon of modern art.' This idea of the canon is elaborated further by Annie Fletcher: 'I remember when I first came to the Netherlands, it felt like all European museums had an Anselm Kiefer, a Georg Baselitz, a Donald Judd. Modern museums seemed interchangeable.' From this we can glean that in their idea the 'canon' basically consists of the common denominators that can be found in the collections of 'modern museums', whatever those may be.
Yet one of the ways they attempt to remedy this problem of the canon is to introduce new people into the museum and their collection. When Esche is asked why Lily van der Stokker was invited to curate a series of exhibitions and acquisitions, he replied that 'she wasn't one of the Dutch artists that had been in the canon here, in the museum'. The simple fact is ignored that this was also true at one point for Kiefer, Baselitz and Judd. In fact, the Van Abbemuseum was the first European museum to host a solo exhibition of Judd's work in 1970. The more pertinent question of a museum's agency in shaping this canon is therefore simply glossed over.
Another 'solution' to this problem of the canon is L'Internationale, a collaboration between museums that 'believes in being locally situated'. One of the first projects was an exhibition called Spirits of Internationalism, where these museums showed each other’s collections. As Annie Fletcher says: 'Spirits of Internationalism was a much more nuanced exploration of the location and context of each of these museums and showed how artistic movements and artist relate. The dialogue between collections becomes much more explicit, richer and complex. That's exactly the quality of it that's fantastic. On that level you break open the canon again in much more fruitful ways.'
Let's keep this interpretation in mind when we read what Leo Castelli wrote about the MoMA in 1941: 'Alfred Barr was presenting an encyclopaedia of European art, such as no European museum could have offered at the time. Side by side, you could find French Surrealists, German Expressionists, and Russian Futurists. Along with the huge collection of French Impressionists, unlike in France, you also found artists from other countries, completely unknown in France, whose works had originated many later developments. The museum was organized so carefully that you could trace the history of all those aesthetic movements, through an analysis that was not at all the European style.'
It can therefore be said that the museum in their 'new' project is very much doing a similar thing the MoMA was attempting in the 1940's. The staff of the Van Abbemuseum is thus reacting to a system where Europe mimicked New York who mimicked Europe and is this mimicking is somehow seen as provincial. So, to remedy this system they reinstate the European provincialism that New York sought to remedy and then remedy it themselves by introducing a wholistic viewpoint, which is what they wanted to get rid of in the first place.
It's pure hallucinatory madness masquerading as a solid foundation for the museum's policy.
If looked at as an archival document, it is also clear that the book seemingly ignores the times the museum specifically engages with this 'canon' they seek to reject. As any other museum, the Van Abbemuseum hosted a number of solo exhibitions in the period between 2004–2024. In the short introduction to this section, they themselves write that 'the artists selected were new to the museum and often from other geographies and traditions than those of the United States and northwest Europe, geographies that had been at the centre of the Van Abbemuseum's programme in the twentieth century' and then present a selection of exhibitions that seemingly adhere to these criteria.
Absent from this selection, and thus from the book as a whole, are the exhibitions of Lee Lozano, Jo Baer, Lynda Benglis, Allan Kaprow, Mark Lewis, Piero Gilardi, Jutta Koether, Mladen Stilinović, Aernout Mik, David Claerbout and Hito Steyrl, who all firmly fit into the idea of the canon of Western art, if one goes by the number of museums that have collected their work. Leaving these out is a clear attempt at whitewashing the museum's history so that the presently preferred narrative isn't stained.
Yet it isn't even true that the seventeen solo exhibitions that are presented in the book are 'often from other traditions than had been at the centre of the Van Abbemuseum's programme'.
Seven of the seventeen presented artists are alumni of the Rijksakademie, an institute that is probably the most enduring and most hollow highbrow tradition of the Dutch art world. There is nothing inherently wrong with showing Rijksakademie alumni, but to pretend they are from 'traditions other than those of northwest Europe' is just a blatant lie, regardless of where those artists grew up.
A further three artists mentioned in the catalogue; stanley brouwn, René Daniëls and Ilya Kabakov, are likewise firmly embedded in the 'canon', so that more than half of the already cherry-picked exhibitions don't adhere to the claims the museum makes.
Rather than engaging critically with an exhibition history and explaining, or possibly reconsidering, the validity of their choices, they incomprehensibly made a decision to just leave out a whole bunch of information that is ostensibly detrimental to their present opinions. No history is every fully complete and unbiased, but to simply disregard a whole chunk that doesn't fit your present-day viewpoints is about as far removed from critical thinking as one can get.
In general, it can be said that an inability or unwillingness to look beyond one's own immediate surroundings is oddly present throughout the book.
An important theme for the museum's future is an idea of the 'life cycle of works' in the collection. Within this discussion the problem of endlessly taking care of physical works is brought forward. Which is certainly a valid and non-trivial subject for a museum to think about.
Yet the discussion largely revolves around the physical conservation of older works: '[...] we've started to talk about a death and life cycle of works to trouble this idea of caring for and maintaining works in one state for eternity. What if we acknowledge what you, Christiane, pointed to – like the material degradation of works – and build that into how we can care for works with time limits?' These questions are reasonable, yet these questions are also ultimately ones not of time, but rather of shifting uses, resources, and perspectives. For example, I don't think anybody would question that the Sphinx is worth preserving, despite its battered appearance and old age.
However, the question doesn't seem to be approached through these more fundamental aspects.
During Esche's directorship the museum has acquired dubious legal constructions and installations that respond to a specific event in national politics, where the enduring continuance was doubtful even at the time of acquisition. It is not these works that come up in their discussions of a 'lifecycle of works', but rather some generic paintings from the museums' early history. And if you're approaching these questions with that mindset of a linear timeline, you very quickly find yourself on slippery terrain.
This is perhaps best exemplified by an anecdote in the book where the loan of a Picasso painting to a museum in Palestine was discussed, as the safety of the painting was difficult to guarantee. Esche quotes Christiane Berndes in saying to him that 'this is the Picasso. We have a responsibility to the people in Eindhoven or to the city council.' To which Esche's reaction at the time was that 'if I focus on that responsibility, I'm never going to be able to do anything'. Although he says that now he recognises Christiane's viewpoint 'was a sound one', it still is exemplary of how a curatorial team can be misguided in how the ownership of, and responsibilities towards, a collection funded with public funds is organised and accounted for.
While Charles Esche seems to have matured through his more nuanced standpoint towards these matters, young curator Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide still expresses in the same interview that: 'if more people are involved from the get-go, the process is more sluggish. If one person says, 'We're going left', it's easier and the rest should follow. [...] I do envy brute force, being able to move instead of convincing and waiting for people to catch up to your idea, whether it's right or wrong.' And although she underlines the 'patriarchal' aspects of that kind of brute force decision making, it's nevertheless something she in some way aspires to, even while she recognises that this is exactly what caused the perceived shortcomings of the museum that they are now trying to amend.
This attitude is typical throughout the book, where contradictory viewpoints are glossed over and explained away as irrelevant and unimportant. Nowhere is this clearer than in a statement by Steven ten Theije towards the end of the book. Obviously irked by the lack of 'greater support within the city council or in the city' towards the museum's policies of 'socially engaged art', he writes: '[...] it became all the more clear that our role as an international pioneer did not match the perception of local users. After all, they should be inspired by engaged art par excellence. We ourselves could recognise the emancipatory power of art a la Rancière, but it would be nice if our audience would do the same a little more often.'
This is a baffling bit of self-delusion where the broader audience gets blamed for not realising that the museum's staff is apparently very effectively socially engaging them with art. This completely ignores the, much more likely, possibility that you're doing something fundamentally wrong if those people you're trying to engage aren't engaged with what you're saying. In the museum's opinion it is the audience who is stupid for not 'recognising the emancipatory power of art a la Rancière', not the museum for its inability to perform its core responsibility of engaging with the public.
As can be read on the back cover, the book has a strong focus on decolonisation through an overwrought equation with modernism. Yet as the above quote shows, the key attitude throughout the book is that the museum's vision is right and justified, and therefore it has a moral obligation to impose that vision on any and all people. And more importantly, anybody who disagrees with this viewpoint is a lesser being and may be disregarded.
Now, it might just be me, but this, rather than any specifics of modernism, is exactly what a colonialist attitude entails. In fact, Charles Esche agrees with me: 'In demodern terms, the canon now appears as another singularity of the kind that modernity as an ideology is always trying to impose on everyone | the idea there is the one and only way, or that there is no alternative or that everything else is primitive, traditional and will die out – whether that's people or ideas.'
Throughout the book their own singular vision of western modernity is replaced with an equally singular naïve idea of plurality as the inverse shape of this modernity, where the framework of the museum is employed as a mechanism for its validation. As that framework is largely constructed on the vision of western modernity they are attempting to subvert, this is of course an unattainable position.
It is perfectly valid to question the 'established canon' of (western) art, but if you're going to judge an outcome of a set of circumstances without a firm grasp on the mechanisms through which those circumstances led to that outcome, you're bound to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
This book claims to be a 'critical case study', yet the absence of contrasting viewpoints and incompleteness of its archival aspects, only make it a document that is highly opinionated and at times hypocritical in its standpoints.
I therefore would like to end this short and incomplete consideration with an anecdote I found in the book about Diana Franssen, a curator who worked for 31 years at the museum and who is otherwise conspicuously absent from the book. She is described as 'working through the archive of the museum' and 'very interested in this critical reading of the archive'. It then says:
'What she learned is that reality was much more complex and much more nuanced. She kind of confronted Charles with it, saying, 'You're not telling the whole truth.'
