Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #13

The Museum Reinvents Attention

by Kader Attia

January 18, 2024

Introduction

Do you remember the first time you went into a museum? As far as I’m concerned, I don’t. I remember first visits, but not the first time. I’ve been thinking for a while that the reason why my memory hasn’t been marked by my first contact with a museum is because it has repressed it. For an almost immeasurable number of people, the same relationship exists with their first encounter with the museum. This amnesia is not due to their history or personality, but to the very nature of the museum. It’s easier to remember the first time you fell in love than the first time you visited a museum. I’m not saying there’s no place for love in museums. The millions of couples of visitors of all ages who walk the aisles of museums know this. At the Musée d’Art Moderne in Algiers, they even had to stop showing videos in “black boxes” because they had become places for lovers to meet…

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Kader Attia at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s Badkuip (Bathtub) Lecture series, given on 21 October 2023. Photo's by Maarten Nauw.

Kader Attia at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s Badkuip (Bathtub) Lecture series, given on October 21, 2023. Photos by Maarten Nauw.

But even if it is a place that attracts very different groups of people, the museum is paradoxically not a place designed to be welcoming. For although communications, marketing, and mediation departments strive to make it friendly, sometimes with great effort, the museum exerts an authority over the psyche of visitors, both individually and collectively. And whether visible or invisible, this authority, based on a system from a bygone era, can be perceived as violent by the most sensitive of beings.

First of all, the museum, like school, is first and foremost a place of sociocultural learning, addressing multiple subjects from a single position through a unidirectional method: from a message sender to receivers. As a result, visitors and participants not only discover new things and new ways of relating to them but also cultivate and develop that vital human capacity: attention. Our attention is constantly activated, sometimes in a firm and safe manner: “Be careful where you step!”, “Please don’t touch!”, “Don’t speak loudly!”; alerts to our attention are plentiful at the museum, in more or less subtle ways. And when it comes to attracting attention in a softer way, the solicitation is just as directive. Orientations toward certain “star” works in museums—which their reputation precedes—our gaze, and the experience of this encounter with said work are an example of the invisibilization of attention, which, by drawing us toward certain works, obscures the field of visibility toward other lesser-known yet equally interesting works. There’s a prior phenomenon to this attentional preparation that takes place in the museum, which emanates from what philosopher Yves Citton calls the attentional vault. If attention attracts attention, it’s because attention is collective, not individual. In the information society in which we have been increasingly immersed since the end of the nineteenth century, our attention exists under a vault of information that circulates and conditions our collective attention. This is particularly true of cultural goods, but not only. Indeed, modern capitalism recycles all the surpluses it produces into markets: first for material goods, then, from the beginning of the twentieth century, for cultural goods. Gradually, the market for cultural goods has accompanied and generated the third modernity, that of the information society in superabundance, whose considerable economic and political stakes are played out on the market for attention, an “immaterial” raw material that is becoming increasingly scarce, and is increasingly coveted by capitalism.

In the same way that, for centuries, school has shaped attention as the principal tool of sociability, the museum—and museography—leads the attention of human subjects to diversify, in order to evolve socially. Whether we share our love or disinterest for a painting by, for instance, Van Eyck—the Arnolfini couple, for example—we’ll never do so for the same reason, and that’s the mystery of art as an individual mirror of the viewer that I call reciprocity. On the other hand, there is one common denominator for all viewers of a work of art: it steals, as Marshall McLuhan puts it, your attention. We shall see later how this question of the inherence between attention and society, which is crucial for contemporary human beings and their evolution, is now being colonized by technological governance, both visible and invisible. This colonization raises two fundamental challenges: firstly, that of putting an end to what Anibal Quijano calls coloniality (i.e., the mechanisms that “systematize” the legacies of colonialism stemming from slavery) in the blind spots of modernity. And secondly, the relevance of the future existence of the museum, a project born with the advent of modern Western thought and its openness to the universe.

Before projecting ourselves into the future, we need to self-reflect on how the techno-liberal power enhanced by the unprecedented hegemony of digital technology, that exploit our attention from outside the museum, have, over the years, come to influence our gaze inside the museum itself, having been fed biased data. In the continuity of a Eurocentric perception, for a hermeneutic of the world from a single, dominant point of view, which is no longer relevant not because it is obsolete (and it is far from it), but because it was built on an arrogant, one-way policy of looking, we will see why what we see is filtered by the invisible screen of a world placed on top of another world.

For if there’s one aspect that makes this twenty-first-century challenge to the neutrality of collective attention even more difficult, in the museum as elsewhere, it’s that, historically speaking, the museum is not a transparent tool. It sometimes operates with an opacity that conceals blind spots and blurs the clarity of our perception of its museography and content, and thus impinges on the free will of our power of interpretation.

The political history through which the genesis and development of the museum concept took place is that of a modernity which, while bringing progress in science and ideas, maintained its veil over political and economic violence based on the invention of races and the inequality of classes and genders, in order to normalize exploitation, from the bottom of the society to the top, where the capital is accumulated. So, if the so-called century of Enlightenment has shined until this day, we should not forget that what we are looking at are shadows, not the truth. As Plato explained, “We are like prisoners chained in a cave, who see of the real world only the shadows cast by the light outside on the wall at the back.”

The cave represents man’s ignorance. That’s how the myth can be summed up. In fact, the person who doesn’t know is locked up (deprived of freedom) in a world they believe to be the true world. In reality, they have no access to real knowledge (the light of day).

This is a theory that has survived the millennia and is confirmed every day in the twenty-first century by the mass media. Light always shines to the detriment of the emancipation of others. As Plato said: those who come out into the light are not used to the sun, and so, in order not to be blinded, risk going back into the cave. The museum of today and tomorrow cannot remain Plato’s cavern, and must work toward learning to see in the light.

Whether it has collected, assembled, and exhibited the works of artists of all generations, the museum, a modern and universal project, is nonetheless the extension of white patriarchal power, which, as we know today, has also kept women and subjects alien to this dominant regime in the shadows, leaving them, in rare representations, only the opportunity to illustrate clichéd points of view of this masculine, heteronormative thinking, either naively erotic or diabolical. Prostitute, witch, or slave, with a few mystical-biblical exceptions, the non-masculine, non-white subject has always been represented in classical painting as an object to be controlled. The Gemäldegalerie, which I regularly visit in Berlin, is a perfect example. The absence, in classical painting, of representations devoid of fantasy or phobia of the female subject or the black body gives us the impression of a racist and sexist anachronism that has become increasingly embarrassing. This essentialism is at the root of most of the world’s museums and illustrates one of the museum’s most significant paradoxes: “gathering that separates.” The more works it has accumulated according to these criteria, the more its monocultural and classist character marks the ambiguity of the universalist discourse at its origin, whereas the unification of contemporary society requires the inclusion of differences. Indeed, it is because we are all different that we are alike. The museum thus appears like a huge ship adrift between a cultural archipelago, unable to find a port to dock. In the Glissantian spirit, the archipelago is a metaphor for the process of créolité, whose archipelago must be an organism of reciprocity between islands, beings, and cultures, generating a third space-time: créolité, which has nothing to do with diversity, because it’s in a constant movement, that Glissant calls relation. In other words, what defines society, as its etymology tells us, is the coming together by association (correlations) of singular subjects, not the “dissociation” of these subjects. Quoting the essay by Jacques Généreux, we could say that the museum in the denial of creoleness is enhancing the “dissociety.”

So we need to take a closer look at the origins of this dissociety in modern and contemporary museography to understand and perhaps unravel the problem that weakens its relevance today.

Although there may seem to be little in common between the collections of a museum of ethnography and the Stedelijk, the Louvre, Berlin’s Neue National Galerie, or the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris—in short, between museums of ethnography (a word that carries with it the weight of the colonial past) and museums of classical, modern, or contemporary art—there is a common denominator for all of them: their ability to immerse our attention into the narrative of modernity from their position and point of view. From the cabinets of curiosity that preceded museums of ethnography to the first classical museums, the narrative deployed for visitors is that of the control of the universe, within sight.

In the eighteenth century, under the influence of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, the idea of a museum gained ground. A new wind blew through Paris in 1750, with the opening of the Palais du Luxembourg gallery, revealing the major works in the royal collection. This momentum spread throughout Europe, with the inauguration of the British Museum in 1759, and museums in Mannheim in 1756, Dresden in 1760, Cassel in 1769, and Düsseldorf in 1770. In Florence, the Uffizi welcomed the Medici collection in 1767, while the Pope’s collections moved to the Museo Pio-Clementino in 1784.

After just over a century of political, economic, and industrial revolution, an artistic revolution is beginning to boil. A generation of artists was born, wishing to cut ties with the legacy of their elders, whom they found anachronistic. But there’s something else. Something far more irrational, involving both the occult capacity of art to serve as an exorcism—because art is also everything we can’t see—and the cathartic dimension of the experience it offers viewers.

What the moderns wanted was a revolution, to put an end to the past, but also to rediscover the past that preceded theirs. A vanished past…

Modern artists, orphaned by magic, uncertainty, spirituality, and the possibility of dreams, found themselves admiring the cultures and arts of other peoples who had not experienced Western technological modernity, which elevated science to the rank of god. These peoples, colonized by modern Western societies, embodied a lost paradise in the eyes of Western artists. This fantasy was given a name that speaks volumes by its spelling: “the primitives,” written without a capital letter. A distinction made by the lowercase spelling, referring to a time before the Western Middle Ages, when Primitives were Italian, Flemish, or French painters.

For artists of the late nineteenth century in search of novelty, the mysticism of non-Western, so-called primitive peoples echoed the vanished beliefs of the Middle Ages and premodernity, such as holy relics made from human bones, clothing, or hair supposedly belonging to holy men or women, which the age of reason and the Industrial Revolution had relegated to the rank of wastes. From then on, the art objects of other peoples became a source of inspiration.

In addition to the power of this belief in powers other than those of science and reason, modern artists have been dispossessed of their mimetic ability to reproduce the world by modernity and its thirst for new technologies. Since the Renaissance, the pride of perspective, which assigns the artist a position where both his gaze and that of the viewer converge on the same vanishing point, has offered the world the illusion of the power of its reproduction.

The belief in magic and its plasticity of space and time was undermined by the imposition of the rational vanishing point, then of rationalized time by the colonization of everyday life. The resulting emptiness imposed an order of the gaze that artists could no longer tolerate as the Industrial Revolution began to rapidly manufacture images. The more the Industrial Revolution was able to reproduce technologically what the perspective of the image since the Renaissance had brought about, as with the invention of photography, the more artists turned away from it, returning to the time when the language of the image flirted with its genesis, like a proto-language, which the savage, the madman, the prehistoric, and the child, handle with ease. French art historian Philippe Dagen explains this very well in his book Primitivismes:

The paths taken by modern artists, from Van Gogh to Cézanne and Picasso, were as diverse as their personalities. Each of them, whose quest was profoundly interior, reinvented the gaze. Even if not all moderns sought their artistic inspiration in other, distant cultures—as Cézanne did, for example, or in children or cave art, let alone the mad—the fact remains that they all looked outside rational modernity for the aesthetic modernization of their art.

This is no scoop. We all know today that this plundering of knowledge has taken place, just as it has for other raw materials such as gold, cocoa, ivory, and so on… But with art, we always think it’s less serious. We take it for granted that, because it’s not tangible, it’s not serious.

And yet, the tangible dimension of looted objects is just as important as their aura, in the Benjaminian sense of the word, as emotion, as the philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne puts it.

Extract from the film «The Object’s Interlacing», 2020:

KADER ATTIA: Senghor is reputed to have said: “beauty is Hellenic and emotion is Negro”. What do you make, from a philosophical point of view, of the emotion generated by these creations that are these days called “ancient arts of Africa”?

SOULEYMANE BACHIR DIAGNE: Well now, it’s great that we’re coming back to this… We must always come back to this phrase by Senghor, because it’s the phrase that drew him the most criticism. People said to him: “Why grant reason to the Hellenics, so the Greeks and the ancestors of the Europeans, while saying that the Africans, for their part, are more on the emotional side?” To say that emotion is Negro the way reason is Hellenic is not to deny Negroes reason, or moreover to deny that the Hellenics are emotional beings… It’s just saying that the works produced in the black African world are to emotion what the works produced in Greco-Roman statuary are to analytical reason. And Senghor establishes a difference between what he calls “a reason-eye”: contemplative reason, which in order to grasp reality effectively holds it away from itself. First you hold reality away from yourself, and next you break it down into its constitutive elements in order to understand it.“I here am the subject who understands or who knows; you, you are the object that is there facing me, and it’s necessary that I understand, and understanding you means knowing how you are made: what are the elements that go into your making.” That’s reason that analyses… And Senghor contrasts with that what he calls “embracing reason”, a reason that embraces, where the privileged sense is no longer the sense of sight but that of touch. And he believes precisely that it’s another approach to reality: it’s no longer an approach by means of separation between a subject and an object, but by means of sympathy between the subject and object. The subject enters into the object in a way, and is in sympathy with it, coincides with it, and embraces the object. The model of that –which demonstrates that this type of approach to reality exists – is Art… And he says that actually, this object isn’t there to be seen by us so much as to touch us. Senghor uses the expression “being in a rhythmic attitude with it”, that’s to say being in a rhythm with the object you’re looking at. Which is a way of saying that the contact is almost physical: viewer and object dance together, they’re in an embrace. And it’s that which he calls “emotion”, in lending this word its etymological weight. E/motion: that’s to say “motion”, movement, “e” which causes me to step out of myself. And in his view that is the profound signification of art… Art touches us more than we see it.

We’ll come back later to the emotional stakes involved in the economy of attention, if, like Yves Citton, we rather call for an “ecology of attention.”

For, as Algerian psychoanalyst Karima Lazali puts it, in the material restitution of objects, we evacuate the immaterial, the magical… And yet, if we look at the work of several modern artists who traveled to colonized territories in Asia, Africa, and the Orient, we discover that Delacroix in Morocco, Paul Klee in Tunisia, Nolde in Papua New Guinea, or Gauguin in Tahiti all made thousands of drawings and took as many notes and therefore immaterial references to daily life. Nolde, for example, is a very explicit case of the ambivalent position he occupies in early twentieth-century colonial Germany, a position of which he is both aware and critical. Not only because, having painted non-Western subjects and their objects while questioning his presence in these other territories, he ended up being a Nazi, and indeed is strangely celebrated as if he hadn’t been after the Second World War, but for reasons that have to do with the economy of the knowledge he accumulated about a people colonized by Germany. In 1913, Nolde went to Papua New Guinea, where he accompanied scientists carrying out research on behalf of the German state. As it turned out, the research was not at all artistic. Initially, it was artistic for Nolde, with sketches showing Papuans hunting, sewing, cooking, etc., but after a long time spent with his scientific co-travelers, he was told by them that their mission was to understand why the Papuan people were dying so early (around forty years of age), and therefore find ways to increase their life expectancy.

Also, the notes accompanying his sketches in Papua tell us today that Nolde helped indeed to enrich the information databases of colonized subjects for the German government of the time, and the scientific project, which was seeking to improve the exploitation of these colonized subjects. Through drawings showing Papuans hunting, sewing, cooking, etc., the artist provided valuable everyday data for their economic exploitation. What has become of this data today? These drawings are exhibited in art museums, at the Seebüll Foundation, but they are not only works of art—they constitute, if not colonial data that enabled the colonizer to learn about these colonized subjects, tools to map and control these unknown societies.

Nowadays, we know that Artificial Intelligences have been fed with the billions of data accumulated through centuries of human knowledges, and continue to collect them. The thousands of notes, sketches, and drawings of colonized subjects produced by all these artist-travelers are also part of the basis of this immense encyclopedia of the world, built up from a Eurocentric, colonial, and patriarchal position.

What we’re focusing on here, then, is the question we raised earlier of how regimes of attention organize our gaze in museums. This should challenge our interrogation of the biased nature of collective and individual attention, which results from collective transindividuation between humans and their environments over the centuries. It is itself constructed from data fabricated from an isolated position, from the hubris of the colonial position looking at occupied societies, not from an archipelago of multiple interpretations, to use the Glissantian term.

So, if the transindividuation process of our collective attention is interdependent to its social environment, it has biased our gaze on coloniality and calls for renewing it through a repair process. Although repair is the most ubiquitous agency of the universe, it is difficult for us to perceive it. So, it’s by paying attention that we perceive it.

From nature to culture, repair can be found at every turn of an accident or injury. It’s easy for us to visualize the sometimes expressive repair of a broken object, just like the scarring of a human, animal, or plant body whose repairing survival automatism has closed the wound. Yet we take this ultra-complex mechanism for granted, without interpreting its meaning in the present, because the attention we pay to our wounds that have become scars is then a matter of the memory they embody. As Cormack McCarty so aptly put it, “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” And if attention allows us to perceive repairs, it’s because attention is also a repair. (Or is driven by a repairing agency.)

Both identifying (automatic) and interpreting (corrective) attention is a factor of negentropy, as Paul Valéry emphasizes in the notes he accumulated between 1904 and 1943, in preparation for a book he never wrote. Attention relates to everything in living things that combats Carnot’s principle of entropy, or “disorder.”

“To thread a needle is to act against probability. Making a sonnet. ‘Attention’ increases the yield of a certain given initial situation—the sensitivity of a sense, the accuracy of an act—of a response. In general, the response is made by a shorter route.” It is here that Valéry speaks of economy, since attention enables operations to be carried out “with the minimum of trial and error […] and the substitution of a kind of ‘certainty’ for a statistical process.” If I approach the thread to the eye of the needle absent-mindedly, it will probably take dozens of fumbles before it penetrates; by briefly focusing my attention on it, I substitute a kind of certainty for a statistical process. The seamstress can probably do the same operation without thinking about it, so much so that habit will have developed in her a gestural cliché (he means an automatism) enabling her to find the shortest path with her eyes closed.

In both cases, attention is a factor of economy, “increasing the yield of an initial situation.”

With its two superimposed levels—automatism of the cliché and intentional corrective concentration—attention is part of an adventure of collective rationalization, in the double sense (philosophical) of mastering phenomena by grasping their causes and (economic) of improving yields: our collective rational attention is nourished by the daily testing of the clichés we have inherited and by the corrective adjustments we make to them in the exceptional cases where they have misled our expectations and we have had to reinterpret them. It is this sharing and incessant recycling of clichés that constitutes the common fund of our collective intelligence—manifested and embodied in the infinite subtleties of our constantly evolving language. Which explains what transindividuation is in terms of collective attention.

If “I” can only be attentive to something insofar as we are attentive to it—and if collective attention must be considered primary to any effort at individual attention—it’s precisely because this common fund of clichés in perpetual reprocessing conditions my ability to identify the phenomena encountered in my environment. The economy of attention is in fact fundamentally collectivist. The loss of this capacity of human subjects to build sociability from attention through transindividuation processes of learning through reciprocity is the loss of a significant gregarious agency that made human life sustainable in a hostile environment. Hostile, because, as one of the most vulnerable species, mankind could have not survived without collective attention: to protect, to eat, to develop itself. Which, paradoxically, is also its own burden, which Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Plantationocene can clearly explain. That’s why the need for the reappropriation of our attention is crucial.

How can we reappropriate our power of interpretation and individuation (in other words, of “attention” in the sense of identification and reparation) through a collective experience of unlearning, at a time when attention is (“scalarized”) the stake of a scarily fast financial technological governance (data circulating at the speed of light) and hegemony through the colonization of our space-time, by shifting the gaze below and beyond capitalist rationality?

Toward the intangible and unpredictable experience of art, which is also improbable, unquantifiable, and unclassifiable.

Bringing surprise and the unexpected back into the museum experience means reawakening curiosity and reinvesting in a proactive, collective attention that dares to take an interest in the unexpected. Through the transdisciplinarity of economic, philosophical, sociological proposals, etc., without limits of disciplines and cultures, since the aim is no longer to attract attention, but to repair it by stimulating it with what is not Mainstream (i.e., what collective attention expects to encounter: the unexpected). Moreover, since collective attention is biased, we need to re-stimulate attention toward the blind spots in the museum model’s narrative, thanks to the productive transparency of collective individuation, which will bring all visitors of all origins, genders, religions, and cultures to “a process of capitalist derationalization” of collective attention. Entering the twenty-first century with the assets of previous centuries, without making a tabula rasa, means understanding that we can diversify our attention and our attentional space-time to remain free, pursuing the agency of evolution (i.e., the “tekhné,” but not letting our dreams sink into machinic automation), in which our unconscious is permanently the protagonist. If Art is the invention of a collective gaze, it is because the gaze is a language.

Last but not least, in terms of collective reappropriation, the role played by attention in emotion and emotion in attention must be taken more seriously, as the cement for reappropriating common sense. Because the field of emotion is a pharmakon: it carries both the remedy and the poison, so it is crucial to take care of it and reappropriate it for the social balance between human groups. Because, if used for political ends, it becomes very dangerous. We knew this, and History seems to be repeating itself, with the toxicity of the mass media sphere we are living through, what Yves Citton and Georg Frank call “mass media, the weapons of mass distraction.”

That’s why, from the explanation that philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne has given us, on the complexity of emotion, it seems that the emotion we’re talking about in the West as a collective phenomenon is incomplete, or incapacitated by coloniality’s biopolitics. If we open up our capacity to be moved by other languages of the body, of thought, of the gaze, then emotion will enable us to develop our collective attention differently and more inclusively.