A contemporary art museum is no longer a box, it is a machine

We have just entered a five-year period at the end of which we will have two expanded museums and a new one in Barcelona. I would like to elaborate on the established fact that the museum of modern or contemporary art has ceased to be only a receiving box for historical sediment that studies, preserves, explains and displays art at the end of the journey – traditionally you arrived at the museum when you had already gone through all the previous filters, not the other way around – to gradually transform itself from the middle to the fact that artists, not all of them, but a very significant part, come to the museum first and foremost to work, to "manufacture" what they exhibit. This implies in some way that the museum space is, de facto, the study of these artists before being transformed into their exhibition space. This is what characterizes production-based art as it has always been understood in the performing arts, in cinema, or even in the musical arts. How all this happened almost half a century ago is a fascinating story that is still incredibly unwritten and represents the most radical change that has occurred within the art museum since its modern version emerged in the 18th century. What I am going to comment on in this article are the consequences and shortcomings that this now implicitly accepted situation has generated, but without being addressed or debated, surprisingly, in a technically serious way.

As an example, one thing is clear: for more than forty years, sound art or pieces that add sound as another element of the artistic piece have been made, and yet, in no new contemporary art museum in Spain, almost all of them, has the acoustics of the spaces been taken into account (!). I will mention another: lighting. For some reason beyond my understanding, the exhibition spaces of most museums in the world are lit with spotlights equipped with 3,200º Kelvin tungsten lamps. At the same time, we all like, especially architects, that the museum is generally bathed in natural light, always spectacular, but which has a different colour temperature to that of tungsten. So what?, one might say, if the human eye cannot distinguish the difference. True, the human eye cannot, but the camera can, and it needs to be told what type of light we want it to work with; if it is adjusted to tungsten, the parts bathed in natural light come out tinted an intense blue; If you do it the other way around, the parts illuminated with tungsten come out yellow. Exhibits need to be photographed, right? The works too, and if these things are not taken into account, it makes the work of people, both artists and other professionals working in the museum, more difficult. How do you solve the problem of colour temperature differences in museums? Simply by replacing tungsten lamps with daylight lamps, both exist.

No one is born knowing how to do it, but if you don't ask, what happens happens, and no one asks. It's not good for rooms measuring six hundred square metres to have ceilings that are too low or entrance doors that are one and a half metres wide. Perhaps you're thinking that I'm writing this because I'm eager to put military vehicles and planes in the museum, but if a racing car doesn't fit, neither does a Chillida or a Di Suvero.

It is worth considering everything, a contemporary art museum is a machine. You have to take into account things as seemingly strange as the floors and how they should be equipped. And speaking of floors, when the new headquarters of the Whitney in New York was inaugurated, there was one detail that was echoed by all the newspapers without exception: the floor of the rooms. As you read, the floor. It was decided to use varnished recycled wood with practically no shine, very correct, but light years away from the marble or dyed cement that we see everywhere and that has abominable acoustic properties. Since it is a cheap wood, they bought twice as much as was required, so that in the future they can do whatever the artists need without having to suffer the consequences of the "disaster". If it is necessary to reinstall a Gordon Matta-Clark with a hole in the floor included, it is done and that's it.

It seems serious to me that these issues continue to be considered secondary or even exotic when we talk about the operational characteristics of a 21st century museum. In the same way that no one would consider building a new hospital without taking into account the opinion of the specialized medical staff so that the center serves its function, I do not understand how the construction of new museums in Spain has been able to be approached without taking into account the technical needs of those of us who do what justifies their existence.

I never cease to be perplexed by the insistence on constantly questioning the very idea of the museum – it is a sure guarantee of appearing radical with little effort – while not even touching upon basic deficiencies that belong to the area of common sense (I am referring specifically to contemporary art museums), namely: 1) that they are oriented towards the arts; 2) that they have ample storage resources (without this the collection cannot grow and the museum ceases to fulfil a crucial part of its mission); and 3) that they are sufficiently funded. In Spain there are many top-notch museums that do not meet all or any of these three requirements, which are ultimately compensated, as in public health, by the forced effort of their human team.

Instead of the Borgesian "habitable" museum that will fall upon us, I prefer a "workable" museum, the most technically flexible and as open as possible to all those who believe unreservedly in art as an unavoidable social necessity, and in the museum as the cornerstone and guarantor of the heritage of art, but also as an experimental field for all the arts.