MONA: A Pop-Up Museum
DETROIT - According to London's Art Newspaper, what resources do you need to start a pop-up art gallery?
You must have inexhaustible reserves of energy, a large helping of
missionary zeal, and a healthy dose of chutzpah. A network of artists
willing to help out on a voluntary basis probably helps. Most important,
courageous landlords to donate valuable real estate. Surprisingly, though,
you don’t need much money.
The original pop-up phenom: Detroit’s artist-run Museum of New Art (MONA) was founded on these principles way back in 1996, and is going as strong as ever: having just announced its first Prinzhorn Prize awarded to six influential national and international artists - with upcoming exhibitions from winner Nicole Eisenman, and another from Lifetime Achievement recipients Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
Over
the last decade, the Museum of New Art has swapped homes six times, ranging
from a commercial gallery’s walk-in closet to the entire second floor of a
downtown skyscraper. And now, to its newest addition: a satellite gallery in
Detroit’s
Russell Industrial Complex.
Currently,
the museum is housed in 7 separate galleries, exhibiting art in spaces
ranging from
Detroit
to the city of Pontiac
25 miles away. It has swelled from that closet museum at its outset to over
40,000 sq. feet by 2003, then back down to its current size of 16,000 sq. feet.
To achieve
all this, MONA has always operated at the opposite end of the financial
scale from more traditional museums, eschewing questions of finance
altogether. This may sound like idealism, but Jef Bourgeau, the museum’s
director, sees it as a practical solution to the problem of arts funding:
“Working
outside
the system, we remain untouched by hard times.”
And yet
without a running budget the museum has managed some real art coups. Since
its inception in September 1996, MONA
has become both a playground and springboard for hundreds of artists, both
new and established. including such notables as Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono, Simen Johan, Crash,
Stella Vine, Haim Steinbach, Lucio Pozzi, and Iain
Baxter.
As for unique art events, the museum founded and sponsored: the Biennale Detroit; Documenta USA; the Detroit International Film Festival 1-10; Ground Zero (shortly after 9/11); e-MONA; ArtCore; Aperto; Moving Walls; and kaBOOM!
In
the last year alone, MONA has initiated Detroit artist swaps with four major
cities (Chicago; Berlin; Bregenz; Beijing). The Detroit exhibition in Berlin
inspired the German television journal Aspekte to produce a segment
on Detroit culture; and the Austrian display of Detroiters' art caught the
eye of the director of Kunsthalle Wien, who is planning a Detroit exhibition
at that museum.
Against
all odds, the museum
has also compiled its own “portable” but permanent collection (200 works made to
fit into small archival boxes) created by artists like Christo and
Jeanne-Claude, Arman, Peter Halley, Jenny Holzer, and Vito
Acconci.
As if an official validation, early on the museum brought down the wrath of Krens (Thomas), former Guggenheim director, writing a few years back: "Any further press releases from you will be returned, unopened ...You are not geographically germane to our interests."
One
early exhibition dealing with censorship was raided by the police and
brought charges of obscenity for most
scurrilously
presenting a reproduction of Courbet's
Origin of the World
(1868). After
three trial post-ponements, the case was finally dismissed when the ACLU
stepped in.
And
then, nearly two years in the making, MONA's Art
Until Now changing installations
at the Detroit Institute of Arts was shut down into its third day of a three
month run - for
presenting work that "might offend Christians." (Graham Beal, director).
At
the time, this was cheered by the likes of Reverend Jerry Falwell: "It's refreshing to
see someone of authority in the arts community who understands the basic truth of
accountability."
Shortly after that last incident, MONA applied for and received its 503(C)(1) museum status.
In a PBS interview, Jan van der
Marck*
said: "I
do not see Jef Bourgeau's museum as a satire of the real thing, I see it more of a
nudging, a questioning, of
the real thing. In that cool Duchampian fashion
that has no pathos, that has no big voice, but that is a subtle, unsettling
challenge to the institution usually known as the museum of contemporary art
and the people responsible for the founding, the running, the financing, and
the publicizing of museums of contemporary art. And so, every museum of
contemporary art and every institution by that name will find that Jef's
little upstart in Pontiac is somehow a challenge, and perhaps, a negative
shadow falling over the real thing."
*Jan
van der Marck is a former curator at the Walker Art Center,
the Dartmouth Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and,
founding director of the precursor to the
< PBS
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