Curating outside @ Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark

Awesome tranquillity pervaded my experience of the sculpture park at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, set on the coast of the Øresund in northern Zealand with views of Sweden just over the narrow stretch of water and the comfort of the museum's modernist embrace behind. Pieces by Moore, Arp, Miró and a host of others snatched my attention and breath as I trod soft thick grass and asked myself unconsciously which ways to turn and explore. This tranquillity was a singular experience, musing on which I have been inspired to think some more about curating and the purpose of an art museum.

With the rise of the modern museology over recent decades refracting the view of our historical and artistic expository institutions, I am struck particularly by how much the contemporary museum is supposed to serve as a multimodal space to fit a host of purposes and reflect the diverse interests and motivations of current and potential audiences. What Louisiana showed me, however, is that--properly done--the power of a museum as a space for creating space is surely a worthwhile function that bears consideration; that the contemplative potential of these spaces should be central to their purpose in society. While exponents of the modern museology have rightly been keen to effect a change in the public perception of museums as repositories of the past and Storehouses of the Venerable for their visitors' Edification, I hope that we do not interpret or enact the change in museological thinking as a substitution of new ideas for the old simply because they are 'new' and 'old'. For while audiences should always visit a museum on equal terms, and not because it is an unquestionably good place to improve oneself, we should be cautious to remember being often unaware of what we might wish to seek or know until guided to consider the possibility of seeking something different from what we set out to find. In other words, the significance of the museum as a space for creating space for its visitors to think and to be as they could be is surely fundamental to its purpose and, more is the point, unique in what it offers compared with most of a society's institutions.

To illustrate: I had visited Louisiana because I was curious about its presentation of modern art and the particular modern art it had to show, and learnt early in my visit that it emphasises temporary exhibitions and attends carefully to the flow and movement of people. Stepping into the sculpture garden, my companion remarked that that feature of the museum takes centre stage, with the building arcing around it, and I was charmed by how the garden's slope down to the water invites one forward, affording movement some involuntary propulsion. So far, then, I had achieved something of my purpose in visiting--quite apart, of course, from enjoying some time with a friend and seeing a new place together--but if I had left at that point, the visit would have been lacking, for what I experienced, and the ways I came think through moving in the garden, circumambulating and navigating the sculptures and interacting with them in thought and through my camera, was inspirational and distracting. The careful and thoughtful space of the museum took me beyond myself and my initial goals, stretching me to think new things.

Whether this was an effect of the outside curation cum mise-en-scène, or just clever curating itself, what I realised is that the properly exciting educative mission of museums concerns our interactions with the stuff they hold and integrate for viewing or experiencing: that the museum as space itself, defamiliarised and interesting, is essential to its functioning transcending the normal spaces of everyday life. One may learn specifically about the objects on display, but one should always also be afforded the possibility to learn in general, which is to say to be inspired and to think. As a space for active, productive thinking, creativity, for brains and persons, the museum stands singular among the more ordinarily accessible social institutions.