Seeing for the First and Last Time in Thomas Struth’s Museum Photographs

Abstract

In 1989, the German artist Thomas Struth began the Museum Photographs, producing photographic images of the visitor experience in Old Master collections. One of the last images in the series, Museo del Prado 7, Madrid 2005, a photograph of visitors in front of the painting Las Meninas, exemplifies the strategies at work within the Museum Photographs. This paper considers the relationship between representation and experience and asks: What does it mean to reproduce the museum experience by way of a photograph? It proposes that the photographs are thinking objects; in other words, the viewer gains critical awareness of his or her status as a museum visitor by engaging with the image. It considers the employment of metapictoriality and intermediality; these factors outline the limitations of the image’s production and impact on the way that a viewer interacts with the image. The implications of the relationship between representation and experience are arrived at through a process of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. Engaging with the Museum Photographs is therefore a transformative experience.

Notes

¹ “Quand je pense à quelque chose, en fait, je pense à autre chose. On ne peut penser à quelque chose que si l’on pense à autre chose. Par exemple vous voyez un paysage nouveau pour vous mais il n’est nouveau que parce que vous le comparez en pensant à un autre paysage ancien celui là que vous connaissez.” Translations by the author unless otherwise noted.

² Metapictoriality is self-reflexive, intertextual and engages with the conditions in which images are made. For an extensive study on the use of metapictorialism in early modern painting, see Stoichita, from whom I borrow the concept. Stoichita examines “painting” and the various framing and referential devices, such as the embrasure, the intertext and the inset image, which are at work in Struth’s images. For example, the experience produced by looking at the Flemish gallery painting Cognoscenti in a Room Hung with Pictures (c. 1620) at the National Gallery is recreated by an intertextual process within the painting. Knowledge by sight is the painting’s subject inasmuch as its function: it is thus an experiential mise-en-abîme, or intertext (Stoichita 114).

³ Struth’s pictures, on the other hand, were destined for the museum (Belting 6). Struth observed in 2001 that, “Now my photographs have become exactly what I was against” (“Maintenant mes photos sont devenues comme ce a quoi je voulais m’opposer-comme les tableaux”) (Schmickl 66), in other words, fetishised: “‘When a work of art becomes fetishised … it dies’. Struth feels the paintings in his museum photographs regain aspects of their original vitality when seen anew in the context he renders” (Tuchmann n.p.). Ironically, Struth has set up an exchange of spectacularisation that borders on the fetishisitic as a means to involve the spectator in contemplation of their own time and place.

⁴ I construe Struth’s notion of “greatness” as equivalent to the purported “authority” of the art museum.

⁵ He has also produced video works, for example the One Hour Video Portraits (1996–2002).

⁶ For further discussion on anachronism in art and art history see Didi-Huberman. He notes that “Whenever we are before the image, we are before time” (“Before the Image” 31).

⁷ Fried notes a similar quality as articulated by Jeff Wall in that “Photography is about distance, the inability to touch, maybe” (124), quoted in Enright (51).

⁸ “Struth used ‘today’s visitors’ to energize Veronese’s masterpiece.” I interpret this to mean contrast.

⁹ My understanding of representation is based on Marin and Foucault (2002, 2–73) meaning that the point, between words and things, at which an idea enters language (verbal, visual, written, etc.) it becomes visible, articulable, and no longer embodied, but at which point it replaces, or displaces, the idea it services; see also Deleuze (Foucault 47–70). I make the leap between presence and absence and meta-cognition because in the process of thinking about thinking the original thought is absented; once it is articulated it becomes something different as analogised in the quote from L’éloge d’amour (Sarde et al.).

¹⁰ Okutsu cites German philosopher Friedrich Schelling as using Mary Magdalene as an example of tautegory, in which the allegorical mode is suspended; Mary Magdalene does not signify repentance, nor is she living repentance: she is Saint Mary Magdalene (148).

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Miranda Baxter

Miranda Baxter is a museum and gallery educator, currently Senior Education Department Manager at Dulwich Picture Gallery; previously she managed education provision at the National Gallery, London. She holds Masters Degrees in the History of Art from University College London (2013) and in Museums and Galleries in Education from the Institute of Education, University of London (2009). Her research focuses on the intersections of technology, representation and display; the body and theories of knowledge; and the history and theory of museums.