Museum Photographs. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2005.

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In 1993 Thomas Struth published a book of photographs featuring museum interiors and their visitors. The majority of the photographs were taken in European museums—in Paris, Vienna, Florence, London, Venice, Amsterdam and Rome—as well as two in Chicago. They are a sober record of the way art is received in public exhibition spaces. The pictures show the casual choreography of schoolchildren and tourists, individuals and groups in a museum setting—transitory moments of transitory people, captured in the aspic of photography.

All these people in fact stand in for us: we could have been the ones captured by Struth's camera. They remain unidentifiable, particularly as they are seen almost exclusively from behind. As we know, this is not coincidental, as the figure shown from behind has been perceived as the representative of the viewer ever since Caspar David Friedrich painted his landscapes. In Friedrich's paintings, figures with their backs turned to us symbolize inner composure and embody the romantic response to nature, to which physiognomy is irrelevant; they symbolize an inner composure that invites us, the viewers, to stand in line behind the figure. By contrast, in certain paintings by Arnold Böcklin, and particularly in those of his disciple Giorgio de Chirico, the figure shown from behind is seen as the embodiment of melancholy withdrawal from the dramatic events taking place on the 'stage' of the picture—a theatrical, reflective figure. The fact that many figures in Struth's photographs of museums turn their backs to us is not a mere coincidence, for Struth does not take snapshots. Rather than symbolizing the romantic reaction to nature, they represent the aesthetic response to art—as a collective internalization, however transient it might be. They do not challenge the viewer—as do Friedrich's paintings—to queue up, but distance us from the pictures they are examining.

For the internalization of these pictures is almost provocative. In a public space this would be considered conspicuous behaviour, except in front of a shop window or a vista point, but in churches and museums it expresses a certain reservation. The protective acoustic space required by this internalisation is a silence that will tolerate whispering at best: boisterous schoolchildren are told to keep quiet by their teachers, although nowadays this is usually in vain. The painful experience of any enthusiastic museum visitor is almost audible: the contradiction between the chaos captured visually in this picture and the individual need for concentration.

A few decades ago Bazon Brock tried to distinguish emphatically between these two institutions dedicated to inner composure when he demanded that people should raise their voices in museums. But the 'aesthetic church' deliberately stifles communication. The velvet wall coverings that were once the optical norm were hence also intended to absorb sound. The appropriateness of this measure becomes apparent if we consider the new building of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne designed by Oswald Mathias Ungers, in which the walls, painted in carefully selected colors, produce cold acoustics.

Not all the museum visitors photographed by Struth are shown from behind; some are also shown in profile or frontally, allowing us to observe them as they observe the artworks. By contrast, Struth conspicuously avoids allowing any of the figures to look out of the photograph at us. With the exception of a small boy, sitting with his classmates on the floor, nobody looks out at us from Struth's museum pictures.

This would be a subject worth examining in itself; in 1964 Alfred Neumeyer devoted his book, Der Blick aus dein Bilde (Looking out of the picture), to the topic. Eye contact between portrait and viewer creates a suggestive tension, breathing life into the viewer's counterpart within the picture in such a way that the viewer feels almost personally addressed.

This is a common experience with pictures, but Struth only puts his own museum visitors through it, not the viewers of his photographs. Generally he shows the way people view artworks so discreetly that we can only guess at what they are doing by observing their body language.

However, Struth's photographs of museums also reflect the levels of reality within the picture. As they show both the observers and the paintings observed, Struth's photographs touch on another classic theme: the picture within the picture. This is a popular subject of trompe-l'oeil painting—does Struth's photography strive to surpass it? I think not, because in many of his photographs Struth creates a contrast between the immobility of the paintings and the blurred movements of the museum visitors.

The photographer does not accept these blurred zones simply because the museum visitors have not kept still. Instead, the indistinct images place a veil of movement between the viewer of the photograph and the paintings. Thus the image of the museum visitors occurs between the painting that they are viewing and the photograph that we see, as if on a separate slide, rendering the moment in time visually perceptible.

However, when Struth's photographs are displayed in a museum they threaten to expand the theme of the picture within the picture, because they are seen by people standing before them like their counterparts recorded in the photograph. You can imagine how viewers of Struth's photographs will be photographed in their turn, and so on and so forth. The result would be a progressive fictionalization of the images—and a loss of humour.

However, when looking at Struth's photographs of museums, it is more constructive to observe not only the theme of the picture within the picture, but also that of the space within a space, as spaces with differing degrees of fiction can be seen.

Initially we have the archetypal museum space. Generally, it

seems practically empty in relation to furnished private rooms, empty in comparison with the over-furnished public areas in airports or department stores, and certainly empty in relation to the public spaces in urban centres in which museums usually stand.

By contrast with Catholic churches, which are lavishly decorated with pictures, museums are, despite the pictures exhibited in them, more closely related to those austere Protestant churches lacking in pictorial decoration painted by Pieter Saenredam in the 17th century. For the modern museum space is sparsely arranged around the pictures, and modest in its furnishings. If there is any furnishing at all, only seating is permitted, meant as an invitation to concentrate. In some older museums, however, they can be extremely dominant features.

Struth's photographs show such museum spaces besieged by their visitors, who fill them in order to look at pictures that are positioned at a second level within a fictional space. This is a progressive intensification of the space, for space has already been compressed in those paintings, just as the museum spaces are now compressed in these photographs. The same way in which painted pictures deliver fictitious depth on a flat surface, Struth's sociological herbarium flattens the museum spaces along with the painted, already compressed spaces exhibited in them, into the surface of a photograph.

A third theme, besides that of the picture within the picture and the space within a space, becomes apparent: the multiplication of time, which is one of the achievements most peculiar to the picture. For a picture always shows another space from the one in which the viewer is standing. The non-simultaneity of the historical time of the image with the space in which it is currently viewed is perhaps precisely the experience a museum visitor is looking for. If the beautiful expression of 'sealed time', coined by Andrei Tarkovski with reference to film, can also be applied to paintings, then those paintings are sealed again in Struth's photographs.

The painted representation of weather is probably the most obvious expression of this discrepancy between 'experienced' spaces and 'seen' spaces, much as the French use the same word for weather and time, le temps. Visitors to a museum will, for example, have little reason to open their umbrellas when they see Gustave Caillebotte's beautiful painting of rain—which, incidentally, is like an unintentional parody of Hegel's insight that a museum visitor no longer kneels in front of a Madonna.

However, the meteorological distance between the space of a painting and the space of the viewer appears slight in comparison to the historical distance. The centuries separating the painted room from that of the viewer are greater than any other spatial, climatic or pictorial distance, and, ultimately, the most important experience of a painting that a museum can offer: the challenge is to cross the borders of biographical time, as once demanded by religions. So there is good reason for the traditional perception of the affinity of museum to the church: the opening of the experience of time beyond biographical limits (to which Thomas Struth's photographs will also be subject one day, for they place a growing time zone between themselves and future viewers).

Struth's photographs, then, ultimately combine multiple time zones: the passing time zone of the observer is fixed to the sealed time zone of the painting in a photograph, which we observe in our own time zone. As the beneficiary of this experimentation with the multiple levels of the picture, space and time, the viewer of Struth's Museum Photographs experiences an inherent, though dynamic escalation. Between these poles of observation—the observed painting and the observed photograph—the visitors now appear as if caught in a time warp in which, fortunately, they can do no damage.

The stares directed at paintings for centuries have no consequences for these paintings. The most fascinating thing about art is perhaps the fact that it is not devoured by being viewed, but—on the contrary—appears to devour the gazes focused on it without a trace.

This is reminiscent of the first two lines of Paul Celan's famous poem, Die Krüge (The Tankards):
"An den langen Tischen der Zeit/zechen die Krage Gottes./ Sie trinken die Augen der Sehenden leer und die Augen der Blinden".
"At the long tables of time/the tankards of God carouse./ They empty the eyes of the seeing and the eyes of the blind". What—apart from the last few words—could characterize the metaphysics of the museum more accurately than these poetic lines?

In the light of this poem, Struth's photographs beg the question of how many visitors the paintings would see each day—if they were able. If we were to look, using the time-lapse technique, at the streams of visitors that the Mona Lisa sees each day, the question of who is looking at whom would automatically arise. In her novel, A Coin in Nine Hands, the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar presents the individual life of the museum painting as one of nocturnal loneliness. But the daily solitude of pictures in museums amidst a mass of visitors is conceivably much greater.

Of course, Celan's poem The Tankards is not dedicated to the perception of art. It deals with the longevity of earthly life, in which the short-term curiosity of all mortals fades away before the enduring nature of what they observe—nature or art. Paintings in museums are some of the most striking elements of this worldly stage, which outlasts the life span of the individual and outlives the passing generations. This is why the last lines of the poem are also a fitting description of them:
"Sie sind die gewaltigsten Zecher:/sie führen das Leere zum Mund wie das Volle/und schäumen nicht über wie du oder ich".

"They are the most tremendous carousers:/they lift the empty and the full alike to their lips/and do not brim over as would you or I."

Celan's poem reveals incidentally what "ars longa, vita brevis" can mean in terms of a history of perception.

In his preface to Struth's book, the German art historian Hans Belting examines the competitive relationship between the photographic medium and that of painting, which can also be observed in Struth's photographs. They examine painting not only in the moment in which it is observed, but also in the traditionally competitive relationship between the painted and the photographic image.

Struth does not employ superficial effects to compete with the painted canvas, as 'pictorial photography' once did, attempting to achieve painterly effects by using rubber prints and soft-focus techniques. As an 'inferior' medium in that it is 'cold', photography is in any case unable to draw even with the individual signature or the material value of the painted surface. As two different methods of creating an image, painting and photography possess such differing powers of suggestion that photography can only exist if it capitalises on its own artistic advantages. If Struth's photographs examine painting as a historical and educational event, they also do so in order to gain respect for photography and the artistic devices it employs.

American photo-realism of the sixties was the last movement to enter this contest by attempting to paint photographs with greater optical precision than is possible in photographs. Yet in Struth's Museum Photographs, painting is rendered precise in a social sense: the way it is received by the viewers is shown in a way that the paintings themselves can never capture. Mirrors incorporated into the paintings of Albert Oehlen and the large mirrors that Gerhard Richter wants us to perceive as paintings are attempts at capturing the viewer's response and imprisoning him within the picture. However, this only works for the individual viewer, who may even feel flattered by it.

Such experiments cannot resolve the fundamental dilemma that works of art are inferior to those who view them in two ways: the paintings are defenseless against the way they are perceived, and cannot even react to that perception. Struth's instantaneous photographs pick up on this deficiency.

Recording paintings at the moment when they are perceived is of course a triumph of 'cheap' photography over 'precious' art. From the beginning, photography has been considered a democratic medium'—and quite negatively so. Struth's instantaneous photographs show the democratic use of what were once luxury goods as a kind of mutual mass processing.

His photographs show the average observer of art, surrounded, at times positively jostled by his own kind. The viewer of art is neither lionised nor caricatured. He is simply there, coincidental, transient, restless. If painting's excellent reputation is only seldom long-lived, only photography and film are able to underline the idea of education in motion. The mass of visitors and the short time they spend observing the paintings make the concept of education in motion appear to be denial of the tradition of concentration on which the museum is based. It is tempting to formulate an obvious law of museum physics: mass endangers reflection. Struth has staged this competition between the media of painting and photography in a pictorial space that can also be referred to as a medium: the museum. Unlike the modern mass media, the museum is an antiquated medium and must be visited in order to see the pictures it contains. If at all, the museum can only be reproduced in the home at the expense of a loss in authenticity; that loss is greater than the difference between seeing a film at the cinema and watching it on television.

Even if Struth does not intend to compete with the color effects of painting as the Pictorialists once did, he still has other things in common with them. Besides light, Struth makes particular use of composition as the scene of this inter-media contest. If painters and photographers of still-lifes are able to compose the arrangements before recording them in a picture, street scenes and public interior spaces must be subject to chance if the photographic result is to appear credible.

In his early photographs Struth rarely ran that risk, photographing city streets with their inanimate contents as if he were more interested in the living space ('Lebenswelt') than in the presence of the people who live there. The museum spaces thus presented him with a new problem: placing unpredictable social arrangements that cannot be influenced at the centre of his work.

This involved compositional problems that extended beyond the unpredictability of movement and large groups of passersby, such as the color of their clothes and how these match the colors of the exhibition spaces. At the same time he also had to ensure that the portrayal of the groups of figures was neither denunciatory nor emphatic.

Waiting for the right moment—the photographer's reward—has been worth it. Even if Struth's museum photographs often convey the impression that it is the paintings that are receiving the visitors, ultimately it is Struth who has waited for his visitors to arrive—as partners for his brilliant monologue on the subject of the museum.




Translation: Toby Alleyne-Gee