"What is the function of the museum in contemporary culture? Until not so long ago, it was clear. One had only to refer to the statutes of the International Council of Museums of 1974, which described the museum as a ‘non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.'

More recently, however, the museum's functions became so drastically altered that they were sometimes said to be in a state of ‘crisis'. Indeed, as the 1990s approached and the effects of the expanding economy of services and the spectacular introduction of new technologies began to be felt, museums, like other types of artistic institutions, saw the scope of their activity grow. Today, apart from collecting and exhibiting works of art, museums are expected to be meeting places, restaurants, bookshops, and even fashion hotspots. Museums can also help to market cities across the globe, construct a national identity, and boost real estate speculation.

Doubtless, such processes suggest that today the functions of the museum extend well beyond the realm of the purely artistic. Whether because of economic criteria or a greater involvement with society and history, museums have clearly lost their traditional autonomy and have become core players of modern-day societies. With nothing left of the self-absorbed neutrality ascribed to them by modern art history, museums are now strategic implements that give rise to unprecedented struggles for their management. The museum has become the emblematic edifice of the 21st century, just as the cathedral was of the Middle Ages. Indeed, one could even say that it is the symbolic seat of the ‘culture industry' and a key reference point in contemporary urbanism. The Guggenheim of Bilbao, inaugurated in 1997, is surely paradigmatic of a trend that has since been consolidated by other institutions such as the Tate Modern of London and the MUSAC of León, to cite but a couple of more familiar examples.

Inevitably, artists have responded to and interpreted such processes, and often even anticipated them. If for bourgeois society the artistic object par excellence had been the easel painting, representing as it did the individualistic values to which it aspired by virtue of its unicity, abstraction and exchange potential on the market, in today's capitalist democracies it is the art institution itself as a whole which tends to reproduce - as a medium for the art work that it is - alternative values designed by audience participation, the importance of collective experience, and context, while generating works that integrate space, both physically and conceptually, as a core ingredient of their identity. This means that the so-called ‘crisis' of the museum is in fact but the renovation of its representative dimension as it assumes the basic premises and antagonisms of contemporary living and presents itself as a privileged ‘public space', an environment in constant transformation which, in addition to fulfilling its mission as an archive, can hold a mirror up to the present moment and to its user community.

The exhibition THE MUSEUM AS MEDIUM uses this context to explore the different ways in which artists have related to institutions since the early nineties, a key moment in the latter's recent history. By researching and contrasting complementary processes occurred in the artistic and social spheres (such as the resurgence of performative and contextual practices, both successors of conceptual art and the institutional critique of the 1970s, the flowering of museum architecture, the gradual mutation of the urban space, the consolidation of an ‘immaterial' economy, and the optimism of the market versus the malaise of the public sphere), this project attempts to reflect on the museum understood not only as a medium and a material but also as a system of conventions historically established in a specific language to show how artists' formal and ideological actions executed therein interpret and question the new conditions and instigate significant changes.

Beyond any narrow numerical criteria or extra-artistic ‘ends' to which they are often reduced, what these works suggest, being particularly alert as they are to their surroundings, is that museums can be ‘mediums' that extend beyond the confines of the artistic to take in much broader cultural and historical debates. Hence it may be affirmed that artists no longer perceive the museum as an ‘enemy', as occasionally happened during the avant-garde, but as a singular space that symbolically condenses and reflects the current patterns and modes of production and in which active intervention can be exploited to posit different visions of society - visions which, of course, draw on the past for inspiration in their endeavour to understand the present through memory. In other words, these works embody a transition from a confrontational attitude with regard to the museum to a dialectical one in which an internal, or ‘deconstructive', critique is vital if a ‘false conscience' and populism are to be avoided. It is thus that the museum becomes a medium - albeit one which, as happened with others that went before it, is nonetheless but an instrument, contingent and time-bound, that serves to represent and question a reality shaped by present conditions."

Pablo Fanego and Pedro de Llano
Curators of the exhibition