Newhouse, Victoria. Art and the Power of Placement. New York: Monacelli Press, 2005. 304 pages. ISBN: 1580931480

With Art and the Power of Placement Victoria Newhouse has written an accessible and richly illustrated text as a seemingly astute guide for arts professionals - but the author is not a museum educator, nor a manager of visitor services, nor an arts administrator. It is evident early on that Newhouse has entered her project as a historian and art connoisseur 1 with strong regard for the primacy of the original setting and the artist's original intent. Newhouse notes that her 1998 book, Towards a New Museum , is about “architecture and art,” whereas her new text complements the subject with its focus on “presentation and art” (8). Her topic is broad, and predictably her text is far from comprehensive, largely eschewing public, site-specific, and performance art to focus on static displays within cultural institutions. Yet the clarity of her methodology is not really in contradistinction to the broadness of her topic and selectivity of her inquiry, as her approach employs a strong visual model to examine the relation between art, context, and meaning.

In evaluating the placement of the Elgin Marbles, Newhouse states that the original perspective in the Parthenon - the original context - is the correct perspective. It is ideal, although, she admits, impossible to reproduce (43). She does not outrightly dismiss subsequent installations in the British Museum , but she does find fault in every divergence from the original perspective. This approach is repeated in her case study on the Nike of Samothrace . The curator Marianne Hamiaux describes the Nike's lessened prominence after the Louvre's I.M. Pei renovation in the 1980s as a necessary sacrifice “to avoid ‘museumifying' the museum.” Newhouse laments the move (“the Nike has been demoted”) but does not elaborate on the implications of such reification (61). For her, the sculpture's 1932 placement was as close to the original installation as possible and after 50 years this placement had become the “authentic” one. Newhouse does not see irony in upholding this now-ideal placement regardless of the changes in the museum. If the pursuit of maintaining an original context reifies the role of a museum, implicit in such a possibility is the evolving role of the museum as a brand and its tenuous, commercial relationship to its growing audience, a role that Newhouse does not address. Where Hamiaux sees the original placement of an artwork as an important but imminently flexible element in the museum space, Newhouse clings to the authentic outside of logistical considerations and shifts in art historical priorities, educational purpose, or visitor traffic. The curator sees this treatment of the artwork's origins as essential to the shifting functional needs of the museum, whereas Newhouse sees this compromise as a failure.

MoMA's 1999 juxtaposition of Rineke Dijkstra's photograph of a Ukrainian swimmer next to Cezanne's Bather is a particular source of concern for Newhouse. Her statement reveals a vague anxiety about photography 2 : “The photograph is about a bather, whereas the painting is about painting” (257). Dijkstra's photograph, with all its cultural or social content, is secondary to the formal aesthetics of Cezanne's painting. Yet if not in a place like the Museum of Modern Art, where else can one find juxtapositions of the modern, post-modern, and onwards? Newhouse's commitment to the primacy of the masterwork is a surprisingly formalist approach to contemporary aesthetics, art practice, and curatorial display.

I can understand the horror of seeing Cezanne's masterpiece of modern painting tritely presented next to a contemporary photograph. But should masterpieces of art only be seen alone, on well-scaled and appropriately-colored walls, as masterworks? If so, who establishes such rules? Or is there some educational or scholarly value in encouraging such juxtapositions? Newhouse notes that the curator's historical knowledge encouraged the comparison because Cezanne's painting was in fact inspired by a photograph. Certainly arts education should value the masterwork, but if a museum's mission is in part educational, is there only one way to teach art history? Can juxtapositions invoke visual thinking - and thus perceptual knowledge - that is as useful as historical knowledge? While Newhouse is a historian, her methodology is invested in visual analysis. One would hope to find an ally in such a mission with this author.

Newhouse touches upon the significance of aesthetic experience in her discussion of a jauntily-installed 2003 exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York . Invoking the term “mirabilia” to describe “a return to historic installations designed primarily to delight and surprise rather than to instruct,” she finds the Drawing Center 's exhibit “determined by the work itself, not, as in so many shows today, by a theory in need of illustration” (260). Yet she does not go so far as to claim that challenging conventional visual thinking, whether through a marvelous or surprising installation, is a form of instruction too.

The author does not want to see art “reduced to a lesson in art history” (234), but at the same time argues that museums should aspire to reproduce original contexts and artistic intent. If context should supplement, not subsume, the artwork, the section on Jackson Pollock makes the point best, as she relies on detailed visual explanations as proof. Considerations of gallery size, wall color, wall texture, hanging materials, lighting, pedestal display, and textual accompaniments are further discussed in the last section of the book. Glaringly, some exhibition elements are not investigated as thoroughly as these physical elements, such the placement, form, and content of wall text (particularly in terms of titling and philanthropic sponsorship), brochures, the architectural flow of galleries, and significantly, the audience experience. There is a single quote about a potential “circulation bottleneck” (198), and not one of the hundreds of photographs depicts the throngs of visitors that quite often crowd museum galleries.

Art and the Power of Placement is perhaps best described as a curatorial history, offering a selective glimpse into how art history and its trends are reflected in the placement and display of artwork. As well, it is a formalist history in its focus on the object. Newhouse rarely describes audience physicality in the space and never ventures to consider how a viewer's presence might also affect an artwork's meaning. In a touch-and-go style that only too briefly pauses to consider larger concerns such as nationalism, site-specificity, the ethics of contextualization, and reception studies, and altogether avoids subjects of time-based art, translation, cultural exchange, anthropological display, and institutional critique, Newhouse's text feels incomplete. Yet beyond the book's lapses, her historical-visual methodology is useful in its visual intelligence, offering students of interdisciplinary work a case-study model of analysis upon which to further explore these critical issues.

1. Newhouse is connected to the Conde Nast media empire by her husband, S.I. Newhouse, and has strong connections to the most prestigious arts and cultural institutions in the world.

2. Douglas Crimp foresees this anxiety over photography in On the Museum's Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).