Art museums have long been compared to monumental ceremonial structures such as Renaissance palaces or Greek or Roman temples due to an abiding tradition of museums appropriating architectural forms from monuments of the past. From the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, these cultural institutions were deliberately constructed to resemble buildings consecrated to religious ceremonies or worship. In fact, major western cities, like Berlin, London, Munich, Washington, and many others built museums whose facades looked like Greek or Roman temples.
The Louvre curator Germain Bazin wrote that an art museum is “a temple where time seems suspended: the visitor enters it in the hope of finding one of those momentary cultural epiphanies that give him [or her] the illusion of knowing intuitively his [or her] essence and strengths.” Summarizing a subject of discussion into just one word has always been a daunting task, yet with Bazin’s passage, it could be easily synopsized in one word: “liminality,” which is inherently associated with ritual.
The term “liminality” was coined by the Belgian folklorist Arnold van Gennep and further developed in the anthropological analysis of Victor Turner to demonstrate a state of consciousness outside “betwixt and between” the normal, everyday cultural and social discourses and practices. Turner soon noticed that his conceptions of liminality could pertain to modern western concepts of the aesthetic experience. In particular, aspects of liminality can be experienced during such activities as attending the theatre, watching a movie, or visiting an art exhibition, when all senses are being brought to the point of greatest intensity. Similar to folklore ceremonies that temporarily suspend the limiting patterns of generally accepted social behavior, these cultural situations create a realm, in which individuals can move beyond the most mundane and practical aspects of everyday life and see themselves and their existence in a new light.
Cultural anthropologists have discovered that every culture, western or non-western, demonstrates some symbolic attempt to challenge the irreversibility of time. The ubiquitous themes of rebirth, rejuvenation, and the spiritual renewal of the past consistently negate the fact of death by symbolizing an illusion of time and affirming the perpetuation of life with repeating cycles of seasons and generations. Ritual usually involves an aspect of performance, taking place on a specific site designed for the enactment or re-enactment of a myth. The Swedish writer Goran Schildt has emphasized that museums are settings in which we seek a state of “detached, timeless and exalted” contemplation that “grants us a kind of release from life’s struggle… and captivity in our own ego.” Art museums therefore serve as ritual sites, in which visitors strive to resuscitate profoundly insightful glimpses into the past through splendid symbolic representations.
The universal longing for contact with an idealized past or with things filled with immortal spirits is prevalent as a sustaining impelling force not only in art museums but many other kinds of rituals as well. In traditional rituals, participants may or may not necessarily perform, rather witnessing a spectacle. For example, during the kachina ceremonies in Pueblo Indian culture, the dancing kachinas involved in the public performances are only men and only those who wear exclusively made masks, thus “impersonating” the kachina spirits coming to dance for the pleasure and abundant harvest of the Zuni and Hopi people. In art museums, however, it is the witness —the museum visitor—who enacts the ritual. The phenomenon resembles Romanesque and Gothic medieval cathedrals, like Santiago de Compostela and Notre Dame de Paris, where pilgrims followed a structured narrative route through the interior, stopping at prescribed points for prayer or contemplation. Similarly, museums offer well-developed ritual scenarios, in the form of art-historical narratives that unfold through a sequence of spaces. Even when visitors enter museums to see only selected artworks, the museum’s larger narrative structure gives a frame of reference and provides context to individual works.
Finally, a ritual experience is thought to have a purpose, an end. When it comes to the art museum, no one could say it better than the distinguished British scholar Sir Kenneth Clark,“The only reason for bringing together works of art in a public place in that… they produce [in us] a kind of exalted experience.” In this context, the ed hoc function of an art museum is to present works of art as objects of aesthetic contemplation and not as representative of historical or archaeological information. Aesthetic contemplation is, in essence, a deeply private and profoundly transformative experience, when an imaginative encounter occurs between viewer and artist. The curator of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Benjamin Ives Gilman,33 in his work published in 1918, compares this phenomenon to the “sacred conversations” represented in Italian altarpieces— scenes in which saints who had lived in different centuries magically come together in a single imaginary space and contemplate the Madonna. From this perspective, the modern aesthete visiting an art museum becomes a disciple or a devotee who attains secular grace through communion with artistic geniuses of the past, eternal spirits that provide a life-redeeming sustenance. The end result is an intense and, ultimately, rewarding emotion or an overwhelming sensual gratification that contains a profound spiritual revelation.—Diana Guber, “Liminality: Musing on the Function of Art Museums,” 2016.