Not what, not who, not how, but where. Where Art is Now.

The MCA’s tagline is quick and cheeky—a definition of the contemporary that is comfortable, explicit, accessible, and, well, objectively true.

In 2011 the MCA Vision Campaign reformulated the museum’s mission to engage a wider public and include all visitors in contemporary art dialogues. The last paragraph of the recently revamped mission statement boldly dreams, “The MCA aspires to engage a broad and diverse audience, create a sense of community, and be a place for contemplation, stimulation, and discussion about contemporary art and culture.”

All the parts are there for a successful, radical contemporary by Bishop’s standards. The MCA will reach the people, not just the elites, and democratize not only the art itself, but the ideas, the concepts, the politics, the impacts that accompany each and every piece. The MCA marches alongside Bishop with fervor proclaiming the museum as the great convener. After all, if museums are “a collective expression of what we consider important in culture [offering] a space to reflect and debate our values” there must be a collective and present-minded our at the heart of its mission. The sweet, sweet contemporary discourse will not merely be generated, but be exchanged in a communitas unlike any other manifesting where else but…where art is now.

But the where is flawed.

What happens to discussion when the where amplifies any conversation to an uncomfortable echo suggesting whispering instead?

What happens to contemplation when the where’s clinical inaccessibility only furthers the viewer from the work, from the artist? How does one insert contemporary ideas and concepts in the liminal “unanchored hyper-reality of [the] architectural container”?

What happens to stimulation when the where’s temple-like staircase proves too intimidating? When the cold white walls are unwelcoming to touch, to lean on, to linger around?

These are the questions both the MCA and Bishop must eventually answer. Bishop begins to unpack what role architecture plays in the grand scheme of the contemporary describing the decrease of the architecturally determined museum as well as the concept of ‘starchitecture’ defined as when “the museum’s external wrapper [becomes] more important than its contents …leaving art with the option of looking ever lost inside the gigantic post-industrial hangars, or supersizing to compete with its envelope.” However, without positioning the function of architecture in relation to the contemporary approach/method, or its direct effect on the visitors, the new museological ideology cannot be fully realized, and more importantly, cannot be fully mobilized.

The paradoxical idea of the defetishized museum object is central to Bishop’s contemporary approach. In a promotional video for the museum, MCA trustee Helen Zell explains:

“[In the 1970s] I thought about the institution as a place I would go to passively look at pictures on the wall. Nobody talked to you, nobody engaged with you, you were just there with the art and that was nice. Back in 1970 that was fine. It’s not fine anymore…the 21st century museum is a whole different animal. It’s not just a place where you engage passively, its active, it’s exciting.”

As the MCA changes–as well as the concept of a contemporary museum–so too do the responsibilities of museums and the expectations the public places on museums. The contemporary cannot be the monologic, didactic history of museums, but rather the active, infinite experience of the viewer. For most exhibitions, the museum should read as a person not an authority, a possibility not a fact. This new found methodology grants agency and power to viewers, enabling them to introduce their own personal experiences and social knowledge into the pedagogy. While this shift from instilling knowledge to producing narratives is a beautiful output of radical education and an important repositioning of the viewer as participatory, the elitist and hierarchical environment of museum architecture does not reflect these values and movements. Rather, it only serves as a reminder of the hegemonic emergence and history of the museums.

Just as art is liberated from the silos of canon and chronology through contemporaneity, the viewer must be liberated from the hyper-formalized, historical environment of the museum to be fully contemporary. By no means must every white cube, wall, and plinth be destroyed or every temple-like staircase converted to an escalator. But what’s really radical about the environment of a museum like the MCA? As we end and begin a new mode of the contemporary each day, museum architecture emerges as the final frontier.