On the Louisiana, on collection rooms with natural light, and on the art of not finishing
The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is forty kilometres north of Copenhagen, which is the correct distance. It requires a decision.
The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is forty kilometres north of Copenhagen, which is the correct distance. It requires a decision. You cannot stumble into Louisiana. You have to want to go — and then take a regional train, and then walk fifteen minutes through a suburb that is not particularly interesting, and then arrive at a building that has been extending itself quietly along a coastal hillside since 1958.
The architecture of Louisiana is the argument for the collection. The connection between building and landscape — each gallery opening onto water or lawn or another gallery — makes it impossible to rush. You cannot take the Louisiana quickly. The building forbids it.
The permanent collection has been assembled without a definitive position. There are Giacomettis, and a room that is mostly Calder, and a lower-level gallery where the light changes over the course of an afternoon in a way that makes the works look different at three than they did at noon. The curators know this.
The MAK in Vienna, which holds applied arts and design, works differently — more scholarly, more organised by period and medium, less ambient. But it shares with Louisiana an understanding of the visitor's time: that it is not a resource to be processed but a material to be shaped. You leave having been somewhere, rather than having seen things.
The museum afternoon as a practice — not an event but a practice — requires a willingness to not finish. To arrive at closing time still in the middle of something. This is the correct outcome.