NOT A MUSEUM !!!

I’ve been to Barnes a few times, but never to the archives. It came up to me the fact that the whole foundation was initially built upon the purpose of education, and the fact that I am currently working on a project of building an art/emotion/educational space and curriculum for Institution of Education in China, I was curious of how did Barnes begin. How did the experiment, what was he thinking while designing these? 

The archive was small, entirely, and the archivist had already prepared a list of files I handed when I arrived. I started, entering the door of 1925. Remember that was long before MOMA even opened, and at the time Barnes and his closed circle Dewy and Brumsh began to conversations and essays heavily discussing how viewing art should be an experience that’s accessible to everybody, the ordinary people. At the time when tons of collectors and billionaires were still interested in buying status, Barnes was quite a weirdo at the circle. The first student of the Barnes Foundation was a factory worker in his industry, and Barnes arranged the whole art series not based on content nor isms, but on what they looked like. You would see Renoir's vas in juxtaposition with Cezaanne’woman connected just by their lines and color. The method dominated the school’s curriculum, too. He stressed, he wanted anyone who walked in and started appreciating art regardless of their background or knowledge. 

In those old letters and documents, you saw a life strive for defining what art and aesthetic meant and how art, psychology, sociology integrated and made a human more complete. Some parts of it may be a bit outdated in some technical terms, (recall that’s before all the modernism and postmodernism and before a machine can intimidate humans), but the core was still very impressive.  It was nothing but bring humans and communities together and completely not himself but integrated with the world, using all the means he could grasp and express. 

Later I walked around in the gallery and chatted with the staff about how playful the wall looked as if Barnes himself was experimenting. “You are right,” the staff said and told me a fascinating detail, that Dr.Barnes at the time would stress with tons of exclamation marks and capitalizations that it was NOT A MUSEUM!!! He said,

“It’s either a foundation, a school or a laboratory”