With characteristic pessimism, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno once declared museums "the family sepulchres of works of art". Filippo Marinetti, the ideological founder of Futurism, was on the same track, calling them mausoleums.
But while artists continue to challenge the taxonomies and traditions of the museum, a key problem facing contemporary curators is that they are pulled between providing an interpretative approach and offering visitors a "heightened experience" or spectacle.
Some museum directors put the emphasis on the visitor as a collaborator or contributor, rather than as some sort of external receiver. Others push claims for the virtual museum.
As curators and commentators continue to mull over both the potential and the potential demise of the physical museum as a vehicle for display and dissemination, the Pompidou Centre, in Paris, appears to be going in the opposite direction. It is hosting a bold show about one of popular cinema's most notorious artists, Alfred Hitchcock, achieving both an intellectual approach and a series of heightened experiences for the visitor.
Putting Hitchcock into the museum/gallery space is not entirely new. Victor Burgin, Cindy Sherman and Douglas Gordon (whose film was recently screened as part of the Temple Bar Diversions programme) are among the artists who have already paid their respects to Hitchcock through quotation and repetition.
But in the Paris show, Hitchcock And Art: Fatal Coincidences, his work remains the point of departure and arrival, as the various rooms testify to the rich relationship between his films and the other visual and literary arts.
Entering a darkened room, you are confronted with a series of 21 vitrines, spotlights picking out the objects in their glass cases, recalling the origins of museums in cabinets of curiosities. Film props are arranged on blood-red satin, accompanied by small snapshots with scalloped edges, evoking the homey quality of a family photo album.
Seemingly banal domestic objects in their glass windows gain the status of relic or icon: a scissors radiates danger, a glass of milk becomes a menace, smashed spectacles threaten our vision, Marnie's bulging yellow leather handbag, stuffed with stolen money, combines danger and desire.
In a curious way, when these props are shorn of their narrative context and removed from the mise en scΦne, they acquire a powerful and typically Hitchcockian, fetishistic resonance. With narrative reduced to object, they also become a random menu, a multimedia interface where the icon or object becomes the route through which the memories of the films can unfold.
Disorientation, in this darkened hall of mirrors, permeates the exhibition. Dim lighting casts shadows and multiple reflections; it seeps through slits in the walls, catching you unawares - startling and awakening the voyeur in us all. Text panels restore some kind of order, drawing out the connections between the symbolist women and their echoes in Hitchcock's work.
The fascination with painted images in Rebecca or Vertigo indicates some of the rich lines of inquiry in the show; then we are assaulted again as we turn another corner to come face to face with several screen images of Hitchockian icy blondes, or are startled by Salvador Dali's giant floating eye at the end of a corridor.
The show highlights Hitchcock's penchant for setting escape and chase scenes in sites of public display and spectacle. These are screened across five suspended monitors and made even more manic with the crazed carnival soundtrack: a dance to death. The Pompidou Centre would itself offer an appropriate site for one of his escape or chase sequences, with its series of transparent tunnels running up and down the building's exterior.
The director Robert Bresson once advised cinematographers to "bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so". This exhibition might also seem to be a blueprint for a multimedia collection.
Hitchcock's Rear Window seems curiously apt, too, as a menu for a virtual museum display. Each of the rear windows of the apartment block offers an opening into a story, appearing together like a bank of television screens, tuned to different soap operas, or recalling the vitrines of the standard museum, displaying artefacts from other habitats.
The increased digitisation of spheres such as education, libraries, galleries and museums has highlighted issues of form, content, use and experience. It has fuelled discussions about the focus of the museum as a means of cultural transmission.
And as Hitchcock is welcomed into the museum, achieving the respectability of institutional authority, his visual energy and this show's approach suggests possible forms for virtual museums.
The world that the Pompidou's Hitchcock show evokes is an ideal immersive environment. Different routes are possible, questions and comments are prompted, conclusions deferred and experience and learning entertained, making for an open work: a museum without walls?
Hitchcock And Art: Fatal Coincidences is at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, until September 24th
Stephanie McBride lectures in film studies at Dublin City University
