Prepared Emotions

Museum exhibit labels have the peculiar quality of giving you both too much and not enough information.

Buenos Aires 2014

Museum exhibit labels have the peculiar quality of giving you both too much and not enough information. You learn the artist’s name, perhaps a birthdate, and the exhibit’s title; you almost always learn the artist’s nationality, along with the year of creation and a list of materials; and, if your curator feels particularly ambitious, you might find a separate label with a sentence or, more likely, eight long paragraphs that describe the entire exhibit, saving you from the trouble of needing to interpret any of the artwork yourself. For these paragraphs the language is ornate and academic and—to be honest—typically impenetrable if you don’t have a good dictionary of contemporary usage handy, though you can always risk turning your head a smidge and just look at the art. To ensure the bills are paid, the smaller exhibit cards usually have a line or two about provenance at the bottom, and a note of reverence and genuflection for the benefactor. Museum visitors read the cards from top to bottom; museum board members read from bottom to top.

I just happened to find myself hunting for one of those exhibit cards earlier this week on the second floor of a rather small museum—a clay sculpture of a distorted figure without any information had caught my attention and I wanted the artist’s name. Perhaps there wasn’t much purpose to my hunt, as I could still observe and interpret the sculpture without knowing the artist behind the work. There’s even a good argument that seeing the work without any extraneous information—no title, nor any nationality—focused my attention on the art. Exhibit labels are always outside of the artwork and frame what you see from a distance anyway; they narrow and shape and describe what you already perceive. And, on that afternoon, when I first looked at the large clay figure, my perceptions had already triggered a sensation, it was a visceral reaction of curiosity and uncertainty, a question about form and texture and an observation about how the room lights created what must have been a purposeful shadow—all of which arrived in my mind without any prompts. For this you just have to imagine walking into a museum room where you don’t recognize the artist and the exhibit doesn’t have any information, which leaves you alone to observe, well, nothing but the artwork.

And thinking about labels reminds me of a famous scene from One Hundred Years of Solitude, which comes when José Arcadio Buendía begins to label everything in his village, his goal to remember the name and function of every item:

With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana. Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.

In that last sentence I am picturing a young visitor in a museum, staring intently at a curator’s note and contemplating how an exhibit title just might explain the political significance of a piece, but never quite remembering to face the artwork and look.

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It is fairly straightforward to understand the necessity of conveying what might be considered the factual information of an exhibit: name, title, year. What’s a bit trickier, however, are the passages on most museum walls that provide an interpretation of the exhibits, these are the curator statements that offer context or definitions or explanations for the artwork—which is a long way of writing that these passages tell you how to think. There’s no need to interpret what you see, as that job has been done for you. Having what’s before your eyes defined with the authority of a museum wall does come with a slight badgering quality, too, which is especially unfortunate when an artist creates a daring, expansive work, as the typical museum visitor ends up perceiving what they’ve been told to perceive. In most cases these visitors are shown a curator statement before they even enter an exhibit—almost certainly limiting the potential for epiphany and discovery and significance.

I can contrast this to when I used to stop by the Angelica Theater in New York for a late-morning or mid-afternoon show without much of a plan. On many occasions I was the only person in the theater and I had two prompts: a film chosen by the Angelica, the title on the marquee. In general the theater did a reasonable job of at least showing films that satisfied a minimum requirement of interestingness—in whatever form that took. Once the lights went off and the film began, I would learn whether I had settled in for a horror or drama or noir, whether it was a classic revival or a small foreign film. And it came without any context or knowledge of the director’s intention, and without any of those ungentle nudges toward a particular interpretation. The stress here, for me at least, is on the difficulty of seeing art afresh, of seeing anything today that hasn’t been defined and categorized and judged long before you even arrive.

Of course watching a story unfold without any expectations isn’t possible with every artist. I’ll never be able to see a Shakespeare play without context; nor can I ever visit a Picasso exhibit with fresh eyes; and I’ll never hear a Beethoven performance absent the tradition of its notes. And that’s the same for any artist that’s universally recognizable—from Frida Kahlo to The Beatles to Jane Austen. If the artist has a famous name, it’s nearly impossible to keep your focus narrowed to the art, and outside of the context that reverberates from the name—you can’t truly absorb any of the work for the first time, as your reaction will always have a prompt, or an interpretation, even just a classification that’s attached to the name. Our most famous artists are so infused into the general culture that you can’t see the work—you’ve heard countless Shakespeare lines, seen a few thousand Picasso prints, heard Beethoven played on film soundtracks. So all the preconceptions, myths, and judgements come prepackaged with the artist. There’s nothing especially pernicious in that simple and unavoidable truth about our most notable artists, but there’s still a reason to push back against having every single museum piece arranged into neat categories and dictated with an authoritative interpretation, as this robs from museum visitors the opportunity to step forward and absorb an exhibit without any intermediaries. Perhaps the only fitting revenge in this dynamic is for the unknown artist—who wins at least this one time—because they’re in the glorious position of having nothing judged or prompted or interpreted other than the work.