Few issues are as vexing to art museums as helping visitors get the most from a viewing experience. Some feel that museums, as educational institutions, should bring every audio-visual means to bear on its permanent collections in the interest of attracting and informing visitors. Others believe the objects on display are primary and must not be distracted from by an atmosphere that puts reading or listening on the same level as looking.
Imagine a small, quietly decorated room in which resides a single sculpture or painting. Also consider the possible tools to promote the work’s understanding: introductory video and text panel; acoustiguide; wall label; interactive computer program; publications ranging from brochure to monograph, artist’s biography to complete-works catalog.
Visualize them all in the room with the painting or sculpture. Is that what we want from an art museum?
“The obvious answer,” says James N. Wood, director and president of the Art Institute of Chicago, “is not to provide the most information possible but what will make the best experience. And that is difficult to assess. Looking at a work of art is like listening to a piece of music. There are many abstract emotional factors.”
Most art museums have attempted to find a middle ground between giving too much information and too little. But it has proved so hard to achieve that no museum in the world has come close to establishing a model.
“It’s easy to think: Museums are educational institutions, and education means words,” Wood said. “Then we fall into what (critic) Bob Hughes calls the therapeutic trap — museums are supposed to make us `healthier.’ Museums are places to learn, but they are more places to experience. An aesthetic experience is not the same thing as learning. The most perfect wall label will not articulate the most essential part of the experience.
“In surveys people have commented on the calm repose, the light and the elegance of the surroundings (at the Institute), which suggests an experience other than just being in an educational center. Still, some viewers get offended, feeling they’re preached at. Others get angry for not knowing (what they feel the museum should tell them). Our obsession with democracy tells us everyone has the same right, but people enter museums with very different levels of experience, and there’s no simple solution to giving everybody the best experience.”
Wood believes art museums must offer a range of solutions, using the best formats at the best times and places. At the Institute that ranges from the Tadao Ando gallery, in which the architecture provides an environment for understanding Japanese art, to galleries 141 and 142, in which small numbers of works from the permanent collection usually are accompanied by a lavish didactic component, giving as much to read as to look at.
The trick is to match the right means to the right pieces while remaining discreet enough so self-sufficient viewers can commune with the objects — and their own feelings — unimpeded.
“To put museums into an `elitist’ category is not quite fair,” says Robert Eskridge, the Institute’s associate director for teacher programs and acting head of museum education. “Botanical gardens, zoos, historic houses — all are faced with the same problems of giving multiple access points to pique interest. The difficulty of scholars not being sure of what to agree on to help (communicate) value or merit is felt throughout the humanities. It occurs whether the work is a painting or `Hamlet’ or `Popul Vuh.’ Whenever we interpret works from other times and places there is a challenge.”
The way is a little clearer with temporary museum exhibitions. Such shows are focused events with a theme or subject that allows for consensus by museums on gallery guides, brochures, catalogs and the like.
But permanent collections are far more vast in the number of their objects, and to assemble educational material for them in such a way that it will be ongoing and long-lasting — pieces go out on loan for extended periods of time — presents a greater dilemma.
Some areas of permanent collections also give less opportunity for explication because they are less settled. History has not weighed in, for example, on a lot of contemporary art. So in the very instances an audience may feel the need for more information or stricter guidance, supplementary data may encourage greater self-reliance and more personal interpretation simply by being terse.
“We just retaped the audio guide to our permanent collection,” says Wendy Woon, director of education at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “It’s not complete in itself; it’s not a textbook. But it does talk about each piece and various art movements, allowing the free choice of listeners (by offering self-directed options).
“Most people look at a work of art in a museum for three seconds. We don’t want to overwhelm that brief time, but an audio tour or any posted information does help viewers slow down. From surveys we found 91 percent of the audience uses labels, and 75 to 80 percent wanted the same amount of information or more. On the other hand, we originally had celebrities speaking the lines on our acoustiguide, and listeners didn’t like it. They preferred artists or curators.”
Periodic calls have come from outside the museum field for documentation of a more sensational, lapel-grabbing nature. Such data — gossip about artists and collectors as well as adventures of acquisition, legal or otherwise — may have a place on future web sites of museums. But despite its marketing appeal, it helps not at all in the viewing of art, and so most responsibly remains apart from the galleries.
Smaller museums, particularly those associated with teaching institutions, might be expected to be even more resolute in their practices. Words are, after all, at the heart of every higher learning experience. Wouldn’t a college art museum also show something of the same emphasis?
“I don’t think our position is so different (from that of the large general museum),” says Kimerly Rorschach, director of the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. “Yes, we are a teaching museum, but we need to reach out. A tremendous cognitive shift has to take place at an art museum, and even our undergrads need a way in. Too often museum labels are written for specialists. Most people don’t care about that. A model for diverse audiences, it seems to me, is to give access to individual objects without directing (the viewer’s) thinking too terribly much.”
The digital revolution has allowed access to more information while allowing users to direct themselves. Few large museums have remained indifferent to that adventure. But teaching institutions have felt the impact of digital technology more steadily from the beginning. Wood says today’s art museums have to experiment with ways to educate. Some of the most successful experiments are conducted at small laboratories.
“We view access to information and its dissemination as what we do,” says David Mickenberg, director of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum at Northwestern University. “Most museums give some information digitally but not much. For our exhibition, `The Last Expression: Art from Auschwitz’ (opening in September 2001), we will enter new digital terrain, giving access to approximately 250 artworks plus original source documents, photographs, 3-D tours of the site, drawings by prisoners, folksongs and interviews with surviving artists. The digital component will be central to the museum, both inside and outside, in nine different languages.”
Museums moving more slowly onto that terrain emphasize how learning proceeds best from live one-to-one encounters. Years of work at the Terra Museum of American Art — now an educational foundation — have been done directly with teachers, and a new part of its complement to exhibitions will be two evening series of lectures featuring scholars and artists who will stay an extra day to energize museum staff and specially chosen groups of master teachers. Audiences there have requested artist-in-residence programs. Here, perhaps, is the beginning.
But do museums ask artists how they want to be presented? Would an artist-teacher be consulted, for example, on the role of a video documentary in one of his large exhibitions?
“I don’t think I ever was asked about it,” says Ed Paschke, whose retrospective organized by the Art Institute first opened at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris. “I did want them to use (the tape in France), but when I arrived and saw it was just on a monitor in the gallery, my initial reaction was that they could have given a little more thought to placement. I would have preferred a small separate space, a `time-out’ from the exhibition.
“In general, from an informational standpoint, I’m all for relevance and conciseness. If texts get too long, the connection begins to be lost with the general public. I’d like to hold the line on diluting the walls of a show. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned by sticking with what I’m used to.”
