On Tue, 21 Nov 1995, Richard Rabinowitz wrote:

> The notion is absurd. A label is a "stand-in," a temporary bridge over a
> gulf in understanding or meaning.  The Most Perfect Exhibits need no
> labels; they are apprehended, engaged, absorbed, and translated into
> personal meaning and action without extrinsic text or maps or graphics.
> My great examples are the Renaissance altarpieces in Italian churches.
> Composed of architectural "frames," encompassing many distinct pictorial
> elements, they are fronted by rows of benches and candle-holders.  The
> altarpiece, of course, sits within another architectural composition --
> the church itself, with its own architectural, musical, auditory, and
> even olfactory environment.  The altarpiece is a kinesthetic experience,
> as well as a multi-sensory one, but it never includes text.  "Visitors,"
> that is, worshippers, know how to encounter and engage it with text of
> their own.

I don't think the above is an example of an "exhibit."  Art is a
component of it, but that doesn't make it an exhibit in the sense we
speak of a museum exhibit.  I also don't agree that the
Catholics who built the cathedral and continue to use it today somehow
manage to extract meaning from it and instinctively knows how to
engage with it without "extrinsic" information such as
texts.  A visitor from another religious tradition, who
has little or no knowledge of Catholicism, might basically grasp the
purpose of the place, but would be hard pressed to interpret the
narratives pictured on the altarpieces and windows.  Even people raised
in say, American Protestantism, would probably need at least some
explanation to understand everything there, e.g. imagery related to the
Catholic saints.  As someone raising children
in a religion, I can tell you that my children are learning to understand
and interpret the relgious articles we use and the symbolism of the
architecture, art and fixtures of our house of worship in religious school
 and through in programs offered by our synagogue.  By the time they're
 teenagers this will all appear self-evident to them, but that's only
 because it's being
carefully taught, reinforced and repeated to them now.

>
> Once the paintings have been severed from this context, ripped out of the
> frames of experience for which they have been designed, and re-installed
> in white-walled modern museum environments, they need the reconstitutive
> energy of interpretive labels. Museum visitors, after all, come without
> the intellectual structures, not to say the faith and sensory
> apperceptiveness, of the worshippers.  They are frequently illiterate in the
> tradition.  The label we supply is then a remedial device.

More assumptions here that I find problematic.  First of all, the words
you have chosen with connotations of violence (severed, ripped).  Some
altarpieces were commissioned by wealthy families, who owned them
privately.  You make it sound as if all altarpieces were removed from the
churches where they rightfully belonged.  The museum visitors don't "need
the reconstitutive energy of interpretive labels" because they're in a
museum and not a church; as I stated above, some of them would get more
out of the experience if they had interpretive materials at hand EVEN if
they were in the church.  However, an art museum exhibit of altarpieces
might be enriched by having some illustrations or three-dimensional
displays showing how they were incorporated into shrines or altars.

By the way, I find the term "remedial device"
condescending with its connotation of "remedial education" (i.e. the
authorities have decided that you should
have learned this by now, but you haven't).  There's no reason to be
patronizing to visitors who
don't come to the museum with the same background information that museum
curators and scholars might take for granted.

> Of course, remediation is never neutral, and many bridges are more
> interesting and impressive than the shorelines they connect.  Indeed, the
> greatest works of art, the most interesting specimens of science and
> history, are probably those which generate the most interesting
> interpretive efforts.  (My ideas about bridges have led to thoughts about
> the Brooklyn Bridge, in particular.)  But we have to be careful to assume
> that any thing we design is perfect, is an end in itself.  Looking for
> the preparatory formula usually means closing our eyes to the subsequent
> experience of our visitors.  A bridge has to connect something.  Pay more
> attention to the roads people take to get to the object, and where
> they're going afterwards.

I do like the bridge metaphor!

--Helen Glazer, Exhibitions Director, Goucher College, Baltimore, MD
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>
> Richard Rabinowitz, American History Workshop, [log in to unmask]
>