I appreciate Helen Glazer's thoughtful response to my posting about perfect
exhibits vs. perfect labels.  Nothing I can now add could bridge the obviously
great gulf between us in defining such terms as art, exhibit, interpretation,
museums, perhaps even religion.  I look at the museumization of select
objects as a historical, social, and intellectual process which inevitably
changes those objects.  One may compare their physical contexts in church
vs. museum, but also (I tried to say) in the narratives that people use to
describe their encounters with such objects.  Perhaps Ms. Glazer sees art
objects as always transcending their contexts and human settings -- that is
certainly a basic tenet of much excellent art historical scholarship, and I
won't take issue with it here.

I do, however, take exception to Ms. Glazer's accusation that I was being
"patronizing to visitors who don't come to the museum with the same
background information that museum curators and scholars might take
for granted."  As my last sentence indicated, I want museums to respect
visitors more than they now do, to take their visitors' prior experience more
and not less seriously.  Indeed, visitors may not know the same things that
curators know; most museums, in fact, don't have a clue to what their
visitors come knowing, nor do they much care.  They measure visitors
entirely by the knowledge that curators have.

Ms. Glazer's example of her children's religious education is a perfect case
of what I mean.  I would love it if museums of Judaica aimed to construct
their object-interpretations as bridges to connect her children's experience
with that of Jews of another time and culture.  In many years of visiting
and working on Jewish museums, I've seen slim evidence of that.  Does
anyone know of a museum of Renaissance paintings whose labels speak to
the religious experience of 15th- or 16th-century worshippers, even insofar
as that experience involved an interaction with these holy objects?  Indeed,
can one find a guidebook or an exhibit about Protestant churches that aims
to explain its physical appearance as a religious, rather than an art or
architectural historical phenomenon?

(I can think of one brilliant exception, which helps prove the rule.  That is
Kings College Chapel, in Cambridge, England, where a brilliant
interpretive exhibit begins by showing how the Tudor building was and is
"about God."  I recommend it as a extraordinary and moving experience.)

But my larger point is that museums too seldom heed whatever knowledge
it is that visitors bring -- whether that is religious, or technical, or politic
al,
or cultural, or whatever.  Instead we yammer at them incessantly, often of
recondite concepts that have no meaning or relevance to them.  We often
speak eloquently of "interactive" exhibits, by which we often mean gadgets
to give visitors even more of this yammering by interacting with their
fingertips.  But we don't listen enough to visitors.  We don't understand that
the most perfect labels are those that visitors "write" while and after they
have been stimulated to thought or moved to feeling by visiting with us.

Far from denying the value of interpretation, I want curators to design
their interpretive efforts to be more attentive to the strengths and
weaknesses that visitors bring with them.  To do this, curators will need to
know more about the 16th century than they now do, and much more about
the 20th century.  They should indeed know what saints meant to 16th-
century Italian Catholics, but also how different is the Protestant notion of
saintliness ("a congregation of saints") or our contemporary notions of "a
holy person."  They might do this better if they saw their work as a dialogue
with contemporary visitors, rather than an effort to make visitors into art
historians.

Richard Rabinowitz, American History Workshop, [log in to unmask]



On Thu, 30 Nov 1995, Helen Glazer wrote:

> 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
> [log in to unmask]
>
> >
> > Richard Rabinowitz, American History Workshop, [log in to unmask]
> >
>