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] >