More and more, it seems that museum curators are determined to make the experience of visiting their collections onerous to patrons. Objects are displayed to make political or ideological points and wall labels admonish, hector, and shame. A little of this is fine, I suppose, but a relentless campaign of ideological purification directed at the hapless museum-goer detracts from the experience and diminishes the aesthetic pleasures of beauty, color, composition and profundity of observation that great works provide. When a Titian nude is considered primarily as the exemplification of something called the"male gaze" and the wall label exposes some of us (half of us) as either voyeurs or nascent rapists, something, I suspect, has gone badly wrong. I am not so naive as to suggest that art isn't often inflected by politics, nor am I necessarily opposed to some degree of pedagogy in the presentation of the paintings and other objects held by museums -- in fact, just about every tactic for hanging art, including the time-honored concept of illustrating mainstreams in art or the historic progression of styles or national schools or themes, is implicitly didactic. The mere fact that works from the Baroque or Rococo periods are generally segregated from medieval or Victorian paintings and displayed in consecutive galleries illustrates a thesis about history and sensibility. But today, there is a tendency toward neo-Stalinism in some galleries -- art works are supposed to be instruments for re-education of those strolling the museum. Aggressively labeled and thrust in the viewer's face as political arguments, the idea seems to be to use art to purge viewers of their fascist, racist, bourgeois, capitalist, unimaginative Republican or conservative ideas. There are many things wrong with this approach to art, particularly when it overwhelms other ways of viewing paintings and art objects. First, this ideological perspective ignores the fact that "art" as a word derives from the notion of doing something particularly well, that is, a particular kind of grace (artfulness) in the craftsmanship of the painting or object. In German, Art or Kunst is related to the notion of Koennen that is capability, acquired skill, something that has to be learned through a long and arduous apprenticeship. Once, this notion of art is lost, there is nothing left but politics and, heaven knows, we have enough of that today. Second, most patrons in most art museums are well-educated and tend toward Leftist politics - the right-wingers are hunting or attending football games; therefore, there is an element of preaching to the choir. Third, art as Arthur Danto argued is always the embodiment of an idea -- but explicit political ideas are, in successful art, distinctly secondary to other qualities manifested in the work. When we politicize art, we elevate one incidental aspect of its content over other more important features in the object. The Politically Correct always assert that they want to have a "conversation" -- but this "conversation" if it happens generally tends to be a megaphone aimed at the wincing ears of the inadequately enlightened with no possibility for response tolerated by the broadcaster.
The Walker Art Center's elevation of political and identity politics themes in its galleries has always been problematic, (The infection has also reached the Minneapolis Institute of Art as witness the recent exhibition of art objects made by Native American women, almost all of them inferior to the less self-conscious and seemingly apolitical work displayed in the adjacent more anthropological galleries.) Sometimes, however, an art object that is ostensibly political in nature and content achieves a baffling density and, in fact, against its own will threatens to become art under the old-fashioned definition, -- that is, an enigmatic object that strains to embody an idea that can't quite be expressed in any other form. Witness Theaster Gates' Assembly Hall. This work is a four-room installation, a suite of galleries rather tastefully color-coordinated in beiges and browns with soft lighting and a mysterious ambience. The viewer enters a room where old slides from 1950's art history classes are projected one after another -- I watched a half dozen of them and the slides seemed to be primarily black and white pictures of Sumerian figurines, rock art, tablets with bas relief images on them, Benin bronze sculptures, nondescript objects retrieved from various archaeological digs. Along a shelf, magazines were bound in uniform red and yellow volumes -- I had the impression that the bound volumes contained back issues of Chicago-based magazines catering to African-American readers: Jet, I think, and Ebony. From this gallery, one enters a so-called reading room, lit like a library with some tables, comfortable-looking couches and chairs. Some people were sitting in the reading room when I viewed the installation -- no one was reading; the people were resting their feet and chatting in low voices. Beyond that room, there was a third gallery containing about 8 or so glass cases. In these cases were displayed commercial art, menus and boxes and other packaging, ephemera decorated with gruesomely offensive images of Black people: little Sambos, Aunt Jemimas, minstrel-figure with flat noses and inflated lips playing banjos or gobbling water-melon, picaninnies with their frizzy halos of nappy hair, Pullman porters grinning as they poured coffee -- not just packaging showing these kinds of caricatures, but, also, toys: grinning simian-like barefoot boys and black raggedy-Anns with stereotyped figures. These objects are part of a collection amassed by a wealthy African-American collector in Chicago and they are certainly remarkable enough. But how are we supposed to react to these artifacts -- with shame? with detachment? with a sneaky kind of affection? (I believe this same collection was featured in the ending titles to Spike Lee's excellent Bamboozled -- shown in counterpoint to elegant jazz, the objects seem forlorn, orphaned, fetishes that once had some kind of power now reduced to ghostly apparitions, empty gestures flapping against the wind of history. Until minstrel shows and minstrel culture is somehow recuperated -- I mean things like the works of Stephen Foster -- American art is much diminished. But I don't know how such things can be reclaimed and rehabilitated. In the last room, narrow and running the length of the others chambers in the suite, pottery and other vessels made by Theaster Gates, who is apparently a well-established craftsman in ceramics, are displayed -- these are elegantly simple vases and crockery, Japanese in influence, glazed in earth colors and set along crowded shelves. In the foreground, if I recall properly, there were some of the tools of the potter's trade displayed on other shelves against the opposing wall. A wall label tells us that Gates thinks it important that the cultural context from which an object derives be understood to be part of the art. So what does this enigmatic assembly demonstrate to us? I'm baffled. It may be that Gates is expressing the notion that he (and his viewers) are vessels and that these vessels originate in the context of other cultures exhibited in the form of anthropological "magic lantern" slides and intense cultural racism. My son had the interesting notion that "racism is baked into the clay" of America -- hence the pots and plates are made, in some respect, out of this milieu of racism. The elegantly simple ceramics were made by an African-American man -- someone who was influenced by a dryly didactic approach to the cultural productions of other peoples, someone who read Jet and Ebony in the context of systemic racism as illustrated by the nasty ephemera in the glass cases. But what does it mean that these racist images are now displayed in a museum behind glass -- does this illustrate the irrelevance of these images, their transformation from commodity into icon, or the exact opposite (that is, the museum displayspromotes the importance and vitality of the images)?
Reading about the installation doesn't solve the problem. Gates calls his interventions "resurrections", that is, giving life to past cultural forms that have been abandoned or simply lost along the way. He calls the slides, apparently from the collection of the Field Museum in Chicago "magic lantern slides." A note characterizes the racist ephemera as from the collection of a wealthy African-American collector -- it is called "negrobilia". The bound volumes do, in fact, contact publications from Johnson Publishing, a major African-American enterprise in Chicago and the publisher of Jet and Ebony magazines. But knowing these things doesn't really help. There's an anxiety about the show -- none of the objects on display would be worth our time if not coupled with the other things in the installation. The ceramics are too bland and tasteful; the racist imagery interesting from a historical perspective but no longer relevant; the "magic lantern" slides aren't really very interesting either -- its the collage of these things that is supposed to carry the meaning. But what meaning?
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