The case of the renegade shoelace

Last Wednesday at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, a man tripped on his shoelace, tumbled down a flight stairs and landed unharmed on a set of 300-year old Qing Dynasty vases. Unfortunately, the 3 vases were not so lucky. In fact, they were smashed to smithereens… all because of an offending shoelace.

At least that is what the visitor bearing the aforementioned tie upon his shoe would have us believe. After regaining his wits and dusting the priceless particles of enamelled porcelain off his lapel, he looked up and said: “There it is! That’s the culprit!”, all the while pointing in the direction of the criminal cord. Although it might be interesting to consider the rise in criminal acts perpetrated by shoelaces, this costly little incident raises a few questions about responsibility.

Of course, the man who will now be fondly remembered as “The One Who Identified The Culprit” did not mean to take a flying leap. Does that free him of all responsibility towards the museum? It would appear to be the case… especially since the precious vases had been sitting on a windowsill at the bottom of the staircase for forty years. Should they have been protected by glass cases, perhaps “The One Who Identified The Culprit” would not have recovered so well from the incident, but the vases would probably be better off.

We tend to perceive museums as fortresses but, according to Charles Hill, a specialist in the recovery of stolen art, the truth is “most art collections are very badly protected. The reason is they’re on public display. You can’t turn the National Gallery in to Fort Knox, what’s the point?” Hill sums up the age old dilemma: can we be given access to art without posing a threat to its security? You never know when or where a renegade shoelace might strike...

Martine Rouleau

Like a whale in the Thames

On Friday, a bottle-nosed whale made its way up the River Thames, swimming through what could only have been experienced as a little canal compared to the deep sea waters this creature is used to. To the amazement of thousands of wide-eyed witnesses gathered along the banks, the great mammal entered central London. The apparently disoriented seven-tonne whale had ventured, against all odds, out of its habitat and out of its depth.

Because I was hiding under a pile of books at the British Library that day, the news got to me via an SMS message stating: “Apparently there is a whale in the Thames outside the Tate Modern.” I laughed thinking that it was putting on its own performance, as worthy of Londoners’ attention as any work of art preciously preserved within the walls of the gallery. After all, it certainly got more attention than the contemporary art on that day . With the outpours of sympathy that went to the poor creature, one could have thought that this whale had a promising future. Alas, it was to have a very short, yet memorable career as a performer.

A few hours after the first live whale to be seen in the Thames in living memory was spotted, an altogether different type of performer was attracting my attention. Marc Cousins, giving his weekly lecture at the Architectural Association stated with his usual bombast: “When you enter an institution you become an idiot.” Sitting in an institution at that very moment and having spent the best part of my day in another, I was compelled to consider the implications of that statement: by entering an institution, you give over all power to “higher authorities”, assuming that professors, librarians, curators, guides ought to know more than you. In order to be granted admission into libraries, universities, hospitals, museums, embassies and town halls – surely repositories of all the world’s wisdom – do we have to first admit in front of witnesses that we are ignorant?

Knowledge is a potent form of power and if we assume that institutions own it all, we choose to be forever out of our depth. We somehow put ourselves, against our better judgment, in the position to loose all the ease with which we usually evolve and become distressed, ungainly creatures. Like a whale in the Thames.

Martine Rouleau

The Beasts in the Museum (part 1)

It’s a Saturday afternoon and the Tate Modern is overtaken by tourists hiding from the glum weather, parents trying to forcefully enlighten their children to the many unclear virtues of contemporary masterpieces and art students commenting on how derivative everything is. The crowd is dense but seems to circulate to the rhythm of a predetermined cadence, somehow just avoiding queues and blockages. People just so in front of each work or forgo stopping altogether in favour of scanning the room, still walking, until they find a work they wish to study more attentively.

In the Jackson Pollock room, the circulation would be fluid too if it wasn’t for a man standing still a few feet away from a painting all the better to drink it in. This man is not especially large or doesn’t look particularly threatening, but the other visitors seem quite disturbed by his immobility in their path. They try to move straight ahead until they understand that he has no apparent intention to move, and then they sigh, move around him, make comments in various languages, some even dare to interpose themselves between him and the painting. It’s not polite to block people’s way. But our still contemplator doesn’t seem bothered by this unspoken rule of the museum. He is an obstacle, yet he hasn’t done anything explicitly inappropriate.

He is a pachyderm, the type of visitor who blocks others path through the museum and to the works by disregarding the conveyor belt rhythm that most others are moving to. The pachyderm is one of the many beasts to populate the museum’s fauna of which one, endowed with enough time and patience, could draw an unlikely bestiary. Although the bestiary might appear to many as a quaint medieval notion, but it was and still is a deductive process, a way to classify observed phenomena in order to make sense of them.

At the origin, these works in verse or prose described the appearance and habits of real and metaphorical animals in the form of an allegorical moralizing commentary. In the twentieth century onwards, this genre has been more or less relegated to children’s literature despite the fact that there is still a great need for bestiaries addressed to adults. After all, the intellectual sphere is not unlike a swamp populated with a variety of exotic beasts – “isms” and “post-isms” abound; ideologies or paradigms are multiplying beyond necessity. It is a legitimate approach that allows one to think a problem through by categorizing and formulating hypothesis.

This one will be used to make observations about the ways in which visitors can experience the museum without resorting the fictive oneness of the public often posited by mission statements issuing from museums often (mis) guided by ideals of public service and democratic access.

Martine Rouleau