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
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3 comments:
Observations intéressantes sur la faune qui visite les musées. Nous attendons la suite avec impatience.
J'espère que cette série de texte nous permaettra de mieux comprendre les visiteurs qui bloquent sans considération aucune ceux qui veulent tout voir dans un minimum de temps.
I wonder which exotic beast could be associated to the champagne glass-holding socialite who usually mistakes "No Smoking" and "Exit" signs for groudbreaking conceptual works of art.
The general public are indeed a source of disappointment and irritation in museums and elsewhere, getting in the way, talking inappropriately, wearing nasty, ill-fitting clothes and so on.
Could not someone in a position of authority (the Tate Fellow, for example) enforce some higher standards, in the Tate Galleries at least?
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