My advice to serious museumgoers is to come in thirty or forty minutes before closing time, when the crowds are thinning. You will always have more privacy. Even better: Leave the great long gallery. Take a path less traveled. I have walked into the Chardin galleries at the Louvre a handful of times and spent an hour with little or no interruption meditating on this master of the everyday, beloved of Proust and of everyone else with an eye for still life, nature morte, the arrangements of ordinary items, what Wallace Stevens might have called planets on a table. Every encyclopedic museum boasts treasures hidden away, pieces of art in styles and forms you never even heard of. Take a good long look at them. Serendipity, when your eyes are open, can ravish you. All pictures are little worlds, cunningly made. One measure of artistic greatness is the capacity of a work of art to inspire long, thoughtful, responsive meditation in a viewer. This is also the measure of the viewers themselves.
And then there have been the delicious, unpredictable occasions when I have become like the lady art historian with connections and had the good fortune of momentary solitude, sometimes with a single work, or a small room, or an entire museum. Twice in the past five years, I have visited Frank Furness’s neo-Gothic Victorian masterpiece, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in Philadelphia, my hometown. Both times, I was practically the only person in any of the galleries. “How sad!” said a Philadelphia friend.
“Not for me,” I quickly replied. Sad for revenues, public relations, and everything else the Academy’s front office counts on, but what could be better than being alone in picture-laden rooms with no noise and no other bodies to compete with one’s silent looking at Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Richard Diebenkorn?
Once I persuaded a kindly or perhaps just lackadaisical guard at the Brera Museum in Milan to let me pull up a heavy chair from the sidelines so I could sit and look undisturbed at Piero della Francesca’s Montefeltro Altarpiece, a Madonna and Child with surrounding saints. He even granted me the probably illegal privilege of momentarily walking behind a metal guardrail to get a real close-up look. Italian guards seem to epitomize and perpetuate the clichés about the national character. Their generosity belongs to a more haphazard sense of order: random, chaotic, antiauthoritarian, and spur-of-the-moment. We like to think of this as charmingly Mediterranean. Sometimes it works to a tourist’s advantage.
Membership, as the old credit card advertisement used to brag, also has its privileges. The Dallas Museum of Art sends out occasional e-mail notices to members of a certain status (“partners”) announcing “Quiet Viewing Hours Just for You.” My latest letter gave me a two-hour time frame, 5:30 to 7:30 one Tuesday evening several weeks in the future. Museums are enforcing an unsubtle distinction between plebeians who must endure less than ideal conditions and first-class customers who deserve first-class viewing rights. Quiet is not a right but something to purchase. A cynic might simply say, “You get what you pay for.” At the Museum of Modern Art, normally as quiet a spot as Bloomingdale’s, museum members may come at 9:30 before the crowds. One recent Saturday morning, a gorgeous September fall day in Manhattan, I was the first person to enter the museum. I made my race to the fifth floor and spent an entire hour in the Matisse room. There I was, alone with ten great paintings, including The Red Studio and The Piano Lesson. This time my great revelation came to me during the full twenty minutes I spent in front of the vast picture The Moroccans (1915–16) as I focused my attention exclusively on the eye-catching palette on the picture’s right side: a field of lavender turning to mauve, abutting another mass of terra-cotta and salmon, with blue and yellow accents pulling the eye to other parts of the picture.
My eyes were awash with color.
And on my only visit to Berlin, a couple of years ago, I showed up at the Kunstgewerbemuseum, a treasure trove of the decorative arts, when it opened in the morning, and for two hours I had the splendid, slightly surreal experience of being one of only two people in this miraculous hall of textiles, panels, ceramics, industrial design, objects religious and secular, everything ranging from the medieval period through art deco. Total, unexpected silence complemented the experience of looking at the hundreds of striking, mysterious things that had long since outlived their usefulness. I felt that I was in a toy shop, a tomb, or perhaps in tchotchke heaven. The Germans have a word for such displays: Wunderkammern, rooms filled with wonderful items. Originally these were rooms for natural curiosities, geological and biological finds, but increasingly they took on a more domestic character.
What added to my pleasure was the fact that all the wall labels were in only one language. I had to rely on the remnants of my vestigial schoolboy German to get at the essence of the descriptions. In the age of multilingual audio guides, of the understandable efforts of arts organizations to make experiences and objects more accessible to visitors, viewers, and listeners, there was something wondrous indeed about seeing case after case filled with things like a Doppelturmofen, a Türklopfer, a Schälchen mit Blütendekor, an Elefanten-Giessgefäss, and many Deckelpokale, not to mention things whose uses as well as histories remained tantalizingly vague.
That my job was not easy made it all the more exciting. Far from diminishing the fun, too little information added to the curious bewilderment I was experiencing. I had to work harder to see and to understand. I’m not sure how much I understood or retained through my acts of looking, but the process made me a little tipsy. Because I could not learn the history, the purpose, or the relevance of any single object, I had to become a total aesthete: I had to rely on my eyes alone to get a grasp on what a thing was, not what it meant, and to focus on what it looked like, rather than how it functioned. These objects, I thought, had been removed from their raisons d’être; now they just sat there, waiting to be admired. Did they, I wondered, talk it over among themselves at night, regretting that they could no longer serve as objects of use to those families who had commissioned, or bought, and cared for them, who polished and sharpened them? I thought of Colette’s L’enfant et les sortilèges and the Disney cartoon Toy Story, in which the toys do exactly that. The Berlin museum had promoted these things to the higher status of “art” from the lowlier one of “craft.” At least that is how one experienced them in the absence of additional knowledge. Formerly, they served a purpose. Now they sat empty of meaning, and if they were a flagon, a cabinet, or a tea service, they were empty, as well, of their intended contents. These containers had been themselves contained within the museum. They were things no longer. They were objects in cabinets, behind glass, or under spotlights begging us to think about and appreciate them.
Ignorance opens us up to such unplanned, weird imaginings. When both spoken and written language—words heard, overheard, or read—prove inaccessible, the other senses must take over. And to have such an experience occur virtually apart from all other people meant that the entire museum, a cabinet of wonders writ large, belonged to me alone. Solitude and silence heighten almost all artistic experiences. For a brief time, you can become the monarch of all you survey.
Many museumgoers can tell similar stories, however infrequent. Standing or sitting still, looking long and hard, is a rare enough phenomenon, becoming rarer still in an age of edutainment when museums prefer, or feel compelled, to shuttle through their doors the busloads of schoolchildren and tourists who require a flicker of enlightenment before proceeding to their day’s next event or episode. Whatever art does these days, it seldom does it to isolated individuals, in quiet. Just as the hushed tones of libraries have long since vanished, so also indoor voices—more available in Europe than in the States—are being drowned out.
How about an art exhibit titled, simply, Silence? An odd occurrence, certainly, but one that I visited. Silence is now as precious and rare as slowness or solitude, clean air, and a star-filled night sky (see “Quiet,” starting here). As someone who never goes anywhere without earplugs, and who would rather stay hungry than be forced into a noisy restaurant, I was keen to visit Silence
at Houston’s Menil Collection in 2013. In a variety of tones, voices, and media, it reminded me of what we often want but can never have.
You could not experience silence there. That would be impossible, even in the cool, chaste chambers of Renzo Piano’s exquisite building. This exhibit was really a riff on the late John Cage’s remark “There’s no such thing as silence.” The show had fifty-two pieces. Some were conventional paintings by de Chirico, Magritte, Rauschenberg, and Rothko, all favorites of John and Dominique de Menil, who had amassed a quirky collection before their museum opened in 1987.
Hanging on the walls were other two-dimensional works, like Yves Klein’s vibrant, glistening, gold leaf Untitled (Monogold). Sculpture, small objects, neon tubing, other three-dimensional art, complemented the pictures. The show featured audio and video installations and a living performance piece by Tino Sehgal, in which a dancer rolled slowly along the floor of an interior room for two and a half hours, followed by another dancer who did the same thing. It certainly was silent, gripping in a boring kind of way.
A typical museum show often moves chronologically; in a thematic show, organizers make other arrangements. Silence might have seemed random, but it had a partially recognizable plan. After a vestibule containing a selection of representative works, you entered four inner rooms. The first, the most conventional and tightly arranged, was in many ways the most moving. Four Andy Warhol pieces—silk-screened ink and acrylic on linen from the mid-1960s—represented the ultimate silence, death, in this case death by electrocution. Warhol’s depictions of the electric chair at Sing Sing are beautiful, almost abstract in their wash of color, a kind of phantom homage to Jackson Pollock. The smallest one, Little Electric Chair, is so black that you might have mistaken it for a cousin to Ad Reinhardt’s all-black Abstract Painting in another room, until you came close and saw the chiseled outline of the electric chair staring right back at you.
Interspersed among the Warhols were seven silk screens by Christian Marclay (2006), each focusing on the single word “Silence” above the electric chair in the death chamber. Silence surrounded the viewer, at least visually, on all sides.
The other rooms contained miscellaneous pieces. Some “talked” to one another; others seemed more randomly placed. Dominique de Menil, a woman of austere and religious character, famously said that “only silence and love do justice to a great work of art,” but this show hardly permitted silence. Interrupting a private contemplation of the art were not only the voices and footsteps of other viewers but also the sounds from the audio installations, including, most boomingly, Kurt Mueller’s Cenotaph (2011), an old jukebox into which you put a quarter and then got to hear one of ninety-nine moments of silence, all of which were preceded by very noisy introductions. No silence comes without sound.
In many ways, the most compelling pieces were two video installations, each within its own darkened chamber. Jacob Kirkegaard’s 2006 AION (Greek for eternity or infinity) was shot on location in ruined spaces at Chernobyl, site of a terrifying 1986 nuclear reactor explosion. Shapes and colors move, come in and out of focus; an interior landscape is bathed in light, then dark shadows, then overwhelmed with whiteness. Static architecture changes as though it were tai chi, Keats’s “slow time” reimagined.
If you moved counterclockwise through the show, the last thing you saw was the most resonant, a return to John Cage, silence’s major spokesman. On August 29, 1952, David Tudor sat down at a piano and performed for the first time Cage’s now iconic (or fraudulent, depending on one’s point of view) 4′33″: a work in three movements and total silence other than the extraneous sounds within the hall. Cage himself said it could be “played” by any soloist or group of players.
Manon de Boer’s Two Times “4′33″” stars Jean-Luc Fafchamps. We see him at his piano—stern, unblinking, virtually motionless—and we hear him set and release the chess timer that marks the three movements. A plate glass window behind him gives onto wintry snow and ice. He sits, he waits, he finishes, and then he stands up. An unseen audience applauds.
The film resumes. This time, we hear the timer’s clicks, but now we watch not the pianist but his rapt audience of earnest, attentive young people. And we see another view to the outside: a northern European city (it’s Brussels, December 2, 2007), part industrial, part architectural, part natural.
To reach de Boer’s installation in Houston, you had to walk through two heavy doors with sound-deadening panels and two sets of heavy black draperies. There, you sat on a bench, with a single light above you. The chamber was dark. You were bathed in silence, except for the sounds of the jukebox outside, which intruded whenever someone put a quarter in the old nickelodeon.
Cage would have been pleased. There is no silence in a museum, but somehow the very thought of it can take you out of yourself. And for some reason, the very title and substance of the show encouraged or inspired museumgoers to move with gentler treads and to speak, if at all, more softly than usual.
This was the kind of miracle that happens every so often. The crowds vanish. Perhaps no one is around to begin with, as was the case for me in Philadelphia. Or perhaps something impressive so transports the viewer that he can forget the crowds, noisy or inconvenient though they may be. If you want to look carefully at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, rather than be whisked through on a peremptory visit, you must steel yourself and try to press from your mind everything that is not Michelangelo: the noise, the people, the jostling. Wait for a seat on the periphery, and then grab it. Crane your neck. Look your fill. Wait for another seat on another side of the room. Move around. At New York’s Frick Collection in January 2014, I waited for a spot to open, and I planted myself in front of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, on loan from the Mauritshuis in The Hague, until I had satisfied myself. I steadied myself and ignored my raucous, elbowing neighbors. I knew that my selfish stationary posture annoyed some of my fellow viewers, who wanted to get a better position in front of the painting. I did not give way. I made everyone else move around me or wait his turn to take my place. Viewing can be difficult; it can be unpleasant. You must be willing to suffer to take the measure of the work at hand. And you must be selfish and cause others to suffer for your enjoyment.
The thrill of slow looking—I use the term as a relative to slow food and slow, close reading—has also occurred when I come to an art exhibition that changes my mind about an artist I never knew well: Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Wassily Kandinsky most recently. Or that introduces me to an artist of whom I have previously known nothing at all: Howard Hodgkin, years ago, first in Fort Worth and then at the Metropolitan Museum; Antonio López García at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts; L. S. Lowry at Tate Britain several summers ago. A world opens itself up and invites you in. The surroundings melt, and it’s just you and the pictures. These things happen. Keats described the experience as feeling that a new planet has swum into your ken. He was thinking of literature—in his case George Chapman’s translation of Homer—but the analogy obtains.
And at least once, for me, the audience was part of the experience and not a deterrent to it. The event was musical, so although it resembled what happens in a symphony hall, an opera house, or even a rock concert, its own uniqueness overwhelmed the attendees, who turned out to be not so much an audience as participants in a shared experience. I watched them, and as we all listened to the same sounds, T. S. Eliot’s lines from “The Dry Salvages” never seemed more applicable: “music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts.”
In December 2013, I went to the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum’s serene medieval outpost at the top of Manhattan. I wanted to see and hear the sound installation by the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff. That first experience encouraged me to repeat it a week later. On two visits, ninety minutes each, I stood in a Spanish chapel listening to music. What was it? In 2001, Cardiff made a recording at Salisbury Cathedral of Thomas Tallis’s mid-sixteenth-century p
olyphonic motet Spem in alium for forty voices. She lined the walls with curtains and blankets to control the sound and to deaden the space. Nineteen additional children augmented the forty called-for singers. All fifty-nine musicians wore lavaliere microphones attached to cables that ran to a truck outside. Then, combining some of the children’s parts, she reduced the audio tracks to forty. The eleven-minute piece, officially owned by the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, has been staged in many venues around the world, the Cloisters being the most recent and also the best and most appropriate of them. In all sites, forty audio speakers—one for each voice—are positioned in a room. At the Cloisters’ Fuentidueña Chapel, a limestone Spanish apse from the twelfth century, the work was “performed” continuously throughout the day over a three-month period. This was the first time the Cloisters had hosted any contemporary art, although the essence of the Tallis polyphonic piece is hardly modern. The whole experience combined the old and the new. It was actually neither old nor new. Instead, it offered a taste of eternity.
Senior Moments Page 14
