Into the Looking-Glass Wood

by Alberto Manguel

  Of course, nothing is going to stop society from this labelling frenzy. There is a sense of security, imagined or not, in knowing that this is a modern art museum, a native craft museum, a nautical museum, a museum of natural science or black history or the Holocaust. And because we are so accustomed to these labels, even an absence of labels wouldn’t save us from reading them. Imagine an exhibition of diverse works of art housed under a single roof, with no labels. One visitor will see it as official art that doesn’t dare to speak its name; another will see it as an indictment of that official art. And so on. We are beyond hope.

  Or perhaps not quite. The word museum, the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, comes from the Greek meaning “seat of the muses.” Here the nine women conduct their ancient business of translating the universe into signs for us to read, each one bearing our secret name and a private warning. We may decide, as a society, decrying the notion of privilege, no longer to offer them a roof, to do away with museums. It wouldn’t much matter, I think. They would assemble elsewhere, and turn the forest of Arden into their living room.

  There we shall go in search of Oscar Wilde’s mirrors, or, like Encolpius, to see the gods and goddesses that suffer just like ourselves, or perhaps to witness the private miracle Rilke hoped for. Bearing in mind, of course, Rilke’s caveat. We may be granted the moment of grace, but we must respond to it in kind. Describing in a famous sonnet an archaic torso of Apollo, Rilke the spectator reaches this inexorable conclusion: “You must change your life.”

  This, I believe, is the only condition.

  Dragon Eggs and Phoenix Feathers, or A Defence of Desire

  “For where no law is, there is no transgression.”

  Romans 4:15

  I. Assembling

  WE ARE TIDY CREATURES. We distrust chaos. Experiences come to us with no recognizable system, for no intelligible reason, with blind and carefree generosity. And yet, in the face of every evidence to the contrary, we believe in law and order. Anxiously, we put everything away in files, in compartments, in distinct sections; feverishly we distribute, we classify, we label. We know that this thing we call the world has no meaningful beginning or understandable end, no discernible purpose, no method in its madness. But we insist: it must make sense, it must signify something. So we divide space into regions and time into periods, and again and again we’re bewildered when space refuses to hold to the reasonable limits of our atlases, and time overflows the tidy dates of our history books. We collect objects and build houses for them, in the hope that the house will give its contents coherence and a meaning. We will not accept the inherent ambiguity of any object (or collection of objects) that charms our attention, saying, like the Voice in the Burning Bush, “I am what I am.” “All right,” we add, “but you are also a thornbush, Prunus spinosa”—and give it its place on the shelf.

  Of course, no object is bound to occupy exclusively any single shelf. For example: there is a story by G. K. Chesterton in which Father Brown is asked to solve the mysterious death of a Scottish lord. The only clues found in the lord’s ruined castle form an odd collection. First item: a considerable hoard of precious stones without any setting whatsoever. The lord apparently kept his jewels loose in his pockets, like coins. Second item: heaps and heaps of snuff, not kept in a box or pouch but just lying on the mantelpiece or the piano. Third item: little wheels and springs of metal, as if someone had gutted a mechanical toy and left the parts scattered about. Fourth item: a number of wax candles but not a single candlestick. “By no stretch of fancy,” remarks the illustrious Inspector Flambeau, “can the human mind connect together snuff and diamonds and wax and loose clockwork.”

  But Father Brown thinks he can see the connection. The late lord was mad against the French Revolution and tried to re-enact the life of the last Bourbons. He had snuff because it was an eighteenth-century luxury; wax candles because they were the eighteenth-century lighting; bits of iron because they represented the locksmith hobby of King Louis XVI; jewels because they represented Marie-Antoinette’s diamond necklace.

  “What a perfectly extraordinary notion!” cried Flambeau. “Do you really think that is the truth?”

  “I am perfectly sure it isn’t,” answered Father Brown, “only you said no one could connect snuff and diamonds and clockwork and candles. I give you that connection offhand. The real truth, I am very sure, lies deeper.”

  He then suggests that the late lord led a double life as a thief. The candles lit his way into the houses he robbed; he used snuff much as the fiercest criminals do, to throw into the eyes of his pursuers; the diamonds and cogs were used to cut his way through glass windows.

  “Is that all that makes you think it the true explanation?” asked the Inspector.

  “I don’t think it the true explanation,” replied the priest placidly; “but you said that nobody could connect the four things.”

  It might be something simpler, says Father Brown. The late lord found diamonds on his estate and kept the find a secret. The wheels were used to cut the stones. Snuff was used to bribe the Scottish peasants into searching the caves by the light of the candles.

  “Is that all?” asked Flambeau after a long pause. “Have we got to the dull truth at last?”

  “Oh no,” said Father Brown.… “I only suggested that because you said one could not plausibly connect snuff with clockwork or candles with bright stones. Ten false philosophies will fit the universe.”

  And a thousand false systems will invent an order for our world.

  The curious construction known as a museum is, above all, a place of order, of organized space, of predetermined sequences. Even a museum that houses an apparently heterogeneous collection of objects, assembled, it would seem, without a clear purpose, becomes defined (as I’ve said previously) by a label outside the particular identity of each of its pieces: the identity of their collector, for instance. The first university museum—the first museum built for the purpose of studying a specific group of objects—was the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, founded in 1683. At its core was a collection of strange and wonderful things amassed by two John Tradescants, father and son, in the previous century, and sent to Oxford by barge from London. These treasures included:

  A Babylonian Vest.

  Diverse sorts of Egges from Turkie; one given for a Dragons egge.

  Easter Egges of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem.

  Two feathers of the Phoenix tayle.

  The claw of the bird Rock: who, as Authors report, is able to trusse an Elephant.

  Dodar, from the island Mauritius; it is not able to flie being so big. Hares head, with rough horns three inches long.

  Toad fish, and one with prickles.

  Divers things cut on Plum-stones.

  A Brazen-balle to warme the Nunnes hands.

  Like snuff and candles, diamonds and clockwork, a Phoenix’s feather and a nun’s warming-ball have little in common. However, what holds that extraordinary list together is the fascination these objects produced, three centuries ago, in the minds and hearts of the two John Tradescants. Whether these objects represented the Tradescants’ greed or curiosity, their vision of the world or a reflection of the dark map of their souls, those who visited the Ashmolean in the late seventeenth-century would enter a space ordered, so to speak, by the Tradescants’ ruling passion.

  I have said that we are tidy creatures, that we seek order. We know, however, that no order is innocent, not even the order of a private passion. Any categorical system imposed on objects or people or ideas must be suspect since, of necessity, it contaminates with meaning those very ideas, people, objects. The candles and clockwork of Father Brown’s story are tinged with the quality of his ironical ordering; the Babylonian vest and the Easter eggs of the Ashmolean formulate a seventeenth-century idea of private property.

  A brief chronology of a few such ordering forces might be of some use here.

  The habit of exposing one’s private passions to the public view can be traced, in Europe,
to the late fifteenth century. At a time when heads of state had begun to amass some of the world’s greatest collections or art—in Vienna, the Vatican, in Spain’s El Escorial, in Florence and Versailles—smaller, more personal collections were also being formed. One such collection is that of Isabella d’Este, wife of the Marquis of Mantua, who, rather than purchasing art for religious reasons or to furnish a house, began collecting works of art for the sake of the works of art themselves. Up to then, the wealthy collected art mainly to lend a space beauty or prestige. Isabella set aside a space that would instead lend a frame to certain collected works of art. In her camerino—a “room” that was to become famous in the history of art as one of the earliest private museums—Isabella exhibited “paintings with a story” by the best contemporary artists. She had a good eye: she instructed her agent to approach Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Leonardo, Perugino, Giorgione, Raphael and Michelangelo for their work. Several of them complied.

  A century later, the collecting passion took over the homes not only of the aristocratic rich but also of the bourgeoisie, and the governing order of such collections was largely one of social status, whether monetary or scholarly. What Bacon called “a model of the universal nature made private” could be seen in the parlours of many lawyers and physicians. Sometimes, when cash was lacking, these collectors resorted to ingenious devices. In 1620, the scholar Cassiano dal Pozzo assembled, in his house in Rome, not the original works of art, the authentic models of famous buildings, the natural history specimens sought after by his wealthier peers, but drawings, commissioned from professional draughtsmen, of all kinds of strange objects, creatures and antiquities. He called this his “Paper Museum.” Here again, as in Isabella’s camerino and in the Tradescants’ collection, the ruling design, the imposed order, was personal, a gestalt created by a private history—with one added characteristic: the objects themselves were no longer required to be “the real thing.” These could now be replaced by their representations, their imaginings. And since these “reproductions” were much cheaper and easier to come by than the originals, the “Paper Museum” suggested that not only the very wealthy could become collectors—the owners, so to speak, of the spoils of history.

  In France, at least until the French Revolution, the accepted truth had been that history was the prerogative of a single class. When in 1792, in the tide of social change, the Louvre Palace was turned into a museum for the people, the novelist Viscount François-René de Chateaubriand, voicing a haughty complaint against the notion of a common past, protested that works of art thus assembled “had no longer anything to say either to the imagination or the heart.” When, a few years later, the artist and antiquarian Alexandre Lenoir founded a Museum of French Monuments to preserve the statuary and masonry of the mansions, monasteries, palaces and churches that the Revolution had plundered, Chateaubriand dismissively described it as “a collection of ruins and tombs from every century, assembled without rhyme nor reason in the cloisters of the Petits-Augustins.”

  In both the official and the private world of collectors, Chateaubriand’s criticism went staunchly unheard. After the Revolution, the collecting of ancient things stopped being an exclusively aristocratic entertainment and became a bourgeois hobby, first under Napoleon and his love for the trappings of Ancient Rome, and later under the Republic. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the displaying of fusty bric-à-brac, old masters’ paintings and ancient books had become a fashionable pastime of the middle classes. Curiosity shops flourished. Antique dealers amassed caches of prerevolution-ary treasures, which were bought and then displayed in the home museums of the nouveaux riches. In these nineteenth-century bourgeois homes, art and beauty denoted leisure; usefulness was left to the workers. “Living?” asked the aristocratic Villiers de L’Isle Adam. “The servants will do that for us!” In such a spirit, the museum became a Utopian space, the explicit embodiment of a class philosophy.

  The next remarkable change took place in the first half of our century, when the museum became a marketplace. Throughout the world, but especially in North America where collections turned into symbols of public status, museums multiplied like mushrooms. These new museums were required to respond to three distinct and growing fears, which the new collectors, working within the confines of a mercantile society and under the shadow of the two world wars, were experiencing: fear of loss, fear of deterioration and fear of excess. The first required a building that would not scatter a collection, since value was seen as cumulative. The second required precautions that would protect the collection from the ruin of time and from theft. The third demanded that the space allow for the collection’s growth—for storage and rotation. And since the competition was fierce, codes beyond the aesthetic code were established to determine what was a work of art and what was an artefact, what was prestigious and therefore valuable, and what was nothing more than a quirky roadshow attraction. Suddenly, the museum itself took on the role of critic and the mere act of exhibiting something in a museum defined its nature. The museum now claimed to offer a “real” presentation of the object displayed: that is to say, the object in its three dimensions (even as a reproduction, as in the “Paper Museum”) but not as a description or gloss. This reality was, of course, not tangible but accepted as an act of faith. The “hands off” rule placed the object literally on a pedestal, elevating it to the category of precious specimen, granting it a kind of aristocracy through the very act of enthroning it.

  The arbitrary essence of this process was something Marcel Duchamp recognized very clearly when as early as 1914 he exhibited a bicycle wheel under the title “Bicycle Wheel.” According to Duchamp, the label and the space in which the object was exhibited ironically bestowed upon the object a higher status. With this one act, Duchamp appropriated the museum’s role as critic in defining the work of art, and incorporated criticism into the creation itself.

  II. Taking Apart

  But all these orders, all these systems, all these methods of grouping and arranging objects within a given space, all these different grammars that structure the elements of a collection in a certain sequence and with a certain meaning, required their counterpart, their mirror, their recipient—their reader. With the creation of the public museums, a new invention, the public, was willed into existence. And with it arose the problem of access.

  When a private, personal, secret collection becomes public, or when a certain authority decides to open the doors to a public museum, the individual pieces of the collection momentarily lose their singular identity as works of art or archeological remains, as natural history specimens or examples of any one human activity, and form together an assembly larger than (and different from) its individual parts. Together, they become the definition of a specific category or concept: “Modern Art” or “Prehistoric Culture,” “The Craft of Coffee-Making” or “Military History,” “The Life of Dickens” or “Jewish Tradition.” Within the borders of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, a Joyce Wieland painting is not what it was coming from the artist’s hands, or what it might have become in Conrad Black’s living-room, but, for instance, an example of twentieth-century Canadian art. Within the confines of the Calgary Glenbow Museum a Blackfoot blanket is not something beautiful woven to keep someone warm, but a trace of a codified native past (for some) or an accusation of imperialist appropriation (for others). Space defines what it contains in both specific and general terms, with one embracing label for all—a label meant to be “democratically” perceived by that other collective invention, the public.

  And yet, when this public gains access to the diverse objects that have become amalgamated under one roof, a paradox arises. In order for the public to perceive the collection beyond the all-encompassing label of the museum’s name, it must disassociate each piece from the whole, it must see it out of context, it must restore to it its individuality. This is especially true in the case of works of art; in order to “read” an object, the viewers must turn away from the explicative labe
ls, dismiss the helpful historical and geographical notes provided by the curator, forget the criticisms, the catalogue copy, the reviews, and stand in front of the work of art ready to not understand everything, in that half-comprehension of an aesthetic or emotional reaction, recreating, as far as possible, the mystery of creation.

  To do this, one further paradoxical step is required. The arduously invented “public,” the people to whom the populist movements, such as the French Revolution, strove to give access to art, the flocking crowd which every government requires in order to justify its existence, must in turn be dissolved. Groups, guides and organized tours that lead an audience through a museum’s maze are all very well—superficially. Their activity is part of sightseeing, not of looking; of cultural propaganda, not of learning; of communal bonding to the conventions of a class or an age, seldom an epiphany. To see, the public must become single again, recognize and confront the official views; the viewer must be alone in front of a lonely creation, and name for himself or herself whatever happens to touch the soul. The whole notion on which the idea of museum is based—a collective display for a collective audience—must be undermined, dispelled, destroyed, for the experience of visiting a museum to have sense beyond mere tourism. For a museum to be a place of revelation, the idea of museum itself must be contested.

  Access, therefore, must be individual in order to be effective. In Europe, for instance, it is not a question of more access but of less or better planned access. The most prestigious museums can barely cope with the floods of visitors and long impatient queues. The act of visiting a museum has become akin to that of a bureaucratic transaction: waiting in line, being shuffled around, being told what to do and what to admire, following an official code that dictates what is important so that the visitor’s passport can bear the stamp “I came, I saw, I conquered.” These days it takes strategies (just like the ones used to circumvent official red tape) to be able to spend some time actually looking at the paintings in exhibitions such as the Cézanne retrospective at the Paris Grand Palais or the Goya at the Prado in Madrid: finding out the hours of least affluence, booking ahead when tickets are pre-sold, avoiding guided groups and the horrible buzzing of leaking audioguides. It is obvious that in these cases longer hours are needed, or controlled visiting times—which means a further stretching of the museum’s limited budget.