Average visitors – a day of discussion with OSK-students
December 28th, 2009 by Steven ten Thije
By Steven ten Thije
Some weeks ago we had an interesting discussion in the museum with a group of art history students from several different universities. They came over to look and discuss the three exhibitions that comprise the first chapter of Play Van Abbe with Charles Esche, Christiane Berndes and myself. In the conversation especially one thing struck me. In the discussions we found ourselves several time returning to the average visitor. Constantly we were speculating on whether or not this figure would comprehend the show.
We presumably returned to this figure because we considered ourselves not to be average visitors. We were curators, art historians, or curators or art historians to be and apparently, in assessing the ‘success’ of exhibition there was a wish to somehow return to a virtuous state of the none-initiated. A quick response to this, especially by thinkers who use the word ‘difference’ a lot, is to point out that there is no such thing as an average visitor, that this figure is more a character in a novel than a person walking the street. However, charming as it may be, it feels somewhat too much like an abstract, text-book, defence and not like a real engagement with the almost natural response of art professionals to analyze exhibitions on the basis of what somebody else might think of it.
In a way it is such a normal practice that it is almost silly to investigate it. Of course, one tries to adjust to what your average visitor might know and see when making a show, for only then one achieves a maximum result. Only in the case of an art exhibition what is ‘result’? The difficulty in an art exhibition is that one is mediating an object which we accepted to be ambiguous, layered and complex. The artwork by its nature is open and to a certain degree incomprehensible. It cannot be reduced to simple, clear-cut statements. So, if the nature of the object is to be complicated, isn’t one cheating if it is presented in a clear way?
In a way this seemingly simple paradox is quite close to being the daily obsession of someone working in a museum. We spent a great deal of time thinking about how to present something complicated as complicated, without it being unattractive. For instance, the luring attractive nature of Fuchs’ summer display (one of the three exhibitions of the first chapter of Play Van Abbe), in my eyes, is the intelligent answer to this paradox. Unfortunately, it is the answer of more than two decades ago, and doesn’t help me in presenting works which are expressing the complexities of these days, but more on that some other time.
And very short. The complexity of art is not an autonomous complexity; it’s not a complexity for the sake of complexity. It is the complexity that is central to the way in which we know the world. Our ideas mingle with our experiences and this process of mingling strengthens the ideas we have, or forces us to change those ideas. Everybody has different experiences and different ideas, but large eras overlap, which makes it possible to agree, while other views conflict and inspire debate. For this exchange to work, we need to be skilled in experiencing and understanding the relation between ideas and experience. It is my understanding that this is what art can be or is in a society like ours. It’s a philosophical task, and yes, quite complex, but in its basic structure everyone does it when one tests ones ideas to ones own experience. When one looks carefully.
Back to the conversation and average Joe in the museum. For the difficulty is not only that an artwork is obscure and that therefore its presentation should be so (in a way Fuchs shows that that’s not necessary, for his display is luminous and clear). The difficulty that became clear to me in the discussion is that this mysterious, average figure, was one manifestation of the problem or question out of which, in my understanding, Play Van Abbe, grew in the first place: how do we deal with art today and tomorrow? For, if art is almost by nature complex, because of its idiosyncratic nature, asking into the ways to negotiate it, is almost like asking how we deal with complexity in our society.
So why can’t we return to the display strategy of Fuchs? Wouldn’t our average visitor appreciate such a presentation more, understand it better? To me the answer seems to be located partly in the medium that I’m using now – the internet, blogging. One of th things that have changed in those years separating us from 1983, is the way in which we communicate. The immense production of written text on the web, the diachronic way in which we can ‘mine’ it with search engines, the astronomical proliferation of cinematic and photographic images. These things are deeply affecting the way in which we negotiate complexity, and an institute like the museum is affected so hard by it, that it feels threatened in its existence if it considers the consequences.
For in a sense the museum is everything these new technological means are not. It is a static, authorative, hierarchical machine, whose techniques of display evolved to educate a mass audience. To negotiate complexity in a museum one has to accept it as authority, one has to return to its status of specialist institute that knows better. In the age of blogging and surfing it is especially specialism that is under siege all the time. Specialism is no longer acknowledged on the basis of degrees, but has been reduced to blunt arguments: can you convince me.
There is something positive about this, for it means that people are critical. However, it poses a challenge for those people whose practice was based on being a specialist and being trustworthy on that basis. Art historians are such specialists. We – I’m also an art historian – need to reconsider our practice and wonder how it functions within this new system of exchange. What role does the type of knowledge production with which we are engaged play today?
The spectre of the average visitor seems currently embedded within this problematic. For it seems the average visitor itself has changed and especially our relationship as specialist to a non-specialist audience has changed. The question therefore should not only be: does an average visitor understand the exhibition?, but how do we, as specialists, relate to somebody who doesn’t considers oneself as such. We have to be aware that the economy of knowledge has changed and that it requires, or even demands, that we face this change and reposition ourselves. Our practice of looking and analyzing, contemplating that complicated relationship between experience and ideas, is still valuable and necessary, just as art is, but if we don’t find ways in which to integrate this knowledge into the new system of exchange, I fear the distance between us and anyone considered average will only grow until we are to each other only a spec at the horizon.
Tags: art history, blogging, museum practice, Play Van Abbe, specialism
