Actually, the labels were really bloody good

I should just stop following links through to Judith Dobrzynski's blog on the ArtJournal platform, because they almost inevitably leave me feeling scratchy and combative. There's a mendacious 'gotcha!' tone to many of her posts, an in-the-know way of writing that I often find mean-spirited.

But this post lambasting the labels in the touring Heatherwick Studios exhibition currently on show at the Cooper Hewitt annoyed me so much I felt I needed to write something. Here's what Dobrzynski had to say:

There’s little questions that some museums have dumbed down their labels of late. Granted, people seem to know less and less about art, even as museum attendance seems to be growing. (That may be because there’s so much more to know and to learn about art, what with more museums showing increasingly broad and diverse offerings). For prime evidence of the dumbing down, though, look no further than the Copper Hewitt Museum in Manhattan. I was there a week ago to view Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio. Heatherwick’s work is original, innovative and fascinating. But neither the show nor the labels do him justice. 

We’ll stick to the labels here, which are framed as questions. Probably meant to be engaging, to involve viewers, they instead are condescending. The museum feels like a kindergarten.

Now, there's a point here that I agree with. As the offer and the audience at art museums gets broader and broader (and contemporary art continues to become less and less figurative, and an audience's familiarity with Western religious stories, literature and classical subjects can be less and less taken for granted) it *is* becoming harder to write labels that will offer something of value to every visitor. This is why we see museums offering layers of interpretation, often through digital supplements, to try to offer an entry point to an unfamiliar visitor and a new idea to a familiar one.

But I saw Provocations earlier this year, and was actually delighted by the labels. I thought they did a marvellous job of demonstrating to a lay audience how the studio approaches a project - and what makes them unique. Each label starts with the central design problem, posed as a question, and then explicates what the studio settled on as a solution or answer. They captured the playful spirit of the studio's work, and the sense of social engagement I saw in the images and maquettes.

In fact, I thought the labels were so good that I took shitty memory-jogging photos of them:

New London bus

   

 

Hereford Community Centre (unrealised)

'Spun' chair

And here's the text for the Zip Bag:

How can you make objects out of long pieces of zipper? 

Discovering as a student that it was possible to buy a 656-foot-long roll of continuous zipper, Heatherwick began researching ways to use this material to make three-dimensional objects. The studio produced various bags, vessels, and even a dress before approaching Longchamp, the French handbag company, about collaborating. The resulting design incorporates strips of fabric between the toothed edges of the zipper so that the bag could double its size when unzipped. The Longchamp Zip Bag, which began as an experiment in 1993, was retailed worldwide in 2004 and became a bestseller.

You can see for yourself though, as the Cooper Hewitt has posted all the projects with all their labels online. 

Design and architecture shows are the genre of museum display that I struggle most with - the Gehry exhibition I saw at LACMA, for example, was just a sea of plywood and different shades cardboard, which was exhausting on the eyes and hard to imagine as shapes in space. The Heatherwick exhibition in contrast was a joy, from the interactive project at the start that let you print out pieces of tickertape to carry around with you, to the cunning modular display that makes it a good touring show (curated by Cooper Hewitt's Brooke Hodge, the exhibition was organised by the Nasher Sculpture Center and also showed at the Hammer Museum in LA).

In contrast to the Heatherwick labels (condescending to the point of insulting, Dobrzynski concludes) she approvingly cites a 2010 newspaper interview with John Baldessari:

“I don’t think you really have to spoon feed the viewer,” he explained. “You just have to give them something to hang on to and they can begin to unravel it themselves. It’s kind of like reading a detective story, you get a clue, you follow that.”

And I honestly can't see where she finds the distance between that commonplace idea and the Heatherwick labels.

First they take 'curate' away from us ...

... and now it's 'museum' that's been filched by the marketers for their own nefarious practices.*^ The American media has been awash (where 'awash' means 'four articles I have read') with commentary on Glade's Museum of Feelings. From the official listing:

This holiday season, Glade® invites consumers to explore their emotions at The Museum of Feelings, an interactive experience built to showcase the beautiful connection between scent and emotion. Visitors will be taken on a sensory journey through the Museum, where Glade® fragrances act as the muse to inspire visitors to explore their emotions.

A series of five interactive light, sound and scent installation rooms lead the visitor to the gift store, where they can purchase Glade's new scented candle range.

The emotional tone of the commentary quivers between bemused and scathing. From the Village Voice:

Housed in a pulsating cube nestled between a luxury mall and a yacht harbor (just blocks from noted tourist attraction Ground Zero), this paean to...what, really?... is a confusing mix of ambient advertising and immersive art. ... 

The cube’s exterior changes color based on the mood of New York City, which (according to a press release put out by Glade® parent company SC Johnson) is determined by “the sentiment of conversations by New Yorkers on Twitter, coupled with local news and trends including the weather, stock exchange fluctuations and flight delays”. Evidently rage stroke coupled with crippling panic attack is a vibrant teal that undulates into fuschia.

From the NYT:

At the end of the exhibit, Ms. Santoro and Ms. Borghini, who work nearby, were shuffled through a gift store. There were no negative emotions on sale, perhaps because it might be difficult to sell a $9 envy-themed scented candle. 

The two friends were asked to stand in front of a large camera and take a selfie, which was then evaluated and tagged with an emotion. It took a few tries, but in the end, the machine returned its assessment: “Indifferent.”

Jared Keller in the Smithsonian Magazine undertakes a scholarly investigation of the marketing ploy. His headline, Fear and Loathing at the Museum of Feelings, might give you a hint of how that pans out:

Without some level of pedagogical logic and civic intent, is it simply an entertaining art installation, regardless of who foots the bill for its construction? In the eyes of historians like Ward, the Museum of Feelings represents a “clever attempt to conflate itself with something respectable.” 

To Ward, it’s indicative of a larger trend in American culture: a tendency to crowdsource art and culture, to turn things to the masses, in lieu of the careful (if elitist) curation of scholars and academics that imparts museums with the knowledge and sensibility that makes them worthy stewards of the title.“Instead of rationality and pedagogy, we’re getting something closer to a carnival,” says Ward. “There’s no demonstrably larger social significance running through a place like the [Museum of Feelings] … so why are they pretending it’s something it isn’t?”

Gotta love that 'simply an entertaining art installation': clearly, Jared has never tried and failed with a family-focused art exhibition. At the same time there's an effort in the article to untangle where corporate and philanthropic support of a museum meshes with the integrity of its programming.

My favourite piece is probably Dayna Evans for The Awl, kind of a Lena Dunham meets art review:

From the tiny screens of my computer and phone, art looks mostly dull, flat, and familiar, especially when it arrives via jpeg or tinyletter or Tumblr scroll. Only a few weeks before I first heard about the Museum of Feelings, I had ordered a new Rizzoli art book called Feelings: Soft Art, a collection of works by contemporary artists that explore the evocative emotions drawn out by visual art. In many ways, this book is drastically different from what the Museum of Feelings attempts to accomplish—which is, make millennials think Glade airspray is trendy and aware and worthy of use—but in some ways, it is not. When Cat and I tried to figure out how it was we even came to learn about the pop-up museum, we both realized that a lot of our more “arty” friends had said they were attending the Facebook event. It spread virally. We trusted those people’s tastes, so we decided to go. We never really thought to check if it was worthy of praise, or even exactly what it was. 

This is the same principle by which the casual museum attendee learns to namedrop Cézanne and Miró. MoMA is just as much sponsored content as the Museum of Feelings—they’re just sponsored by different power structures.

(Like the Village Voice, Evans identifies the James Turrell / Hotline Bling overtones to the installation's aesthetic, the ubiquity of which is possibly now even further emphasised by Pantone's 2016 Colour of the Year.)

It's all a long way away from Charles Simic's William and Cynthia, which I quoted from three years ago in a presentation where I talked about what I imagined when I thought about a museum of emotions:

Says she'll take him to the Museum
of Dead Ideas and Emotions.
Wonders that he hasn't been there yet.
Says it looks like a Federal courthouse
With its many steps and massive columns.

Apparently not many people go there
On such drizzly gray afternoons.
Says even she gets afraid
In the large exhibition halls
With monstrous ideas in glass cases,
Naked emotions on stone pedestals
In classically provocative poses.

Says she doesn't understand why he claims
All that reminds him of a country fair.
Admits there's a lot of old dust
And the daylight is the color of sepia,
Just like this picture postcard
With its two lovers chastely embracing
Against a painted cardboard sunset.

After all this reading, I remain curious about one question. How strong was the pull of that word 'museum'? Was it the selfies on Instagram that got New York's 20-somethings queueing for this experience, or does the word hold some special magic? I'd like to think the latter, in which case I am sure we will survive Glade's assault upon our ramparts, and live to fight in the culture wars on yet another day.

*I mostly joke here. Some of my best friends work in comms and marketing. Hell, I work in comms and marketing, and we're all shameless.
^Also, as I was discussing on Twitter tonight, 'curate' is arguably better understood now than it was before it was co-opted for everything from wardrobes to playlists to friend groups. Prior to that, who could've told you that curating has something to do with making informed selections and publicly presenting them?

Label, label, on the wall

This - from LACMA - was one of my favourite wall labels from my trip. Something about the proportion of real estate given to institutional wrangling compared to the art work really caught my fancy.

Did you know wall labels as we know them were introduced in the 1830s by Gustav Friedrich Waagen, the first director of the Royal Museum in Berlin? Or that titles for artworks became common only with the advent of the art market and public museum in the 18th century?

Me neither. Probably should've, really. But now you can read all about it in this piece by Jill Sterrett, Director of Collections at SFMOMA. The article also contains a handy visual breakdown of the properties of a wall label (which is in itself a direct argument for telling the stories, not just providing the tombstone data).