Tag Archives: experience

Participatory Practices in the Museum Space: A Dissection

May 11, 2017 Mike Murawski 2 Comments

Written by Danielle Carter

Participation in the museum sector has become a buzzword, used at such a high frequency that it can oftentimes be misunderstood amongst museum professionals or, in some cases, so that it becomes meaningless from overuse. When talking about participation, it is essential to discuss the theoretical aspects of what participation is, what it can be and/or what it should be, as well as how these participatory practices are grounded in practice; in other words, what are the theories of participation and how are these theories employed in museum practice?

Nina Simon is our go-to model for what participation in the museum is and/or what it should look like. While her blogs and her writing are a great resource, it is only natural that multiple voices, views, and opinions on this topic exist and — if you will allow me to particularly corny — they should be allowed to participate in the conversation too.

The Maastricht Centre for Arts and Culture, Conservation and Heritage hosted a conference in March 2017 with just that particular goal in mind: practitioners and researchers from various backgrounds in arts and culture gathered to discuss the multiple meanings and practices of participation within the arts and heritage sector.

In this post, I’ll discuss some of the outcomes and more significant thoughts and discussions that occurred during the conference as well as their relevance to museums and learning in the museum space.

Why participation?

Participation seems like the natural next step in the evolution of museums away from the uni-directional, aristocratic collectors’ cabinets of curiosities of yore, right?

There are many reasons to integrate participation into the institution of the museum — if you are low on funds, volunteers are great; if you are trying to reach a new community, allowing the voices of that community into your institution is the best way to reach them (see again: Nina Simon’s The Art of Relevance); if you want your visitors to engage in the museum content in a less uni-directional, top-down manner, participatory practices can be the key. Just from the examples listed above, it becomes obvious that participation can be defined in many different ways: volunteering can be participation, encouraging visitors to create their own meaning and perhaps contribute that to an exhibition can be participation, etc.

Overall, participation involves parties from outside of the museum institution, often in a way that invites them to contribute in a meaningful way — meaning that they contribute in a way that has some kind of effect or impact either on their experience of the museum, on visitors around them, or on the institution as a whole.

How should participation be integrated into museums?

For most of us, we see participation only as a possibility in the outreach, marketing, or education departments. The curators will remain the curators — experts in their fields — but educators are the ones who must create this (illusion of?) participation within the museum space. Although I will admit that this is a great step for many institutions, this is definitely and obviously short of institutional change.

Lena Porsmo Stoveland’s presentation on her experience as a student curator wonderfully reflected the various levels at which participation can take place. She argued in her presentation that the life of the object was a participatory one: a. the object of her discussion was an altarpiece created by several craftsmen, b. the altarpiece was used by church members in Sweden, c. the altarpiece became a museum object, and d. the altarpiece was restored and conserved by a collaboration of Finnish, Sweden, and Norwegian university students.

Building on this in his presentation on “the uncomfortable conversation between artworks and communities,” Dr. Jeroen Boomgaard formulated the identity-forming interaction between artworks and viewers. In other words, communities attribute meaning to artworks (despite the intent of the artist and/or commissioner) which results in an evolving object biography. Rogier Brom later expanded on this with his case study of a clothespin-shaped sculpture located in the courtyard of a school: the sculpture is no longer referred to by its name but by “wasknijper” (clothespin in Dutch); it was once located near the entrance of the school but, after a renovation, it is now located behind the school; and there was once a gardener that hated the sculpture so much that he let the bushes grow wild around so as to consume the entire sculpture, hiding it from view completely.

Sure, the interaction between public artworks and communities differs from that between museum objects and museum visitors, but these interactions have a familiar ring to them: although museum objects remain relatively static in their position within the museum space, the meanings attached to them are still in flux, dependent upon the visitors in the gallery or the way that the exhibitions are arranged at the time. In a participatory museum, the meanings attached to museum objects should always be in flux; rather than the museum telling visitors the significance of the object, visitors should be encouraged to connect with the object on their own terms. As Boomgaard and Brom elaborated, this process is inevitable in the case of public art, because an institution typically does not mediate the interactions between the public and the art.

Participatory practices and learning in museums

Although it was great fun to absorb new information and perspectives about different levels and variations of participation within arts and heritage, this is a museum education/learning blog after all and I am a museum educator and researcher, so I must return to participation and learning.

One of the last panels of the conference focused on participation and learning in arts and culture, of which the three presenters focused on participation and learning in the museum setting: Stefanie Metsemakers presented on the learning experience of adolescent volunteers in art museums, Emilie Sitzia focused on the learning potential of participatory practices through the lens of narrative theory, and I discussed the potential for the integration of play in the museum space to instigate participation and, thus, learning.

By inviting visitors to contribute to the museum in a variety of ways, participation aligns with affect theory as well as Falk and Dierking’s Contextual Model of Learning (as well as narrative, as Sitzia focused on her presentation — but that is a big enough topic for another blog post… or dissertation).

In essence, participatory practices in the museum setting validate visitors’ contributions, feelings, thoughts, reactions, and emotions, which, in turn, confirms the significance of visitors’ affective experiences. For example, by asking visitors questions or by asking them to participate in certain activities that require their input in relation to artworks in the galleries, visitors are notified that their reactions to or experiences of museum objects are valid. The immersive model proposed by Sitzia is parallel to the idea of participation in the museum space, in which visitors are immersed in the museum and immersed in the artworks, whereas the discursive model proposed by Sitzia relies on the traditional top-down model of the museum.

Sitzia_Stedelijk-Studies — Emilie Sitzia, “Narrative theories and learning in contemporary art museums: a theoretical explanation,” *Stedelijk Studies (*Spring 2016)

This also links with the Contextual Model of Learning, which posits that the physical, sociocultural, and personal contexts are fundamental to the learning process. Again, by asking participants to contribute, participatory practices draw upon visitors’ backgrounds, earlier experiences, dispositions, opinions, etc. and can also encourage visitors to participate with other visitors in a social manner, which is also a significant element of the learning process.

Through our three presentations, it became clear that learning is an experience in the museum space and encouraging active participation — to various degrees and in different manners — sets the learning process in motion.

The next steps forward

Although many museum researchers, academic, and practitioners would pat themselves on the back for researching participation within the museum space or implementing a participatory program at their institution, the academics and practitioners present at the MACCH conference in March 2017 stumbled upon something: participation is just an extension of that uni-directional model, isn’t it?

When we began to discuss what participation itself actually means, we realized that participation still implies that visitors or stakeholders are invited to partake in something. The fact that the institution has to grant the invitation means that the institution still holds the power; the museum grants an invitation on its own grounds and may still deny access depending on its own boundaries, wishes, desires, or needs.

Despite our attempts to focus more and more on our visitors, many museum practitioners — as well as visitors themselves, for that matter — often view aesthetic and social value as dichotomous, which Professor Gabriella Giannachi refuted outright in her keynote presentation about the epistemology of participation. In other words, increasing the social value or participatory practices within the museum space does not necessitate the diminishment of the aesthetic or artistic value of the museum objects, nor the intellectual value of curators and museums.

Hopefully, by inviting stakeholders and visitors to participate in the first place, this dynamic will begin to change; by inviting visitors on their own terms — not ours.

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About the Author

DANIELLE CARTER is a freelance museum educator and researcher based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She studied Art, Art History, and Museum Studies (2013) at Florida State University before moving to the Netherlands to pursue her Master’s degree in Arts and Heritage: Policy, Management, and Education (2015) at Maastricht University. Through her experiences as an arts and museum educator in the United States and abroad, she has become interested in the museum (learning) experience, the narrative of the museum (learning) experience, interactions between visitors and museum objects, the mediatory role of the museum, and play in the museum space. In Amsterdam, she bikes, takes advantage of the sun every time it comes out, and falls in love with every dog that she sees. To find out more about Danielle’s activities, visit her website (tangibleeducation.nl) or send her an email at daniellencrtr@gmail.com.

Museum Tech

The Big ASK: Experiencing the Brooklyn Museum’s ASK App

July 23, 2015 Mike Murawski 7 Comments

“With a culture of questioning, there is always more possibility.” – Debra France & W. L. Gore

“Without a good question, the answer has no place to go.” – Clayton Christensen

“We live in the world our questions create.” – David Cooperrider

Much ink (and many pixels) has been spilled over thinking about the use of questions in museums. I, myself, have given considerable thought to not only how we as educators employ questions in our own inquiry-based teaching, but also how we might get museum visitors and learners to ask more questions – to wonder more about the objects, collections, stories, and experiences brought forward by museums. I owe a great deal to the thinking of other educators and cultural leaders like Rika Burnham, Elliott Kai-Kee, Nina Simon, Philip Yenawine, and many of the folks at Harvard’s Project Zero, to name a few. In countless docent trainings, teacher workshops, school tours, lifelong learning classes, etc., I’ve worked to help cultivate a culture of questioning in the space of the museum – exploring creative questions, structured questions, participatory questions, visitor-centered questions, and questions that take a critical look at the very institutions of museums themselves. So when I visited the Brooklyn Museum last month, I was intrigued and excited to be able to test out their new ASK app as well as chat with some of the Audience Engagement staff about the intiative.

What is the ASK app?

ASK is the newest iOS app developed by the Brooklyn Museum to allow visitors to ask questions during their museum visit, and have Audience Engagement staff on the other end answering their questions live via the text-messaging feature of the app. As visitors ask questions, a member of the Audience Engagement staff not only responds to the question, but they know where the visitor is located based on iBeacons that the museum has installed throughout the galleries. In addition to texting in a question, visitors can also send a photo along with their question.

As the Audience Engagement staff receive visitor questions, they have access to a growing wiki that contains information about artworks, related artworks, historical information, and other questions that have been asked by visitors. These staff are constantly building this database of content and context, allowing them to more easily answer subsequent visitor questions. The app works in real-time, but only functions while on site at the Brooklyn Museum (if you want to take any of the experience with you, you need to take screen shots or notes, like I did).

In a recent interview with Nina Simon, the Brooklyn Museum’s Vice Director of Digital Engagement & Technology, Shelley Bernstein, spoke more about the new ASK app and experience:

“ASK is part of an overall effort to rethink the museum visitor experience. We began with a series of internal meetings to evaluate our current visitor experience and set a goal for the project. We spent a year pilot-testing directly with visitors to develop the ASK project concept. The pilots showed us visitors were looking for a personal connection with our staff, wanted to talk about the art on view, and wanted that dialogue to be dynamic and speak to their needs directly. We started to look to technology to solve the equation. In pilot testing, we found that enabling visitors to ASK via mobile provided the personal connection they were looking for while responding to their individual interests.”

The Brooklyn Museum has been testing the ASK app during the past couple of months (summer 2015), and making changes and prototyping new approaches throughout (which is awesome to see!).

My ASK Experience

As I walked along Prospect Park on my way to the Brooklyn Museum, I began downloading my ASK app (yes, I am a super museum nerd – I’m sure very few visitors have their app ready-to-go when they enter the Brooklyn Museum). Entering the museum, I was prepped to ask questions.

Rather than try to ‘stump’ the app experience and try to ask a series of outrageous or challenging questions, I wanted to really see when I would have the natural inclination to ask a question. I even wondered how often I have my own questions while I stroll the galleries of a museum (we think so much about questions as part of the museum experience of others, but perhaps rarely think about our own process of questioning as learners/visitors in the galleries). Not having visited the Brooklyn Museum for quite some time, I immediately found myself wandering around trying to find my way without a map. So question #1 for me was about way-finding: “Where can I find a map?” An immediate response via the app had me even more excited about my visit (now with map in hand).

I only ended up asking about 4 additional questions during a 2-3 hour visit, but the exchange with the Audience Engagement team member on the other end was enjoyable and surprisingly engaging. To give you a sense of how natural and conversational it felt, I am pasting a collage of screenshots from a part of our exchange at the right (click on the small image here to access a larger view of the exchange). The ‘responder’ texted me about twice as many times as I messaged them, which shows a really nice level of engagement. The conversation basically occurred in real time, without any awkward silences or wait times.

While I was testing the app, the person on the other end was nameless (but I think they’re now testing it with the person’s name included to add more personal connection, which is a fantastic idea). Towards the end of my visit, the staff member invited me to stop by the kiosk on my way out and say “hi.” So I did, and ended up meeting Megan Mastobattista, who has been a part of the Audience Engagement Team since March. We chatted about the project, and I was able to connect a real person to my digital experience (hooray!).

ASK team stationed at a kiosk in the entrance pavilion, which is how I experience it. Photo from BKM Tech blog.

Overall, I felt that the ASK app experience really succeeded in one area that I know the Brooklyn Museum’s is aiming for with this project: personal connection. I was highly skeptical of this app when I arrived (to be honest), since I tend to have reservations about anything that creates a culture in museums of asking questions and getting answers – assuming that there is some correct answer to every question, and preventing visitors from simply wondering about art without someone texting them the answers. From the outside, the ASK app seemed to be trying to digitally replicate the older and outdated model of docents, who try to “know everything” and answer any questions visitors have about works of art, history, artist bios, etc. But in experiencing the app myself, I felt connected to the answerer, and I also felt that the goal of the Audience Engagement team was not to specifically answer my questions, but truly to engage in dialogue and prompt more thinking or looking on my part. I could also bring my own knowledge to the exchange, and it was valued and became a building block for further dialogue.

After my visit, I connected with my colleague Monica Marino, Audience Engagement Lead there at the Brooklyn Museum, to get some of her thoughts on some of my questions and experiences:

“Users are consistently surprised when they realize it’s a real person speaking with them. It’s interesting, even when they go into the app experience knowing that it is a person responding (and even when they meet us beforehand) they have an “ah-ha” moment after about the 3rd exchange. That’s a prime moment for us to provoke a more in-depth dialogue about what the visitor is looking at.”

One part of the experience I was pleasantly surprised with was the app’s ability to connect me with the same Audience Engagement staff person each time. While I understand that this must be more challenging when the museum is more crowded, I asked Monica about their thinking about this aspect:

“From our end (the Team responding) it is nice when we can sustain the conversation with one person, however, it has its logistical challenges – for example if we have multiple people sending us messages, we want to be able to respond to everyone quickly which makes it challenging sometimes to stay with the same person. In addition, it happens that one of our team members has more of a background on a particular object/collection so it’s best when they’re able to respond to the visitor. Having said all of that we try as much as possible to stay with a visitor as they use it.”

Monica also writes more about the thinking behind the opening prompt and the first response to the visitor in this text messaging environment, and how to best spark the conversation I’ve been talking about.

As the Audience Engagement Team at the Brooklyn Museum continues to test and adapt the ASK experience, you can keep in touch via their BKM Tech blog, which is also a great place to learn more about the evolution of this initiative. Also check out Nina Simon’s interview with the project’s lead thinker, Shelley Bernstein.

As the team at the Brooklyn Museum collects data on visitor questions and behavior, I’m also very interested to see how it shapes the internal decisions being made about collection installations, exhibitions, interpretive strategies, and gallery design. To play off of the quote as the start of this post by David Cooperrider, are we heading toward a moment in which visitor questions will be shaping the museums of tomorrow. Will we ever be living in the museums our questions create?

What’s Your ASK Experience?

I’d love to hear from others who have experienced the ASK app. What can you share with us about your process of questioning and exchange with the Audience Engagement team? What do you think about this type of museum experience – should we instead be focusing more on human, face-to-face engagement rather than the digital? Please share and keep the dialogue going.

Bookshelf, Teaching Tools

How We Experience Art: A Reflection on 2 Recent Books

January 29, 2015 Mike Murawski 6 Comments

I have to admit that I am a bit of an enthusiast when it comes to books about how we look at and experience art. So when I found out about the recently published books by Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford as well as Ossian Ward, I was more than just a little curious (I ordered them right away and began to dig in during the winter holidays).

Rendez-Vous with Art, by Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford (Thames & Hudson, 2014)

Ways of Looking: How to Experience Contemporary Art, by Ossian Ward (Laurence King Publishing, 2014)

First, let me dive a bit into the pages of Rendez-Vous with Art. This book reads like an enjoyable travelogue of the great museums of the world, retelling in lush detail a series of art encounters as filtered through the interests, knowledge, passions, and opinions of de Montebello (Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 31 years, 1977-2008). At café moments and interludes, both authors engage in brief conversations about how we experience art, how we think about it, and how we look at it. The book is, as the authors write, “an attempt to get at not history or theory but the actual experience of looking at art” (9). Visiting the Louvre, the Prado, the Palazzo Pitti, the Mauritshuis, the British Museum, the Brancacci Chapel, the Met, and other notable art sites, their conversations focus on their experiences with masterpieces and lesser known works that allow them to escape the crowds of some of the more popular cultural destinations.

I happened to be reading this book during the days leading up to a workshop I was facilitating with our docents at the Portland Art Museum, spending time in the galleries looking at an absolutely electric El Greco painting on loan to our museum from the Cleveland Museum of Art. I was searching for a new way to frame our extended experience with this masterpiece — a way to prompt our viewing of the painting in a way that could transcend the art historical facts of the painting’s creation and context. Could a work like this speak to us today about something meaningful? As a viewer, what does this work mean to me? De Montebello provided the tee-up:

“A characteristic of great works of art is that they persistently catch our attention and beckon us. It is like a piece of music that we want to listen to ad infinitum or a book that we love re-reading — because one never exhausts what a great work has to give, whether it’s in the detail or the whole…. It has an ability not just to defy time, but also to communicate through time, even to people who do not and cannot know much about the beliefs of the people who made it or the message it was supposed originally to have. Somehow, inexplicably, a great work of art transcends its own age.” (31, 34)

While I may not agree with de Montebello when it comes to how we shape visitor learning experiences and use social media & digital technologies to broaden public engagement (among other things), I did enjoy his grandiose statements about the powerful nature of experiencing art. The hustle and bustle of a crowded art museum can certainly be music to a museum educator’s ears, yet I know that many of us, like myself, also seek out the more intimate, quiet, deeply rewarding experience of being the only person standing in front of a masterpiece (how many of us sneak into the galleries when the museum is closed to steal away our own time with art?). De Montebello muses on the challenge of viewing art amidst the crowds of popular, well-visited institutions … or, as they write, “the hell of looking at art with other people” (128). As Gayford recounts, de Montebello originally wanted the title of the book to be “The Art Museum: An Imperfect Construct.”

At times, both authors seem rather grumpy about the millions and millions of people who crowd into museums to see masterworks of culture and history, but their questions about how we experience art in these contexts raises interesting issues about marketing, image reproductions, and digital collections. For example, given the deep crowds of camera-phone-wielding tourists crammed in front of the Mona Lisa on any given day, is it more valuable or meaningful to look at a high quality digital image on my iPad (here in the quiet comfort of my own home or office)? And how does our repeated exposure to beautiful, massive publicity banners and posters showings close-up details of masterpieces effect our expectations of the actual museum gallery experience with these artworks?

This is what it is like when you're standing looking at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Photo by Stephen R Melling, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0 — This is what it is like when you’re standing looking at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Photo by Stephen R Melling, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0

How Do We Experience Contemporary Art?

OK, let me shift gears here, from talking about experiences with Egyptian sculpture, Renaissance masterpieces, and nineteenth-century portraiture to experiencing the art of now — contemporary art that can be scattered across a gallery floor, projected on multiple walls, consuming a massive space, requiring us to talk to someone or eat something, confusing, perplexing, and having no apparent start or finish.

“The old rules of not touching a work of art or of reverentially paying homage to each picture in a state of quiet awe are now gone….” (Ward 8)

Carsten Höller “Test Site” installation at Tate Modern, 2006. Photo by David Sim, Creative Commons 2.0 license

Ossian Ward’s Ways of Looking makes a fresh pairing with Rendez-Vous with Art, focusing on art created since 2000 that frequently expects viewers to perform, interact with, or complete the piece in front of you. In this highly readable, straightforward book, Ward offers a set of tools that go beyond just looking and might help provide a way to make sense of contemporary art. While an art critic and art world insider himself, I think he succeeds in his attempts to combat the ubiquitous and opaque ‘art speak’ that so frustratingly surrounds contemporary art. He writes (and I quite agree):

“Too often, these gatekeepers [curators and critics] stand in the way of the understanding of a work of art by using a morass of theoretical jargon and pseudo-philosophical art-speak. This kind of clever-clever writing about art does very little to bolster or boost an artist’s cause, other than perpetuating more reams of similarly hard-to-fathom ‘discourse.'” (20)

So how does Ward propose we cut through the verbose jargon and allow for better experiences with contemporary art? His central foundation is to “start from zero” and wipe the slate clean — tabula rasa — using the first word TABULA as a mnemonic device for the approach he proposes. While I don’t want to give away all the details (after all, you should read the book yourself and explore this approach), here is a very brief summary:

Time: Always a good idea to start with a few minutes of calm contemplation, looking, and exploration. Take stock.
Association: What is the personal resonance or ‘hook’ for you? This can be a visual attraction or a connection with a memory or experience you’ve had. Make some associations.
Background: Use some basic ways to learn a bit more about the backdrop of the piece or the artist — using the title, label, press release, museum brochure or website, etc.
Understand: After looking, connecting, and learning a few basic background facts, the piece is more likely to sink in a bit more. What might be some broader messages at play here?
Look again: Simple as it sounds. After a bit of pondering, go back and look or engage with the work even more. Did you miss a detail?
Assessment: After these first four steps, you’re now in a better place to decide whether you think the work is good or not. But Ward reminds us not to hastily jump to this step (which we all do far too often).

Much about this method of looking at contemporary art or thinking about an encounter makes sense, and reaffirms many existing pedagogies and educational philosophies already informing museum practice. In addition, throughout his book, Ward provides us with wonderfully pithy ‘Spotlight’ features that lead us through parts of the TABULA approach with individual works of contemporary art — including explorations of Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), Carsten Holler’s whimsical Tate Modern installation Test Site (2006), Glen Ligon’s Warm Broad Glow (2005), and Roger Hiorns’s amazing and enormous Seizure (2009). When the TABULA approach seems a bit lacking, at least the discussions of contemporary art are enjoyable and digestible.

Everything Comes Full Circle

The entire experience of reading these two ‘looking at art’ books side by side became eerily connected when I reached the final pages of Ward’s book only to find a Spotlight on Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Two Circles (1661) — a painting that de Montebello and Gayford could have easily included in their travels. Ward comes around full circle to the more traditional ways of looking at art that form the foundation of Rendez-Vous with Art, writing: “there is no better way to slow down and tabulate one’s appreciation of art than by sitting with one of the Old Masters.” No matter what approach or strategy you take when it comes to encountering art of any time period or culture, is there anything more essential than spending time to look, perceive, and use our multitude of senses to take it in?

“It’s not rude to stare at art. Quite the opposite, in fact: it’s the least you can do. Stop. Breathe. Relax. Don’t think, just look, take it all in. Soak up your surroundings, feel the space in front of you, set your mind free, let your internal monologue recede and allow your eyes to settle. When was it that you last allowed yourself such a moment?” (Ward 148)

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Featured header image: Carsten Höller panorama by David Sim, Creative Commons 2.0 license

OpenThink

How to View Art: However You Want To

October 8, 2014 Mike Murawski 4 Comments

Written by Jen Oleniczak, theengagingeducator.com

Reposted from Huffington Posts’s Arts & Culture.

After reading art critic Philip Kennicott’s article in the Washington Post this past weekend, I felt like I was being punked (does that still happen?). Someone is actually telling people how to view art? And chastising them for incorrect behavior like making plans in museum walls? As a museum educator and consultant that teaches other educators how to listen to visitors and interact with art in different ways, imagine my shock at this antiquated judgmental piece. Now, Hyperallergic beat me to a delightfully snarky response, so I present five (snark-light) counterpoints to Kennicott’s ‘how to.’

1. Take the time you have

Museums are exhausting. I’m a museum person and the stimulation tires me out. So take the time you have and spend time with the works that you like. Viewing art should be a fun experience — not a sprint to see every Picasso, Monet, and Degas until your eyes bleed.

Do you have an hour? Great. Take advantage of a pay-what-you-can day and spend some time in one collection. Or even one gallery. Engage with the art in the way you want to engage. That means if you want to take a photo, take it. Take a selfie (if the museum allows it) or photo bomb the work.

If you want to tweet, hashtag #ITweetMuseums and someone might strike up a conversation with you about the artwork. Take the time you have.

And don’t wander around, waiting for something to hit you. Do you wait in a coffee shop for true love to come through the door, walk up and propose? Nope. Art is similar — you won’t get ‘struck’ by something that shakes you to the core by racing around seeing every work you can. Take it easy, date art as slowly as you would date people. True love might be out there.

2. Seek your space

“Museums aren’t for everyone. But they should be for anyone.” – David Carr

Find those dark corners away from Starry Night. Don’t just see the highlights — see the side galleries. Did you know the Met Museum has an incredible visible storage in the American Wing? Or the Guggenheim has a basement with a theatre that often shows video pertaining to the current exhibition? Investigate the map; see what looks interesting to you and head there.

Or stand in front of Starry Night. You shouldn’t avoid a popular work because it is popular — even if you’ve seen it before. Watching people interact with artwork is possibly one of the greatest sociology experiments. I was at LACMA on business and I watched a family staring at a Rothko, trying to make sense of the color fields. The older male said, “It looks like it’s vibrating” while his wife (?) said, “it looks more like it’s swinging.” The key is finding the space that works for you and your art viewing, even if it’s the loudest corner of the museum.

3. Just do you

Some people respond to art with knowledge. Some people respond to art by looking. Some people respond by moving, listening to music, sketching. You know what kind of learner you are. And if you don’t, try things. Pose like the sculpture or move like the shapes. Just stop and look. Wiki the work, read the museum label or online catalogue, listen to the audio guide or sketch a detail. Just do you.

If you decide you are an interpersonal learner and want to interact with others, take a museum tour. Those questions the educator is asking? Chances are they:

want to see where you are at in ‘understanding’ the art,
want to see what you are interested in, or
want to show that everyone can have an opinion about art, and yours matters as much as the curators.

See the common theme? You.

Museum education programs care about the visitor. What is the art if you aren’t there? A historical thing on the wall. As a museum educator, we don’t think learning from authority is oppressive. We DO think that all opinions are equally valid, as long as they are backed up with thought. I’ve had many people tell me contemporary art is crap. “Great,” I respond, “Why do you think that?” Silence. Then, “well I could do it.” My response? “Ok you need art to show skill, let me show you x later, they were classically trained…”

See what happened? It goes back to the YOU. What you think and feel about art IS important, because without, the museum is just a place with a bunch of things on the walls.

4. Remember in your own way

This ties very much into my previous point. Remember what appeals to you. If you’ll remember your experience with the artwork by the date, fantastic. If you aren’t a number person (like me), exactly what will the date do for you? Or the name of the artist?

Take in what affects you. Is it the brush strokes? The color? The connection of the figures? If you are dealing with an artwork you actually like, creating a mental image, sketching, acting out the piece will be fun. So will Instagramming it. Museums do not have to be like school — you don’t have to cram in facts regarding the artists or movements shown in exhibitions. You definitely can, but again, you do you.

5. Ignore everything I said

How to really view art? Ignore everything I just said, except for the title of point three. Just do you. Don’t listen to me, don’t listen to Kennicott — listen to yourself. If you are bored, take a break. If you are interested in a work, investigate further. If you want to move, listen to music, sketch, get a coffee, tweet, laugh, cry — whatever. Interact with art in any way YOU want to.

A few years ago at a conference, David Carr said to a group of museum educators, “Museums aren’t for everyone. But they should be for anyone.” Never had a truer statement been said regarding museum — they should be for anyone, even if you use it as a backdrop for a date, air conditioning on a hot day, a library, a school or a place to center yourself. Without you, museums are giant holding centers for bits of human history.

So just do you.

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Featured Image credit: Photo by J Neuberger, Flick.com, Creative Commons 4.0 International License

Spotlight on Practice, Teaching Tools

Forget About the Price Tag: Engaging with a Masterpiece

January 24, 2014 Mike Murawski 1 Comment

Written by Mike Murawski

This past November, the art market grabbed headlines around the globe with the record-breaking auction purchase of Francis Bacon’s 1969 triptych “Three Studies of Lucian Freud.” With nearly 500 news stories (and counting), this trio of canvases has garnered nearly Miley-Cyrus-level media attention — a frenzy obsessed with auction prices and billionaire collectors. When it was announced that this series of canvases was going to be on view at the Portland Art Museum as part of our Masterworks series this winter, I immediately began thinking about how one can get past the media craze and dollar signs in order to dig deeper into the core significance of this ‘masterpiece.’ How might we address the complexities of how visitors would experience a work like this? What are some ways in which we could bring audiences into a closer connection with this work? How could I, myself, have an experience with this work in a meaningful and personal way?

Standing in front of this triptych myself for the first time in the galleries of the Portland Art Museum, I was initially overwhelmed and distracted by the news stories that have provided so much baggage for this intriguing portrait. What was I going to have to do to dig deeper — to start discovering this ‘masterpiece’ for myself? As I stood there, I thought of the words of British philosopher and art historian John Armstrong, who in his 2000 book Move Closer: An Intimate Philosophy of Art writes:

“If we go to a painting demanding that something special happen, we end up in the condition of the insomniac who can’t sleep precisely because he keeps retelling himself, with mounting panic, that he must fall asleep.”

Perhaps the best way to start tackling this painting was to actually deal with the fraught idea of a ‘masterpiece’ and how that determination effects the experience we can have with art. For me, this type of exploration is best done with others. So early in the New Year, I invited our docents to spend some time with me in front of the Francis Bacon triptych to do some close looking, to connect with some of the scholarship on the work, and to start the process of digging deeper into the work’s significance. With only a few days notice, we had about 60 docents show-up for these open explorations of teaching with and experiencing a modern masterpiece.

Visitors crowd around Picasso's — Visitors crowd around Picasso’s “Desmoiselles D’Avignon” at Museum of Modern Art in New York,

What Exactly Is a ‘Masterpiece’?

Across the country, visitors consistently flock to museums to see noted masterworks (whether through traveling special exhibitions, celebrated groupings of masterpieces, as part of some museums’ collections). Yet, an artwork’s prestige can create a situation (like the insomniac) in which the pressure to ‘get’ the famous work prevents us from having any type of valuable experience at all. This situation is more common with modern and contemporary art, which might not always meet the traditional or popular criteria of a masterpiece. So what do we mean when we say a painting is a masterwork or ‘masterpiece’?

This question is a weighty one and comes with a lot of historical, cultural, and political baggage — yet I began my sessions with our docents by directly addressing this very topic. Faced with defining the characteristics of a masterpiece while seated in front of the Bacon, our group of docents and I discussed how a masterpiece traditionally has “stood the test of time,” or is a particularly iconic work within a major artist’s career. In our conversations, we also touched a bit upon the individual experience we have with a masterpiece — something that draws us in and keeps us thinking, questioning, wondering. In my own experiences visiting museums as well as teaching with art, I do find that certain works of art continuously draw us back in for repeat encounters, offering new challenges and insights each time we sit in front of them. We questioned the idea of who gets to define a ‘masterpiece,’ proposing that perhaps we as individuals get to make that determination for ourselves.

However, people frequently look to experts or scholars to help us determine which artworks might be considered masterpieces, so I thought I’d bring in a few of their ideas. Back in 2010, the Los Angeles Times interviewed a series of art scholars and experts about this very question posed by the inaugural exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz entitled “Masterpieces?”. Here are a few responses:

“For me, masterpiece connotes a work of art that manages to work on multiple levels: impact, art historical importance, and an elusive quality that lets it be meaningful to a wide audience, rather than only specialists.” -Stephanie Barron, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

“I believe in the transformative power of art; I do believe that. And the paintings that move you so much words fail you — those are the masterpieces.” -Michael Kareken, artist

For our engagement with the Francis Bacon “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” at the Portland Art Museum, it was important for our discovery to push past monetary value (which, of course, remains the elephant in the room) in order to see how this painting might appeal to us in a more complex, meaningful,and perhaps elusive way. We began to unknowingly take the advice of a quite terrible but catchy pop song as we proceeded: “forget about the price tag.”

Aaron Doyle and Evan Tewinkel, preparators at the Portland Art Museum, install the Bacon triptych. Jamie Francis/The Oregonian – http://www.oregonlive.com

Engaging with a Masterpiece: Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” (1969)

Moving past the auction price and the weight of this work being a ‘masterpiece,’ we were now faced with looking at this immense triptych of 6-foot-tall canvases and making some meaning of our own. But how to do this? How to begin to dig deeper? I immediately went back to John Armstrong, and a recent book he co-authored with writer Alain de Botton entitled Art as Therapy. Probing at the larger purpose and relevance of art (and quite critical of the art market, itself), Armstong and DeBotton offer philosophical strategies for approaching art in a new way, beyond the normal historical or stylistic concerns toward a more personal, human approach:

“Getting something out of art doesn’t just mean learning about it — it also means investigating ourselves. We should be ready to look into ourselves in response to what we see.” (p. 72)

While I generally gravitate toward this type of approach, it seemed particularly appropriate as a framework through which to view this visceral and intensely human set of paintings by Bacon. After briefly talking about Armstong and De Botton’s ideas, the docents and I spent much of our sessions with quiet, guided looking followed by small group conversations to talk about what we were noticing, thinking, and wondering with the Bacon portraits. I acknowledged that this would only be the beginning of our experience with these paintings, and read a few quotes from Bacon himself to help us peel back more layers of meaning in these portraits.

“In painting a portrait, the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person.”– Francis Bacon

“When I look at you across the table, I don’t see you but I see a whole emanation, which has to do with personality and everything else. And to put that over in a painting, as I would like to be able to in a portrait, means that it would appear violent in paint. We nearly always live through screens — a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.” – Francis Bacon

Before we left the Bacon triptych as a group, I invited each docent to return to this painting at another time, sit with the work alone on a quiet afternoon, and spend about 20 or 30 minutes doing some sketches and open reflective writing. For me, the most powerful prompt for this type of written response has simply been “What is this to me?” — a question directly inspired by John Armstong and one that I have used repeatedly in my own gallery learning as well as teaching with larger groups. And I feel that if we can begin to answer this question for ourselves, we can also begin to open up a new type of experience for our visitors with great works of art.

The sessions I led with the docents in front of the Bacon triptych were by no means the type of neatly packaged, “transformative” experience we sometimes strive for. I had to remind myself that there was value in simply opening up a process of discovery and not ending in some grand culminating moment of clarity. After all, this was a complex artwork filled with a shifting sense of energy, fragility, violence, and deep emotion that would reward a more sustained and circuitous path of learning. In her chapter entitled “Intense Looks” in Teaching in the Art Museum, Rika Burnham discusses the deep journey of contemplation, research, and gallery teaching that can often lead us, as educators, to our own transformative experiences with art. As she aptly writes:

“As museum educators, we must never forget that in every gallery dialogue we lead we must strive simultaneously to discover both the artworks we look at so intensely and the process itself of discovering artwork…. As teachers, our own difficulties in making sense of art, the experiences of frustration, the long detours and false starts, all chart a terrain whose exploration expands our capacity for empathetic listening and responding, for encouraging intense looking, and for moving dialogue forward.”

It may be these cumulative, layered experiences we have with masterpieces that allow us to change the way we see art as well as ourselves. But these types of experiences take time and repeat encounters with a work of art — they don’t happen in the seconds or minutes that we typically spend glancing at a painting such as the Bacon triptych, and they also often don’t necessarily happen when we’re leading a guided experience with an artwork. As I concluded my session with our docents in front of “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” I encouraged them all to see our collective experience as simply the beginning of a deeper process of looking at this work; a process they would need to culminate on their own, in their own personal way, and in collaboration with future visitors to the museum.

Spotlight on Practice

Beyond Just Staring: Personal Discovery as Core to Museum Learning

March 18, 2012 Mike Murawski 4 Comments

“When contemplating a work of art one of the key questions ought to be: `What is this to me?’ This is asked not in the sceptical tone it sometimes takes, implying `And I think it’s pretty irrelevant to me really,’ but rather in the tone of genuine inquiry, implying that one might come to discover how the object does matter in a personal sense.” (Armstrong, 5)

A couple years ago, I led a series of public gallery talks that began with the quote above, pulled from John Armstrong’s book Move Closer: An Intimate Philosophy of Art. I had become so invested in bringing the personal dimension of learning into the gallery experience that I decided to experiment with these public talks, inviting [perhaps somewhat unwilling] participants to explore an exhibition of contemporary photography through the lens of their own perceptions and lived experiences. Since this is unfortunately something that museum visitors are rarely asked to do during a gallery talk or public program, it began with some awkwardness as I explained our task. Two core questions, also coming straight from Armstong’s 2000 book, faced each of us as we examined the series of photographs by artist Bruce Yonemoto:

What do I have to do—beyond just staring—to get the most out of looking at these artworks?
What is the importance of any particular work to me?

Rather surprised by this line of inquiry, the group took my lead and embarked on this process of personal discovery. To begin, we examined a large photograph that was re-staging a well-known Caravaggio painting, and spent some time sharing our observations and creating what meaning we could by just looking. This loosened them up for the next step, which was going out on their own, finding a photograph they felt connected to, and spending some time with the work exploring personal connections — keeping in mind John Armstrong’s charge ( what is this to me? what does this remind you of? what do you wonder about this image?).

“Being preoccupied with when something was made or who the designer or artist was can be a way of avoiding a more personal relationship with the object. External considerations can be so absorbing that they draw our attention away from the very thing which they are supposed to serve—we end up knowing about the picture, but not knowing it.” (Armstrong, 14)

After about 20 minutes of self-exploration and ‘seeing for ourselves,’ we gathered back as a group to share the discoveries that everyone was able to make. I am always amazed at how quickly people are willing to begin sharing personal connections, and the conversation began to build. It has been almost 2 years, but I distinctly recall one woman who had lived in Indonesia much of her life, and she told us several intimate stories about experiencing the strife and conflict in her home country and how that related to one of the photographs she chose (an American Civil War portrait that Yonemoto had re-staged with Southeast Asian men instead playing the roles of the soldiers). Others made connections to their own experiences during the Vietnam War, a period which Yonemoto’s images specifically recall for Americans who lived through that era.

“If we go to a painting demanding that something special happen, we end up in the condition of the insomniac who can’t sleep precisely because he keeps retelling himself, with mounting panic, that he must fall asleep.” (Armstrong, 63)

No doubt, the conversation was significantly more meaningful than if we had simply discussed the “facts” surrounding these works and the artist himself. Like a mantra I often borrow from Rika Burnham, we ‘opened ourselves to the work’ and allowed for a slow, fluid process of perception. We did come to some complex meanings that aligned with the curator’s perspective, but we also made these images our own — allowed them to “matter in a personal sense,” as Armstrong would say. “What good we get from art depends upon the quality of our visual engagement with particular works. We need to ‘learn to look,'” Armstrong writes (60). While I have not led a gallery talk quite like this since then (mostly because the Museum would quickly ask me to stop giving gallery talks, I imagine), I have continued to build a strong element of ‘creating personal meaning’ in the learning experiences I facilitate in the galleries — and the programs I manage for students, teachers, and docents.

LookingAtDeKooning-ClintGardner — Photo by Clint Gardner

While there are many examples of museum educators writing about the power of ‘seeing for ourselves’ and the value of personal discovery (including some great stuff in Rika Burnham & Elliott Kai-Kee’s recent book and the article by Ray Williams published in a 2010 issue of the Journal of Museum Education), I always return to the words of John Armstrong from Move Closer. Perhaps because my role in working with docents requires me to constantly be tackling issues related to the appeal of information & knowledge versus experience & the multiple dimensions of meaning-making. For many years now, Armstrong’s book has armed me with a clear sense to counter the over-emphasis of information in my work as a museum educator — but also to enhance my own response to art, and get beyond just staring.

Art Museum Teaching