Alienation at the Art Museum

A few weeks ago I visited the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, and it sparked an epiphany: I really don't enjoy viewing art in the constrained circumstances that many museums now impose.

I still love going to a museum like The Metropolitan in Manhattan where you can get lost in small rooms where only one or two visitors ever venture or where you can see so much art (the Egyptian tombs, for example, or the amazing new installation of Greek and Roman statuary) in natural light.

Of course, I recognize that many art works cannot be placed in natural sunlight without suffering damage, but does that mean that the artificial lighting in so many museums has to be so poor? At the Blanton I simply gave up trying to look at one Frederic Remington painting because the glare from the artificial lighting on it made it impossible to see one section of the canvas; no matter where I moved, it was obscured by a stubborn bar of refracted light.

More and more art museums also seem calculated to keep the viewer at distance and to impose a sense of constant surveillance more in keeping with a prison than an institution designed to let people see and enjoy art. Between the checking of bags, the security gates, and the fish-eye you get from the guards, you might find an eerie resemblance to the TSA. “Will they ask us to take off our shoes next?” I wondered to myself.

For example, if you have any kind of purse (especially the small backpack kind), a guard will descend on you and tell you it's not allowed because you might back into an artwork. I'd like to hear of an actual instance of this happening, and every time I have to listen to this rationale delivered in the falsely apologetic tones of a customer service operator, I want to ask the guard: “Oh really, and when did this last occur?” I really can't imagine backing into an art work because viewing art is a visual experience, stupid, and what would be the point of approaching it backwards?

However, in this instance, I once again divested myself of wallet, keys and other ID to the relative security of a coin-operated locker and returned to the gallery where I hoped I could browse undisturbed.

At the Blanton, before you can enter any gallery, you first have to pass through an enormous hall that opens up to the second story with a broad staircase that is blindingly (and I mean literally blindingly) white. Each time I ascended and descended this staircase, I kept my eyes firmly fixed on my feet hoping I wouldn't trip and fall.

The hall has all the charm and warmth of an operating room; as far as I could tell there was no artwork whatsoever in it – no tapestries or wall hangings or anything to break the sterile expanse of whiteness stretching in every direction. It made me want to run for cover.

Once past this alienating entryway, I did discover one of the best collections of contemporary Latin American art that I've seen in recent years, and my mood had improved a good deal while I was wandering through it. Yet here there were also not too subtle messages keeping me at arm's length, this time in the form of lines drawn around various installations and signs indicating that one should never touch the art work or cross those clearly demarcated boundaries.

And I thought to myself, “Why should art only be seen and not touched?” Public art rarely has this “Noli me tangere/don't touch me” aura about it so that students can happily rub the protruding foot of a statue of a former Yale president without anyone frowning at them, and even hold weddings in front of Rodin's “The Gates of Hell” on the Stanford campus without anyone giving them notice of trespass or bad taste.

I remember looking at late paintings by Monet and wanting so badly to touch the thick swabs of paint on the canvas and trace their swirls with my fingertips. Sacrilege, clearly. But would it be so out of bounds for modern artists to consider making their work a little more interactive? Maybe they could provide even a sample section of canvas for visitors to touch and hold and add a tactile dimension to their visual experience.

I believe this need to touch art is deeply embedded in our psyche from childhood. Who can't remember seeing something both crafted and beautiful as a young child and wanting to hold it but being told, “No, no, don't touch, just look”? For me these early aesthetic experiences were intensely frustrating, resulting in furtive attempts to hold a figurine or a china cup when I wasn't being observed.

I was reminded of this tension between “art” as object only to be viewed and “art” as object to be touched when I was in the Dallas airport during the holidays, and a voice came over the PA system to request that the “parent or person responsible for the child climbing the public art work please retrieve him.” I knew immediately that the child in question was my youngest son, and I was torn between fury that he had disobeyed my strict injunction not to climb the art and my frustration at the utter stupidity of this rule.

After all, place a steel structure that looks like skyscrapers fused together at odd angles with a hollow interior and convenient little fissures that look just like foot and hand holds in an airport terminal, and what would you expect a normal five-year-old to do? “Just look at it?” I thought incredulously as I ran over to retrieve my son and listen to the same-old, same-old spiel from the security guard. “If he'd fallen, he could have been killed,” he lectured me, adding the threat of mortal danger to the relatively innocent faux pas of not keeping an eye on my kid.

It didn't surprise me at all when I read the other day that one of the things mothers wanted most from the developers of a new shopping mall was “art their kids could play around or climb on.” What could be more natural?

And what could be a greater act of poetic justice? After all, a good deal of modern and post-modern art is all about the impulse to shock its bourgeois viewers out of their complacency. Why not turn the tables and break the conventions of viewership? Let's break at least a few of the barriers keeping art at arm's length and bring more artworks into the public sphere that can be touched, walked on, even surmounted by little boys with good climbing skills.