A long time ago, before I started looking at art with any intent, I vaguely remember seeing something at the Tate and being interested enough to look at the accompanying wall text for further elucidation, perhaps confirmation of whatever I had been thinking as I was looking. The memory is all very hazy in my mind now but I remember with a great deal of clarity that upon reading the text I felt utterly deflated and offended both by it and, as a consequence, the art. The text offered an iconographic reading of the work which purported to tell me that a) symbolised b) and that b) referred to event c) in the artist's life in the most as if that were the end of the story. I swiftly turned my back and moved on. This memory has never left me, however clouded by time it has become. I don't even remember what the art was, selective memory is a powerful thing. But I have never been able to forgive iconographic, symbolic, intentionalist or overly reductive readings of art and yet that is the mode by which the vast majority of wall texts in museums and galleries are written. I find them, for the most part, intellectually both patronizing and debilitating as their explanations for why a piece of art should be as it is or look as it does, for what art's effects might be, are played out on completely depersonalized terms. They are presented as if unquestionable absolutes, like objective facts. Who are you to tell me what to think anonymous wall text?
This is no small matter, for in a museum or gallery context the issue of informational wall texts has become key to the presentation of material to the general public. They are not just an aside. In fact people, especially if unfamiliar or unsure of the artwork before them will spend more time reading the texts than they will looking at the work itself. It has become something of an interpretative crutch for the unaccustomed or even lazy eye. Towards the end of an extended gallery visit I often find myself spending more time reading and less time looking.
Given the placement of these small unassuming texts, on the wall in direct correlation to artworks, they surely deserve a good deal more thinking about than they are currently given. The question becomes first of all one of content. What should these texts contain? Should it be a straight title, date, artist, artist's dates, materials and dimensions? Should the text attempt to explain the work, to extrapolate the kind of issues that the work might be deemed to be grappling with? Should some kind of historical contextualization be offered? Whatever the nature of the content it is clear that these wall texts have the power and authority to suggest interpretative and methodological ways into the works in question. That's no mean feat. They are like 50 word intellectual frameworks for the work displayed. Bland, non-committal, poorly written or indecipherable tags simply will not do. We and the art they attempt to shed light on, deserve better.
At the Phoenix Gallery in Exeter a recent show of characteristically small paintings by Lara Viana appeared with no explanatory wall texts to accompany each painting at all. An almost mystically vague wall text appeared by way of introduction to the artist and the show but apart from the paintings the walls appeared bare. The lack of wall text was refreshing. In fact given the intimate, small scale nature of Viana's work, its relationship with text would have been problematic purely on the basis of scale and focus. The text would have been far too distracting to any spectator. Nonetheless the decision to omit text from the gallery walls was a brave one given on the one hand the context of the particular gallery (it is a publicly funded arts centre and not a highbrow avant-guard establishment) and given the current mission to educate via museums and galleries. Of course there were also sheets with minimum details (dates and titles) and a specially commissioned piece of art writing which you could choose to refer to. The lack of text was an interesting experiment though the gallery has not continued in that vein for its subsequent shows. Neither can I see major museums and galleries losing their wall texts all together so what other directions could these texts take other than the current prevailing tone that is 'so reductive, so intellectually unambitious, so badly written, and so physically intrusive that they feel less like the handiwork of Jeeves than of some shambling Igor?' as Thomas Morton put it.
It's all very well being critical of the general state of wall texts but the offer of a more constructive alternative might be valuable. I take as an example a text from a recent exhibition of prints (etchings and engravings) that I curated for the University of Bristol.
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Lambert Suavius 1510–1574/6 (Flemish)
The Entombment 1548
Engraving, 21.4 x 17.5 cm
This image shimmers with detail: in Christ’s beard; in the irregular masonry around the arched opening to the cave; and in the weeds which grow in the cracks of the stone, and which sometimes cast a shadow.
Shadow functions to contextualise the action within the cave. The framing walls of the cave are dark and unforgiving, challenged most strongly by the small square window in the right hand wall that bleeds sunshine directly onto Christ’s reclining body. Here shadow is mostly tonal, giving the figures a sense of volume. Suavius uses cast shadows more sparingly and often in fragments, like the intriguing one that cuts down through the centre of the forearm of the female figure holding Christ’s feet. The artist does not keep pedantically to a logical projection of shadow and light, but allows a playful visual eye and a narrative thread to dictate the shaded forms of the print.
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Such an impressionistically guiding description is enjoyable to read and is suggestive in its own way but perhaps wall texts could go a step further? In such a context is there scope for considered personal reaction to a piece of work? Could we, as an art viewing public, handle it? Would it be considered too much of an intrusion, perhaps even too directive and if so why? We have all heard whispers of the demise of the critic and the general suspicion of the opinions of so-called experts so would a knowledgeable response to an artwork be too much to take? This is a situation that has come about partly through an over-saturated market in arts criticism (as James Elkins took to task in the infamous 'What happened to art criticism?'). Amateur critics (in the form of bloggers say) now seem to be replacing or at least displacing the professionals (as numerous journal and newspaper articles love to point out). I am not in the business of putting professional art critics out of work (the market certainly needs a shake up but that is a matter for another time) however this justified discontent with unsatisfactory art writing seems like a good juncture to evaluate the approach to the arts that most museums and galleries express though these all-important small wall texts.
I would like to see even more personal investment in wall texts. Imagine wall texts as personal reactions to and impressions of the art to which they refer, as art's equal, rather than art's drawn out funereal march, that is something else. Imagine the mundane wall text transformed into what Gaston Bachelard has termed a 'reverberation', a manifestation of our natural proclivity to repeat, to share, to reconfigure our experience of art through words. It adds a further layer to the art, not in competition, but as an expressive form of appreciative ode to the work. Such an impression is lasting and far more worthy of our attention.
A subjective reaction is certainly less determining than a seemingly objective take on the matter of art. It recognises both its uniqueness and its foundations in the cultural baggage from which it was born. People are happy to compare personal opinions, impressions and much less happy to disagree with a presented depersonalised (symbolic, historical, political or social) 'fact', thereby stimulating silent discussion and reflection rather than smothering them. An affective response (as Peter de Bolla puts it), that is an emotional reaction to art, is something that people can uninhibitidely draw out of themselves, with practice. Though this experience is hard to verbalize or even recognize at first it certainly is not helped when people read wall texts that are written as a watertight synopses of the art in question that simply don't let you the living viewer in. Surely what a wall text should be doing is to draw the viewer closer to a work, to stimulate further independent reflection, emancipate a viewer's speculative viewing input rather than surge on as if the viewer had nothing of worth to give. Wall texts should offer doubts rather than resolutions, possibilities rather than 'truths'. The 50 word wall text should surely not have the last word. It should aim to empower the viewer to come to his or her own pondered conclusions, as an extra spark rather than the cinders.
Selected Bibliography
Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969
Elkins, James, What Happened to Art Criticism?, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003
de Bolla, Paul, Art Matters, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001
Morton, Thomas 'The Wrong Words' Frieze issue 124 Summer 2009
Lloyd, Lizzie, 'Picturing Subjective Art Histories: The Accumulative Eye in Peter Doig', MA Thesis, University of Bristol, 2009
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