What the Museum Has Done to Looking: Art and the Loss of Vision
From the Ghent Altarpiece to a closed piano in a felt-lined room, a visit to the machinery of contemporary looking and the art that survives it.
18 min read
Thomas Struth, Louvre 4, Paris, 1989. Chromogenic print. Struth's museum photographs, made across two decades in the world's major collections, turned the act of looking at art into a subject in its own right.
I made a pilgrimage to see the altarpiece by Jan Van Eyck (1432) in the cathedral of St Bavo in Ghent, Belgium. It is the most famous work of art in the city, so famous in fact that it is known simply as the Ghent Altarpiece, and it comes with a touristic mandate. No visit to the city is complete without it, and, like the Mona Lisa, people visit it for the sake of being able to say that they had. It is one of those generic masterpieces interchangeable with its place, whose value as a sign has to a greater or lesser extent eclipsed its own intrinsic aesthetic merit, that is, if we can assume that the two criteria of merit and notoriety can be separated.
Since the work was housed within a church, I sighed with relief that my Euro-weary wallet would be spared another assault. I entered the old cathedral, always relishing their echoes, their coolness and the smell of old stone. I thought I had found the altarpiece when I chanced upon something I remembered to be hanging within one of the adjoining chapels that subtended the rear of the central nave. But it had a dull and even glow which definitely wasn't paint. It was a large reproduction, and had the aesthetic effect of hearing a great piece of music played on a Fisher Price keyboard. Nor did the church give me that delicious feeling, even when you don't belong to any religion, of entering into a vale of silence. For on either side of the main altar were two large speakers piping early Renaissance chant, a player and an amp nestled against one of the thick venerable columns.
The authentic altarpiece was to be found off to the side, ensconced to the hard left of the entrance, but behind several partitions. The first was a guichet manned by a young student who sat calmly reading a book. Still reeling over the memory that I had to part with pounds to enter St Paul's in London, my hapless wallet opened again with a weary groan. Gripping my ticket, I entered an enclosed chamber that emitted the feeling of what one imagined was something like a Victorian side-show tent. In the darkened room, the altarpiece shone out like an epiphany. But before I had any time to let this epiphany stir inside me, I was interrupted by a woman on my right asking if I wished to use an audioguide. She sat behind countless numbers of them, like a military sergeant in charge of the battle arsenal. As if to entice me, she advised me that they were included within the price of the ticket. All this, to say the least, didn't make me perky. I declined and tried to salvage my 'true' and 'private' response to the 'real' altarpiece that I had come expressly to see (oh, ah, the mandatory cynicism of the postmodern world). Although the room was not crowded, there was still a bit of jostling and bumping caused by the people who had adhered the audioguides firmly to their ears, their senses torpid in attention to the gadget, their eyes beadily intense yet dead.
I made my peace with the audioguide a long time ago, and I have learned to suffer them with unruffled silence in the same way as I don't let the imperative 'enjoy' in restaurants ruin my meal. But it was cold outside, a bleak, humid, arthritic cold, and I picked up one of the guides as an excuse to stay a little longer in the room. Inevitably, I thought, there is something to gain from these things and sometimes it is worth relaxing one's standards. C'mon, said the little voice in my head, chill out baby and don't be an up-tight elitist snob. So I picked up one of those things, hoping that its previous patron hadn't suffered from the winter grippe. I pressed the first button and held the thing to my ear, whereupon I was assaulted by an early Renaissance motet, the voices cracking, grating and welling, pounding my ear with their distortions. I grimaced and looked at my son, who cries automatically when he feels distressed or discomforted, and I suddenly wished I was free to do the same. The music carried on for longer than was bearable, long enough to make me feel that I was part of the soundtrack of a B-Grade Medieval mystery movie. I removed the piece from my ear for a few moments like someone experiencing a berating over the phone, and after doing this a couple of times I got the commentary I was now awaiting with a mixture of anticipation and dread.
Finally came the voice: a slow, deep bass tremolo purr that could make a pizza menu sound like an epic. He said that it was a great and mysterious work. Well, that's why I parted with five bucks to see it. It is rich in detail. Can see that. It is a work over several different panels. Right again. On the upper level it has a central figure (right on!) flanked by two figures on separate panels on either side (yup!). The central figure is the largest (uhuh) and he is clad in red (yay, I'm not colour-blind!); the figure on the right is dressed in green (yep, definitely not colour-blind!); the naked figures on the outer panels, a man on the left and woman on the right, symbolise Adam and Eve (I'm no theologian, but hey, yeah, I sussed that). I lowered the piece from my ear incredulously and wondered whether I had chosen the right version. If there were commentaries in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch, maybe there was also one in the language of the mentally challenged. In the weakness that incredulity frequently causes, I returned to the apparatus and pushed another button, which then went on to describe the lower panels in prosaic detail. As I navigated through the console I did pick up some useful points of historical detail, but by then my confidence had been so eroded, and I felt so exhausted, that I went outside into the cobblestone square where at least there wasn't any piped music. The well-preserved glory of the work still held a place in my mind, and it glows there still, but when I turn the corner in my memory I also see the woman behind the counter, the small room, the student at the ticket booth and the people with blank expressions shambling about listening to their audio prosthesis.
The altarpiece survived the morning. Not all works are built for it.
Powerful works of art manage to transcend, or at least squeeze past, the circumstances that may mire them and which infect so many lesser works. While it is far from an easy or complete transcendence, we still emerge, if we make enough effort, with a sufficiently rounded sense of what the work is. By contrast, take the way the academic sculptures that flank the main entry hall of the Musée D'Orsay are engulfed to the point of eradication by the cavernous and depersonalising geometric space of the interior structure. The D'Orsay and most other major museums have their audioguides, as they are now somewhat de rigueur for the art-going public, and they are among the phenomena which amount to a decline of vision. The phrase is Paul Virilio's. It is an extreme popularising, he argues, which has denuded us of the ability to reflect, an externalising visuality that renders blind. Galleries have become so friendly to the public that they risk unfriendliness to the art.
If you walk through the National Gallery in London you will regularly stumble upon works labelled 'Highlight Painting', where each and every painting has an accompanying explicatory panel. But thankfully, since entry to the National Gallery is free, audioguides are not included in any price, which makes people more reluctant to hire one, which in turn means that there are fewer dazed automatons peregrinating from said highlight painting to highlight painting. I can see the paintings coming to life at night and arguing over who should be the highlight painting and who shouldn't, the highlight painting fraternity lording condescendingly over all the other works deprived of the luxury of being highlighted. As an artist myself, when I grow up, I too want to produce a highlight painting and maybe to be a highlight artist.
Or maybe not. It is one of the proclivities of internet culture, which is largely a lexical culture, that everything is laid onto the same matrix and everything can be rated: hotels, movies, tourist activities, you are invited to give your view, supply a rating, add your five cents. And the trouble with opinion is that, like money, it too is susceptible to inflation: too many opinions have the opposite effect of being anodyne and of undermining criticality. This tendency of opinionated profusion and of rating experience (click here to write your review!) spills out into all areas of life, and especially into museums, where there is an unspeakable delineation between good, better and best.
There are, however, still collections on display which are the collections of individuals, and which carry less of the curatorial tendentiousness increasingly anxious about pleasing the public. There is nothing at all wrong with that aim; it is democratic, but its democratic impulse seizes more on what the public wants than on the generating of an aesthetic policy, a set of ideas that would allow the works to evolve in accordance with the prevailing culture. Walk into the Nissim de Camondo in Paris and you climb the staircase of a house someone actually lived in, the rooms kept more or less as their owner left them; stand in the Barnes in Philadelphia and you are looking at a wall hung exactly as one obstinate man decided it should be hung, a small and unregarded thing wedged against a famous one, a wrought-iron hinge bolted up among the paintings. These collections, along with the Cognacq-Jay in Paris and the Beyeler in Basel, bear the imprint of their originator, and as Walter Benjamin remarked in his famous essay on the collector, they say as much of the collector as of what is collected. They retain a trace of the individual and thus fallible stamp. They are not motivated by the generalising impulse that underscores, rightly or wrongly, so many public collections. Imprinted with an individual sensibility, the private collection has many surprises and curious smaller works that enrich the larger ones, for each work has been chosen according to imperatives other than those of public accountability. While such collections remain on display without supplementation or interference, looking at them is frequently, in my opinion, a less depersonalising and more rewarding experience. One has the sense of having uncovered and shared something, rather than of being witness to an aesthetic event that subsists in all its grandeur whether you are there to see it or not.
Ironically, it would seem, the private collection, although born from elitism, the least democratic impulse, succeeds in highlighting the humanist function of the objects in its store, and the particular as opposed to general impulse that gathered them together. Humanism is the cornerstone of democracy, but it is what democracy is most inclined to forget, since the view of democracy is typically directed outward rather than within, toward what the public likes in the long term rather than toward taking risks with what is best for the long-term good (take the environment). Art's present condition foregrounds this tension within democracy, since in both art and gallery management the big questions are tipped in the direction of what people, not the artists, would like to see, rather than toward what the relevant philosophical questions of artistic merit might be. If there is a pedagogical role that the museum must serve, then it is obscured lest people call the museum didactic or dry. Don't be serious, don't be glum, art can be fun.
Virilio sets out his decline of vision in a book whose title slips between meanings: L'Art à perte de vue can be read as Art and the decline of vision, but also as the art of vision's decline and the art of declining vision. He sees that decline in terms of a decline in insight, which might otherwise be named aesthetic scrutiny and reflection. He puts it down to what he calls a communism of emotion, which has come to replace the communism of public interests. In other words, he translates the theory of speed that made him famous in the 1980s into a hyper-diffusion of affect for the masses, not only in the media but in art. It is a condition in which curators, culture workers and ministerial funders look toward 'public benefit' as opposed to the pursuit of good art. But the effect of this lust for mass satisfaction is not necessarily motivated by a desire to school more people in art. Instead he speaks of a forced acquiescence to which the general public unwittingly submits, as a result of the devalorisation of the aesthetic debate that is internal and alive within all decent art. The emancipation of art from rules, he suggests, means that art imbibes a purposelessness and a boredom, because art is divested of its dialectical energy; there is not enough at stake. The only law, art's highest standard, is to serve the public, to become the artwork of the week and to be explicable through a portable hearing device. As he puts it, a 'communism of public emotion' comes 'to replace, with such discretion, the communism of public interest'.
The popularising of art, for all its benefits, is in this light the symptom of a wider visuality: one that compensates for a culture of fear, making one thing visible at the expense of another, and one, telescopic and televisual, that favours surfeit over scrutiny, where the cult of personality grows so strong that it inhibits the subjectivities that compose it. And the externalisation of global culture is, paradoxically, guided increasingly by paranoia. Our visual field, of which the spectacle is of course part, has receded into a series of values defined by suspicion, of terrorists and, in Australia among other countries, of illegal migrants: a vast woven tissue of fear and media-generated energy which eradicates rather than enforces the local, subjective visual fields. The internalisation that paranoia brings is not subjective internalisation. It is a displacement of self that allows neither interior nor exterior thought:
In an era when walls are everywhere and where there are no frontiers, the resultant closures end up not only building the claustropolis of tomorrow, but above all inhibit the perception of what lies around us, since what lies hidden is no longer, as it once was, the face, but rather the visual field... the look is lowered so as only to see the point of one's feet, not from timidity, but from introversion.
The toposcopic, as he names it there, is the result of an acceleration of the real whose most evident avatars are the satellites that orbit and scour the globe, leaving no surface untouched and all horizons annulled. Successor to the telephonic and the televisual, it is also the world of webcams and mobile phones, which fold the private domain of one household into another. The latest incarnation, what he calls the televisionophone, the third generation of the mobile telephone, draws more attention to those around us than to whatever stands in front of us, and threatens, he writes, accidents that result less from the loss of vehicle control than from the inattention of the driver. The public-private binary that once defined the spaces of modern life is confounded by these intrusions. One can be surveilled anytime, anywhere. Everything, from changing-room antics to the meal on the table, is reproducible as a digital image. The spectacle has become so superabundant that our participation in it, our interactivity, has made us all at once potential surveillants and the unwitting victims of spycams.
Within the realm of art, this externalisation has made itself felt directly. There is nothing new in the observation, especially since the impact of technology on art since the sixties has seen it enter the public sphere in ways that confound high and low. While Pop is the main example of this, it is worth observing that the main debates surrounding video in its earliest years, in the sixties and seventies, centred on the infiltration of the public within the private domain of the lounge room. The externalisation advanced and accelerated by digital technology Virilio calls disastrous. In the cultural sphere, popularity is never in question if it is accompanied by numbers. Externalisation equals quantity, as exemplified by the massive push to justify and attract crowds to exhibitions. Virilio quotes a remark made in 2005 by a writer in Le Monde: on the evidence, museums pay more attention to who leaves than to who enters, meaning that the weighting is more on numbers than on what the people do, what they see or how they see it, not to mention the homogenisation afforded by the ubiquitous audioguides.
Virilio's complaints with the marketing operations of the culture industry are not motivated by gratuitous high-mindedness, snobbery or elitism. The problem is that culture is so glibly circumscribed; art one day and a swimming carnival the next. Today culture is continually being corralled into particular social perimeters, like government departments, so that it can be accorded its requisite share within the civil sphere, a physical quantity like health, sanitation or immigration. Virilio watches 'the minister, worried at the declining numbers of museum visitors,' seek out yet another ploy, 'at the expense of controlling the intrinsic quality of artworks, contemporary or otherwise, which enter into French museum collections'. In short, art, whose virtues are in its very unquantifiability, is accorded strict limits. Exactly what art's qualities are at present, why art is unquantifiable and yet why it continues to make sense and to be valued, all the primary aesthetic questions, are not entered into, because to value them would also be to value the other apparatuses that keep such debates alive: criticism, critical curatorship, and the artistic endeavours which openly set out to challenge the status quo of images, identity and culture. And when nationalism and paranoia are on the rise, such challenges can be invidious.
An index of art's spill into the realm of entertainment is the degree to which aesthetic questions, which are often complex and esoteric and almost always specialised, are made to appear supplementary, indeed pointless. Therein, to extrapolate Virilio, is the real elitism, but it is a retro-elite that elevates the quick pull while ghetto-ising the harder, more critical tasks of cultural diagnosis. It is what keeps art-goers happy. But if we look at artists of all stripes, from Caravaggio to Géricault to Lautrec to Dix to Arbus, art was not always made to make people happy. If such work pleases, it is through a certain crispness of expression, and it may also please many of us viewers of today through the relief that vaudevillian, meretricious pleasure, for such artists, is not the measure.
Two decades on, the press release for the 2006 Sydney Biennale is a period piece, but the species is unchanged. One need only scan it to get the sense of how expressions of hype cheapen intrinsic merit. The media kit, and with contemporary exhibitions you can now be kitted out, the press kit under your arm or slung over your shoulder if they offer you a free bag, the audioguide pressed firmly within your palm, ready for anything, sets such a tone as to cheapen anything the curator, 'Dr' Charles Merewether, set out to achieve. (Is the title sobering credentialism or parochialism? Has anyone in Australia looked lately at how many PhDs are employed by, say, the Met in New York?) The theme, 'Zones of Contact', is never rigorously discussed, let alone introduced in any sensible way for anyone curious about what the whole thing is about. Left to be ignorant of the premise, the reader is abandoned in the question of how the artists within the exhibition exemplify or challenge the curatorial construct, or, as in so many previous Sydney Biennales, neither exemplify nor challenge it, leaving the theme hanging like mistletoe from the ceiling. We are told that all eyes will be on Sydney for an event which is 'one of the most challenging events of its kind', two abstractions heaped one upon the other, neither qualifying the other. Readers with even the toughest stomachs will begin to feel bilious by the second sentence of the second paragraph: this year's event 'provides a chance to experience some of today's most exciting artists', a stock marketing statement where the last word is interchangeable with any collective noun, ice-skaters, cake-decorators, macramé or automobiles. The Biennale will give Australians 'unique access to some of the most creative minds working today'. Yet if it is one of the most challenging events, how is it unique, except that unique is the other meaningless word in the marketing lexicon? And how does one quantify 'some' when dealing with an international event? Creative minds? Will this then also include architects, cooks and economists, or do they mean artists? By the third paragraph the stomach gives way: the exhibition 'pushes new boundaries', the artists are 'groundbreaking'. I stop here, at only the third paragraph.
It is a norm of decent writing to allow your subject to speak for itself, to be judicious with adjectival clauses and to qualify terms of reference. It is the sign of vapidity to have to embellish with hyperbole. It is the hallmark of bad marketing to underestimate one's audience. The crimes are here in triplicate. It is populism at its most odious. It would be curious to know whom they are trying to attract with this screed, as it certainly isn't anyone who is intolerant of bad writing. The ideas motivating the exhibition, whatever they are, are buried under the poorest dross, which begs the question of how a curator presumed discriminating with his content and the artists he chose should be so negligently permissive with his marketing team. The previous Biennale left its artists with misgivings still relatively fresh in the memory; one can only hope the 2006 cohort are spared the same.
This de-emphasis on the critically aesthetic in favour of spurious populism, like the importance given to attendance figures, has the profound effect of devaluing vision, in the sense that vision is to seeing as listening is to hearing. We see and we hear, and we are measured externally by how many of us are doing so.
It is this side-show mentality which Virilio cites as leading to aesthetic confusions of which the average visitor, enticed rather than convinced, is unaware. He reports the symptom directly. Going beyond Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project at the Tate Modern in 2003, with its artificial indoor sun, Paris created its night museum to attract the hordes, young and not-so-young, of night-owls, filling places with all the charms of ambient music, like the Gustave Moreau museum where the evening visitors could sway to the rhythm of Salomé's dance. From seven in the evening to one in the morning, on the night of Saturday 14 May 2005, visitors were allowed the groping adventure, in the glow of hand-torches and candles, of inspecting various exhibited works, the sculptures at the Rodin museum, the paintings at the Louvre, which, we are told, reached 'the limits of its capacity', as the crowds squeezed together to admire the Mona Lisa of enigmatic Da Vinci Code fame.
Virilio's observations on this new carnivalisation are commensurate with what happens in the melancholy example of the Sydney Biennale media release. The latter is obscured by disingenuous hype and cliché, while the former takes recourse to novelty. The irony pregnant in the notion of the night museum is not lost on Virilio, for a night in which all cows are black requires no discrimination at all, and it is the one time when all can agree on art, especially those who know what they like.
In his book La Procédure silence, Virilio begins with an excerpt from an interview with Jacqueline Lichtenstein, who recounts her horror when she visited the museum at Auschwitz, only the horror was inspired not by the content but by the manner of the display:
The moment I visited the Auschwitz museum, I became absolutely terrified by glass displays with images of contemporary art. I felt no fear standing before the displays with suitcases, prostheses and children's toys. I didn't feel crushed by them. I wasn't ripped apart like I was when I walked into the camp, no, but in the museum I suddenly had the impression of being in a museum of contemporary art. I took the train back saying to myself, 'They've won!' They won because they have produced forms of perception which are completely continuous with their particular mode of destruction.
This remark is about a certain horizon of art and curatorship. For when the aim is to be novel before it is to be sensitive, then, in circumstances such as those outlined above, the results can also be catastrophic. There is no room for tact in sensationalism. Virilio's characterisation of the loss of vision is a symptom of the dehumanisation of art in favour of products and events whose approval comes through consensual, mass acclaim. It is a condition of late capitalism in which art finds itself not just within the marketplace, but one and the same with the marketplace, and where the spirit of the commodity does everything to reposition art away from its critical raison d'être. It is a complaint that places Virilio within the terrain of cultural critique set in motion by thinkers such as Benjamin and Adorno, and before them Simmel and Veblen.
For Virilio, teleobjectivity, our age of satellites and global implosion, has in turn produced what he calls telesubjectivity, which vastly falsifies its relationship to things. Duchamp's call to extra-retinal art sounds, to Virilio's mind, prophetic, but in a way that compensates for the myriad technological, pathological and ethical conditions, salutary and mostly not so salutary, that rob us of the possibility of perception. Virilio never uses the words 'authentic' or 'real' to qualify this manner of perception that he says is being inhibited or lost. Yet by way of compensation, he says that certain more or less post-Duchampian developments since the sixties, such as Minimalism, are restitutive of the loss of vision through a recourse to the haptic. Telesubjectivity has robbed us of the capacity to relate perceptively to the outer world in anything but an overly mediated and cursory way, which is why, he says, we can better understand today 'the survival of haptic sensation, the success, for example, of the sculpture of someone like Richard Serra', or even of famous installations, or whatever name is given to all that is palpable and tangible.
Two such installations that may be in Virilio's mind are in the Pompidou's collection. One is Christian Boltanski's huge installation Dispersion, a deeply memorable work in numerous incarnations which has at its base a collection of thousands of cast-off clothes that line the walls or bedeck the floor. The other is Beuys's felt installation Plight, conceived in the last year of his life, a room-like enclosure with the suggestion of another room beyond it, viewers constrained by an enclosed entry cubicle. The felt is in thick rolls insulating the walls; in the first room stands a closed grand piano. Both are post-Holocaust works about the silence that reigns over the fractured remains of a tragedy. In both, the non-visual effects are as strong as the visual ones, if not stronger. Boltanski's installation is replete with the smell of must; Beuys's rooms are thick with silence and the heavy humidity of imposed, unwanted warmth. Both inspire claustrophobia, both sneak up on the sensorium.
Such works, borrowing from Virilio's thesis, render themselves visible by circumventing the well-worn paths that lead to vision's loss. The everyday vision of telesubjectivity decodes and censors with such ruthless alacrity that little is left to chance, and near everything arrives as only varying degrees of cliché. But in these works, once vision has been bypassed, the viewer is invited to see afresh, as a rich composite of experience, and as free as free can be of crass platitudes. The work retains its innocence because vision is still embedded within the material, not with a Brancusi or Caro-like sanctity, but quite the opposite, through the consciousness of culpability delivered in the manner of sensory shocks available only from within the work itself, where seeing is indissoluble from experiencing. Like all art they are encoded, but encoded without the tacit injunction that they be decoded. They impress but they do not entertain, because they emanate, palpably and conceptually, an indescribable sadness whose pleasure comes from the excellence of the way the work conveys itself to us. If they liberate us, it is because they do not force happiness or pleasure onto us. They do not expressly set out to communicate to everyone, or lay their virtue in accessibility. They are also, I might add, ninety-seven per cent audioguide resistant.
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References
Paul Virilio, L'Art à perte de vue, Paris: Galilée, 2005.
Paul Virilio, La Procédure silence, Paris: Galilée, 2000.
Jan van Eyck, The Ghent Altarpiece (Adoration of the Mystic Lamb), 1432. Cathedral of St Bavo, Ghent.
Joseph Beuys, Plight, 1985. Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Christian Boltanski, Dispersion, various incarnations. Found clothing.
Walter Benjamin, 'Unpacking My Library' (1931), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken, 1968.
Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818 to 1819. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003. Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London.
Thomas Struth, Louvre 4, Paris, 1989. Chromogenic print.
