Viewer vs Participant

When I heard our paper assignment was to visit the DeYoung or Legion of Honor museums and write about the pieces in the collections, I was fairly pleased. I love museums and have been looking for an opportunity to explore SF's fine art museums since moving here about a year ago. So, needless to say, I was excited when I walked in the doors of the Legion of Honor Tuesday morning.

The first thought the came to mind once the excitement had died down was the relative size of the museum. I don't know if was because I had built this up to be some big thing in my mind, or if it was because one of the last museums I went to was the Met in NYC--but, the Legion of Honor is tiny. Unless I somehow missed the secret rooftop gallery, out of the many museums I've frequented, I think the Legion of Honor is one of the smallest.

The second thing that caught my attention was the abundance of signs warning patrons to not touch the artwork. I realize such signs are present in every gallery, but for some reason, I seemed especially attuned to their presence this day. Round each corner I turned, beneath every work of sculpture, from the corner of my eye I would spy the ubiquitous plaques displaying over and over "please do not touch." And it got me to thinking about how the casual artgoer's relationship with the medium is mostly visual. We experience the world with all five of our senses; how are we to fully immerse ourselves in a work of art if we're forced to refrain from making use of three to four of them in our observation? Obviously, I understand the dangers of allowing people's five year olds to come up and rub their little gooey faces all over a 200 year old Goya, but there's something to be said for fully experiencing art, as opposed to just looking at it.

One of the most memorable exhibits where I've had the chance to immerse myself in the artwork was an installation piece at the Mass MoCA titled Corpus by Ann Hamilton. The piece was the entirety of a large, expansive room, the walls bare white and windows covered in pink translucent paper. Speakers shaped like megaphones dangled from the ceiling in two rows, lowering in and out, emitting a garbled, ethereal mix of sound. Following the speakers were pneumatic devices dropping onion paper from above at random intervals, each release marked by a quiet hissing sigh. The floor was littered with paper which had accumulated over the weeks since the installation's opening, crackling as visitors shuffle through the space and adding their presence to the aural landscape. This installation was not something you just viewed with your eyes, but an experience you partook in with your ears and skin and nose as well (and I'm sure you could probably taste the onion paper if you really wanted), and as such had an almost sacred quality to it.

In a work like Corpus you become a participant in the art, as opposed to simply a viewer. As mentioned in lecture, Delecroix stated that 'a piece of art should serve as a bridge between the spectator and the artist,' but I feel that can't be fully accomplished without experiencing the piece on more than just a visual level. You need to get your face right up to the canvas, feel the brush strokes, smell the paint, listen to your hands moving over the surface. Follow the patterns and pathways the artist described so many years ago. Only that kind of detailed survey of will bring you anywhere close to the mindset of the artist who created the piece. If I ever get the inclination to create art for the masses, I hope that's the kind of work I'll make--the kind where you can immerse yourself fully in the art, and take away a little piece of the artist with you.