Weaving narratives in museum galleries Thomas P. Campbell

when I was considering a career in the

art world I took a course in London and

one of my supervisors was this irascible

Italian core Pietro who drank too much

smoke too much and swore much too much

but he was a passionate teacher and I

remember one of our earlier classes with

him he was projecting images on the wall

asking us to think about them and he put

up an image of a painting is a landscape

with figures semi dressed drinking wine

there was a nude woman in the in the

lower foreground and on the hillside in

the back there was a figure of the

mythological god Bacchus and he said

what is this and I no one else had so I

put up my hand and I said it’s a

bacchanal by Titian he said it’s a what

I thought maybe i pronounced it wrong

it’s a bacchanal by Titian he said it’s

a what I said it’s a bacchanal by Titian

he said you boneless bookworm it’s a

orgy as I said he swore too much

there was an important lesson for me in

that Pietro was suspicious of formal art

training art history training because he

was he feared that it filled people up

with jargon and then they just

classified things rather than looking at

them and he wanted to remind us that all

art was once contemporary and he wanted

us to use our eyes and he was especially

evangelical about this message because

he was losing his sight he wanted us to

look and ask basic questions of objects

what is it how is it made why was it

made how is it used and these are

important lessons to me it when i

substitute storian my kind of eureka

moment came a few years later when i was

studying the art of the courts of

northern Europe and of course it was

very much discussed in terms of the

paintings and the sculptures and the

architecture of the day but as I began

to read historical documents and

contemporary descriptions I found there

was a kind of a missing component for

everywhere i came across descriptions of

tapestries tapestries were ubiquitous

between the middle ages and really well

into the 18th century and it was pretty

apparent why tapestries reportable you

could roll them up send them ahead of

you and in the time it took to hang them

up you could transform a cold dank

interior into a richly colored setting

tapestries effectively provided a vast

canvas on which the patrons of the day

could depict the heroes with whom they

wanted to be associated or even

themselves and in addition to that

tapestries were hugely expensive they

required scores of highly skilled

weavers working over extended periods of

time with very expensive materials the

walls the silks even gold and silver

thread so all in all in an age when the

visual image of any kind was rare

tapestries were an incredibly potent

form of propaganda when I became a

tapestry historian in due course I ended

up as a curator at the Metropolitan

Museum because i saw the met as one of

the few places where i could organize

really big exhibitions about the subject

i cared so passionately about and in

about nineteen ninety-seven the then

director philippe de montebello gave me

the go-ahead to organize an exhibition

for 2002 we normally have these very

long lead in times it wasn’t straight

forward it’s no longer a question of

chucking a tapestry in the back of a car

they have to be wound on huge rollers

shipped in oversized freighters some of

them was so big we had to get them into

the museum we had to take them up the

that the great steps at the front we

thought very hard about how to present

this unknown subject to a modern

audience the dark colors to set off the

colors that remained in objects are

often faded the placing of lights to

bring out the silk and the gold thread

the labeling you know we live in an age

where we are so used to television

images and photographs at one hit image

these were big complex things often

almost like cartoons with multiple

narratives we had to draw our audience

in get them to slow down to explore the

objects there was a lot of skepticism on

the opening night I overheard one of the

senior members

staff saying this is going to be a bomb

but in reality in the course of the

coming weeks and months hundreds of

thousands of people came to see the show

the exhibition was designed to be an

experience and tapestries are hard to

reproduce in photographs so I want you

to use your imaginations thinking of

these wall hi objects some of them 10

meters wide depicting lavish court

scenes with courtiers and dandies who

look quite at home in the pages of of

the fashion press today thick woods with

hunters crashing through the undergrowth

in pursuit of wild boars and deer

violent battles the scenes of fear and

heroism I remember taking my son’s

school class he was eight at the time

and all the little boys they kind of you

know Lolo her boys and then the thing

that caught their attention was in one

of the hunting scenes there was a dog

pooping in the foreground kind of an

in-your-face joke by the artist and

though you just imagine them but it

brought it alive to them I think they

suddenly saw that these these weren’t

just old faded tapestries these were

images of the world in the past and it

was the same for our audience and for me

as a curator I felt proud I felt had

shifted the needle none at all through

this experience that could only be

created in a museum I’d open up the eyes

of my audience historians artists press

the general public to the beauty of this

of his lost medium a few years later I

was invited to be the director of the

museum and after I got over that who

made the tapestry geek I didn’t wear a

tie I realized in fact I believe

passionately in that curated museum

experience

we live in an age of ubiquitous

information and sort of just add water

expertise but there is nothing that

compares with the presentation of

significant objects in a well-told

narrative what the curator does the

interpretation of a complex esoteric

subject in a way that retains the

integrity of the subject but makes it

unpacks it for a general audience and

that to me today is now the the

challenge and the fan of my job

supporting the vision of my curators

whether it’s an exhibition of samurai

swords early Byzantine artifacts

Renaissance portraits or the show we

heard mentioned earlier the McQueen show

with which we enjoyed so much success

last summer that was an interesting case

in the late spring early summer of 2010

shortly after McQueen’s suicide our

curator of costume Andrew Bolton came to

see me and said I’ve been thinking of

doing a show on McQueen and now is the

moment we have to we have to do it fast

it wasn’t easy McQueen had worked

throughout his career with a small team

of designers and managers who were very

protective of his legacy but Andrew went

to London and worked with them over the

summer and won their confidence and that

of the designers who created his amazing

fashion shows which were works of

performance art in their own right and

we proceeded to do something at the

Museum I think we’ve never done before

it wasn’t just a standard installation

in fact we ripped down the galleries to

recreate entirely different settings a

recreation of his first studio a hall of

mirrors a curiosity box a sunken ship a

burnt-out interior

with videos and soundtracks that range

from operatic arias to pigs fornicating

and in this extraordinary setting the

costumes were like actors and actresses

or living sculptures it could have been

a train wreck it could have looked like

shop windows on Fifth Avenue A Christmas

but because of the way that Andrew

connected within the Queen team he was

channeling the rawness and the

brilliance of McQueen and the show was

quite transcendent and it became a

phenomenon in its own right by the end

of the show we had people queuing for

four or five hours to get into the show

but no one really complained I heard

over and over again wow that was worth

it it was such a visceral emotive

experienced now I’ve described two very

immersive exhibitions but I also believe

that collections individual objects can

also have that same power the match was

set up not as a museum of american art

but of an encyclopedic museum and today

a hundred forty years later that vision

is as prescient as ever because of

course we live in a world of crisis of

challenge and we’re exposed to it

through the 24-7 newsreels it’s in our

galleries that we can unpack the the

civilizations the cultures that we are

seeing the current manifestation of

whether it’s Libya Egypt Syria it’s in

our galleries that we can explain and

give greater understanding I mean our

new Islamic galleries or a case in point

opened 10 years almost to the week after

nine eleven I think the most Americans

knowledge of the Islamic world was

pretty slight before nine eleven and

then it was thrust upon us in one of the

America’s darkest hours

and the perception was through the

polarization of that terrible event now

in our galleries we show 14 centuries of

the development of different Islamic

cultures across a vast to geographic

spread and again hundreds of thousands

of people have come to see these

galleries since they opened last October

I’m often asked is digital media

replacing the museum and I think those

numbers are a resounding rejection of

that notion I mean don’t get me wrong

I’m a huge advocate of the web it gives

us a way of reaching out to audiences

around the globe but nothing replaces

the authenticity of the object presented

with passionate scholarship bringing

people face-to-face with our objects is

a way of bringing them face-to-face with

people across time across space whose

lives may have been very different to

our own but who like us at hopes and

dreams frustrations and achievements in

their lives and I think this is a

process that helps us better understand

ourselves helps us make better decisions

about where we’re going the Great Hall

at the Met is one of the great portals

of the world or inspiring like a

medieval cathedral from there you can

walk in any direction to almost any

culture I frequently go out into the

hall and the galleries and I watch our

visitors coming in some of them are

comfortable there feel at home they know

what they’re looking for others are very

uneasy it’s an intimidating place they

feel that the institution is elitist I’m

working to try and break down

that sense of that elitism I want to put

people in a contemplative frame of mind

well they’re prepared to be a little bit

lost to explore to see the unfamiliar in

the familiar or to try the unknown

because for us it’s all about bringing

them face-to-face with great works of

art capturing them at that moment of

discomfort when the inclination is kind

of to reach for your iPhone your

blackberry but to create a zone where

their curiosity can expand and whether

it’s in the expression of a Greek

sculpture that reminds you of a friend

or a dog pooping in the corner of a

tapestry or to bring it back to my tutor

Pietro those dancing figures who are

indeed knocking back the wine and that

nude figure in the left foreground wow

she is a gorgeous embodiment of youthful

sexuality in that moment our scholarship

can tell you that this is a bacchanal

but if we’re doing our job right and

you’ve checked the jargon of the front

door trust your instinct you know it’s

an orgy thank

you