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to read historical documents and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