Scuffed shoes and bitten nails at the MAC

Today I went to the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (known in these parts as the MAC), to see what was on since I hadn’t been in a while. The installation by Fiona Tan, Saint Sebastian, is excellent, very subtle and beautiful. I will not describe it in great detail, because I have a rant that is entirely unrelated to Tan’s piece that I am burning to write. But go to the MAC and check out this piece, and spend some time with it. The usual thirty second walkthrough neither respects the piece nor serves you in appreciating it. This piece was not made for the MTV-no-attention span generation.

Now for my rant (although I’m already sounding kind of cranky, I realize), which is not concerned with the work itself in the other show, entitled Appearances. The show itself, while it contained only a few gems for me (highlights included Yannick Pouliot, Tim Lee, Kelly Mark, and Germaine Koh) was utterly mocked by the disastrous quality of the wall text.

You are thinking to yourself at this point, “Kasprzak has lost her mind. The wall text? Who cares about the wall text?” Remember what I said in an earlier post on this blog, the thing my father used to say about judging a person based on the care they take with their shoes and their nails? The same logic could apply to this show. If this show was a person, I would say that her outfit was fine (though perhaps the hat was a bit askance), and her makeup was OK (although perhaps a bit heavy on the eyeliner), but her shoes were badly scuffed and her nails bitten down to ugly nubs.

The details are important. I observed the visitors to the museum going through the space, and virtually each and every person spent time reading the wall text. I often had to wait until someone else, who was standing directly in front of the text, had finished reading so that I could read it as well. I was a bit shocked at the mediocre quality of writing, wasted space on irrelevant biographical details about the artist (notice I said irrelevant, relevant and illuminating details are always fine), and grammatical blunders. I couldn’t help but note some of them down, to reproduce here for your amazement.

About Kelly Mark:
“To her art is a tool for understanding and expressing her experience of the world.”
(A completely banal and empty statement, wouldn’t you say? Does any artist make work that doesn’t somehow relate to their experience of the world?)

About Jean-Marc Mathieu-Lajoie:
“The artist transforms these images which refer to painting and video pixels, among other things, severely testing our faculty of perception and sense of observation.”
(“Among other things” (tell me what!), weakens the sentence. More glaringly though, testing perception and observation seems to be another obvious function of art, and stating this reveals no new insights about a rather unusual body of work. The artist works with jigsaw puzzles, reconfiguring them and playing with the images borne on the puzzle pieces. Surely something more interesting can be said about this work than a sweeping statement about perception and observation.)

About Jérôme Fortin:
“Fortin’s work as a whole thus forms a critique of our society and its values, contrasting overproduction and overconsumption with sensitivity for and respect for the objects, insignificant as they may be, which this undertaking demands.”
(This sentence is so poorly constructed I don’t feel that I have anything more to say about it.)

I apologize in advance to the artists, especially if the administrators of the museum lifted from your artist’s statements or other material to hack together these texts. You are artists, not writers, and I would expect that the museum would take more care than to simply copy-paste from your own materials, anyway. If they didn’t, that’s incredibly lazy. If they wrote these texts (and other beauties that I don’t have space to accomodate) themselves, that’s incredibly sad.

It’s sad because it’s one of those details that makes or breaks a perception of a work, especially by a curious public who underestimates their capacity to interpret the works on their own, and therefore turns to catalogues and wall texts to augment their understanding. (I won’t even get into the catalogue, which at one point basically told readers they just won’t get one artist’s work unless you jump around in it and explore it, which was expressly forbidden by a sign placed at the work’s threshold saying “do not enter”.) I’m not campaigning here for pages of baroque writing that will make no sense to anyone save scholars in art history, I would simply like to read clear texts that tell me something about the work or the artist that will enhance my interpretation of the work and perhaps, in its best moments, reinforce the curatorial themes by revealing links to other works in the exhibition.

I recall being at a show at the Guggenheim in New York, where I was devouring the wall texts and scribbling quotes from those texts in my notebook. I was even competing for a better view of the wall texts with one other woman, which became a strange wordless competition of positioning ourselves in front of them. These texts were succinct, articulate, inspiring, and free of spelling and grammatical errors. I specifically recall saying to my companion, “those wall texts were so great, I can’t wait to get my hands on the catalogue!” and after the show we proceeded directly to the Guggenheim shop and both purchased catalogues of the exhibition. That’s the effect of professionalism. That’s the museum doing its job of making me even more interested in the art than I was when I walked in the door, by providing unobtrusive clues to help unlock both the pieces themselves and the overall curatorial intention.

I can only hope that this kind of attention to important details becomes a priority in other institutions as well – ones that should know better.