On Museum Interventions

The recent announcement that even the Frick will soon be playing the museum intervention game reminded me that so-called “interventions” in museum installations have been around for a long time.  I’m not sure whether he invented the concept, but Leslie Cheek, Jr. (1908-92), one of my predecessors as director of The Baltimore Museum of Art, and subsequently director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, surely ranks as one of the pioneers of the museum-as-theatre mode that underpins many of today’s interventions.  Smaller and regional museums have special challenges in attracting visitors, since they don’t benefit from the automatic tourist throngs that constitute a substantial proportion of visits to museums in large metropolitan areas.  So it’s understandable that dramatic flourishes will have a special appeal to directors and staffs of those museums which need to work harder to attract repeat visitors.  The Worcester Art Museum, of which I was also director, has an ongoing tradition of “flower arrangements inspired by works of art” every winter.  I vaguely remember that it helped swell visit counts.

Still, it’s difficult for any museum to compete with the Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s recent Costume Institute blockbuster, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.  The spectacles of most recent Costume Institute shows have reached new heights in pushing the extremes of museum installation techniques; so it feels somewhat curmudgeonly to complain that the extravaganza often elbows out whatever passes for serious content in these exhibitions.  The “catalogues” are presumably replete with weighty information, but I don’t invest in those props, which are quite costly (“It’s not a coffee table book; it’s a coffee table!”), albeit splendid.

There’s evidently an ongoing competition for each year’s museum fashion divertissement to outdo its predecessor.  With the added incentive of a certain content logic, this year’s exhibition played at two venues: the main store, now called “The Met Fifth Avenue” and farther north in Fort Tryan Park, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s amazing gift to New Yorkers, now known as “The Met Cloisters.”   While in previous years I tried to focus on the fashion content, albeit distracted by the glories of the installation, this time I found myself more interested in what happens during an intervention.  The fashions were jauntily installed in the midst of presumably related collections.  Certainly the medieval and Byzantine galleries housed dramatically placed dresses, 

although I found it a bit weird to move through the Byzantine corridor and look up the skirts of the rows of sequined dresses.  (I guess this obviates the old mirror-on-the-shoe trick.)

I can’t have been the only museum person to check out the visitors, to see whether any of them were also looking at the medieval or Byzantine art — wondering what the religious or visual connections might be.  But there seemed to be little of that.  Instead of the array of confused stray visitors trying to figure out which direction to follow, in the process bypassing some  inspiring Romanesque and Gothic carvings, people were stopped short by the glitter of gaudy fashion, at best tenuously linked to the art in the Medieval Court (officially Gallery 305).  The last time one saw such rapt crowds in that space was at Christmastime, for the Met’s annual display of the gorgeous  Christmas tree decorated with 18th century Neapolitan polychrome figures.

But the Fifth Avenue museum is so capacious and diffuse, and way-finding for the uninitiated is so complicated, that there seemed to be a general consensus that the Heavenly Bodies exhibition fared much better at the Cloisters.  For one thing, there’s a more-or-less unified visual environment in the mélange of bits and pieces of mostly ecclesiastical, mostly medieval, structures serving as a background for a great collection of medieval art.  For me it’s worth a visit just to see the so-called Mérode Altarpiece, the sublimely beautiful 1427 triptych, Annunciation with Donors, ascribed to Robert Campin and his workshop.

A single elegant red velvet gown, whose designer’s name I can’t recall, was placed (not quite juxtaposed) in that room presumably to relate to the Virgin’s crimson robe; but alas, the painting far outshone the fashion.  Not that anyone seemed to be looking at the painting, although it’s high on many lists of the great works of art resident in New York.

Most of the other fashion interventions were more visually dramatic, and thus presumably more successful — from an “installation glamour” point of view.  I’m skeptical about using The Met Cloisters and fashion to promote the idea of faux piety, but there’s no denying that some  breathtaking theatrical ensembles were created.

If by “the Catholic imagination” we are meant to understand fantasy, then this section of the exhibition succeeded better than previous Costume Institute extravaganzas which depended primarily on brilliant stage designers/installation artists.

Where it worked, the architectural setting was wonderfully evocative.  But these were about formal concerns and about riffs — some pretentiously sanctimonious, others slyly blasphemous — which is what much of high fashion is about anyway.

Were we meant to see “the Catholic imagination” as humorous?  Perhaps.  Ironically the most object-based juxtaposition  — by which I mean inviting comparison of a museum object with a fashion object — concerned death, with the placement of a dressed model next to a stone tomb.

Now and again visual themes or images from”art” turned up, and although they were sometimes beautiful, they screamed superficiality.  My favorite was the fluffy-skirted dress with the embroidered unicorn on the jacket.

Since the Unicorn Tapestries (1495-1505) are among the most popular of the works on display at the Cloisters, this was fun to see (would that the dress had been more attractive).  And my sense was that it was the one room in which people were casting their eyes back and forth between the embroidered jacket and the tapestries on the wall.  Since unicorn carries layers of meaning, both religious and erotic, this maybe-a-wedding-dress did not feel out of place here.

The workmanship involved in creating a sexy Adam & Eve-ning gown was as awesome as some of the artistry involved in making the medieval art symbolically elbowed out by this fashion show.  But to me it felt like just another use of a visual theme, plucked from art, that we often see on all sorts of clothing, albeit on a much more refined level here.

Elsewhere, playing  architectural forms against straw hats turned out to be an especially engaging trick.

Yes, I realize that much of (most of?) this “fashion” isn’t necessarily meant to be worn by real people.  Maybe that’s why the Met calls that department Costume Institute?  In which case maybe theatre designs by Picasso or Schlemmer or Hockney could be shown by that museum department.  But no — that would likely be under the aegis of one of the other “departments.”

What struck me the most at both venues of this spectacular “fashion” exhibition was the problem created by placing the “clothes” in the middle of collection galleries.  The primary message in doing this is that the museum’s holdings can serve as theatrical props.  There is little evidence that visitors engaged with the museum’s own works while ogling the clothes.  (I would love to be proven wrong; perhaps the Met has done a serious study of this.)  I’m an inveterate museum eavesdropper, and my favorite collection-based comment was overheard at the Cloisters, as a lady was mistakenly reading a label for the room’s architecture, thinking it was for a dress.  “I thought Catalonia was in California,” she said.  Her friend told her she was thinking of Catalina Island.  But the not-so-far-from-Hollywood reference seemed very apt to me.

The Met’s recently-appointed director, Max Hollein, has said: “I’m not so keen on putting one contemporary piece smack in the middle of the Greek and Roman gallery and saying, ‘Well, here is a dialogue.'”  That’s reassuring, and we’ll see about that soon enough.

Meanwhile, back in intervention-land, the Frick Collection has announced that in 2019 an exhibition by celebrity British ceramic artist, Edmund de Waal, “will be displayed in the museum’s main galleries alongside works from the permanent collection.”  I am a great admirer of de Waal’s work, having first encountered it in his Signs and WondersI installationI (2009), which sits precariously around the upper edge of the rotunda in the ceramics galleries of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum — although you have to know it’s there and look up to see it.

So much about de Waal’s work focuses on subtlety and perception (not a specialty of Costume Institute shows), that his Frick intervention could be exciting.  Moreover, it sounds as if the idea of this exhibition is to create a visual collaboration between whatever de Waal creates and how he manages to install it.  His exquisite installation, White, which was installed in the Royal Academy’s Library and Print room (2015-16) was understated and controlled, accentuating much about this rarely-seen space and its contents.

So there’s every reason to be excited about a de Waal collaboration with the Frick Collection.

Meanwhile, back at The Met Cloisters, I was remembering one of my favorite to-do projects, although I’ll probably never get to it: I imagine sad monologues recited by lonely masterpieces that get passed by because, in the rush of blockbusteritis, no one manages to see them.  Like this guy, the magically-carved, linden wood, Seated Bishop, ca. 1495, by Tilman Riemenschneider (1460-1531).

There he was, near the entrance, ready to welcome one and all to Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.  But no one looked at the poor fellow.

Postscript:  The Met announced record numbers of visitors at the close of the exhibition.  Clearly that proves something.  And after the close.