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Barcelona, August 10, 2011:
According to Thomas Crow (1), the composure and visual and gestural rituals that museums require of visitors are a legacy of the Parisian Salons of the eighteenth century. The men and women who attended these had to learn and rehearse gestures of pleasure and discrimination, as if it were a performance. This kind of performance was, in turn, inspired by the rituals of the aristocratic patrons of a century earlier.
Nowadays, we have presumably internalised these codes of behaviour. And while it is true that many artistic projects require a different kind of attitude from their audiences, most museums still demand certain composure. Hence the arrangement of artworks in display cabinets, the tape indicating where visitors should stand, and the other elements that protect artworks or indicate the distance from which we should look at them. Often, exhibition attendants and security guards are in charge of ensuring that these inherited and seldom written rules are properly followed.
Montserrat has been one of the few museum attendants who has truly immersed herself in her job. In spite of the inhumane working conditions (a monthly wage of less than 600 €, interminable working hours with only a 20 minute lunch break and a masculine-style uniform), her pride in her work was such that it almost seemed as if she were the one exhibiting. If anything ever happened to one of the works –although she made sure nothing did during her shifts– she took it very badly; to the point of getting angry with her colleagues or even crying with rage. If visitors failed to follow the rules, her anger led her to punish them with one of her special reprimands. Montserrat made well and sure of two things: that visitors were aware that museum premises are a regulated space and that they never forgot it!
Montserrat and I met because we are from the same city, but it was through the museum that we really got to know each other. Since she began her job as attendant, she has been telling me everything that goes on there. The idea of Montserrat’s memoirs or a collection of anecdotes began as a project to make a video, but this was quickly ruled out when I found out she loves writing. I thought this would make a more honest point of departure. Originally, the idea was that the book would describe the behaviour of visitors inside the museum. It is interesting to have an account of this kind from the perspective of an attendant working in museum security, given that very few museums have incident logs and data protection legislation requires security camera footage to be constantly overwritten. And in any case, when we turn to the memoirs of an attendant, we appeal to her subjectivity, her personal experiences and her opinions. And this is the result.
For My Museum, Montserrat participated in meetings with Ariadna Serrahima to decide on the design of the book, and also took part in some work sessions with Jordi Canudas for Espai 13.
As I write this, it is still more than a month before the opening of Her Museum. So I won’t prematurely reveal the contents of the room. I only hope that this book has reached you in the appropriate manner. You know what I mean.
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Written by Montserrat Saló
Edited by Mireia c. Saladrigues
Designed by Ariadna Serrahima
Published as a part of Her Museum at Espai 13, Fundació Joan Miró de Barcelona
Within the program The End Is Where We Start From curated by Karin Campbell
Working now on an annex about the experience in Espai 13, Fundació Miró de Barcelona to be added to the book.
Picture by Elisenda Fontarnau
In 1737, the Salon became a fixture in Parisian cultural life. Staged every other year, this free, public exhibition permanently changed both art consumption and production in the French capital. Art historian Thomas Crow argues that the birth of the Salon also meant the rise of a totally new art public, one that was heterogeneous, opinionated, and unpredictable. As the Salon increased in popularity, the art world noticed a gap between what exhibitions were intended to represent and how they played out in practice, a tension that arguably remains present today. Crow explains:
[The Salon] was collective in character, yet the experience it was meant to foster was an intimate and private one. In the modern public exhibition, starting with the Salon, the audience is assumed to share in some community of interest, but what significant commonality may actually exist has been a far more elusive question.[1]
One reason this “commonality” is so difficult to pinpoint is that both audience members and institutions (the Salon in the 18th century, the museum now) are responsible for shaping an art public’s shared identity. Upon attending an exhibition, individuals knowingly join a group of people defined by its interest in art. For its part, the hosting institution physically unites the exhibition community and sets standards that dictate which behaviors are acceptable, and which are reprehensible. In the Salon, these standards, born of the notion that viewing art was a privileged act, served to ease the minds of wealthy patrons who were alarmed by unprecedented social engagement among people from different classes.
The Salon’s legacy of normalized codes of conduct has remained strong in contemporary museum practice, despite attempts by many artists starting in the mid-20th century to interrupt or even end formal, rule-based behavior within exhibitions. In reacting against the staid museum “white cube,” artists have highlighted an issue with which many Salon visitors would likely have identified: that within museums, people are forced outside of their comfort zones because they are expected to adhere to certain norms. By inviting audiences into their creative processes, artists can draw upon humans’ impulse to act as social beings and communicate when they congregate for a shared purpose.
“Her Museum” looks at how an exhibition context instigates certain types of behavior and how these behaviors can be confused by the unpredictable nature of social interaction. The project begins with a single object – a book written by an individual who has spent much of her adult life watching other people engage with art. Yet this book is only part of the story. The rest you must discover on your own.
Karin Campbell
Curator, The End Is Where We Start From