At the Met, Day 6

Looking at and writing about random work of art was starting to feel a little too self-indulgent, so today at the Met, I decided to bring it back to books.

One of the current exhibitions is Francis Bacon, and as it happens, there are a number of notable books on the artist: Michael Peppiatt's biography of the artist, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma; the collected writings and interviews Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait, also by Peppiatt; and Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation by Gilles Deleuze.

The exhibition was nice, just about the right size to get a good sense of the artist's work without exhausting it, or yourself. The works were well hung, the gallery walls cleanly painted, and of course there was the ubiquitous wall text and wall labels.

Not including archival materials, there were 65 works in the exhibition, 52 of which had wall labels. The shortest was around 36 words, and the longest around 108. All together there were some 3,564 words on the 52 wall labels alone. Add to that some 1,576 words of wall text explaining the overarching theme/era of each gallery and you have more than 5,000 words of exhibition text. Equivalent to the first three chapters of Tolstoy's War and Peace.

I don't know when we came to the idea that an art exhibition should include so much text to read, and include it in a way that makes it physically difficult to read. Standing on your feet for an hour or two among crowds of people, small text adhered vertically to a wall at or below chest level... If we evaluate this as a reading experience, rather than an exhibition one, this design is a massive failure. Yet we persist.

As a visitor to the Bacon show, I was looking for words to put to these paintings to help me process and understand them. But because of the length of the exhibition texts and the negative experience of reading them, I was missing a lot of what was offered there and was left searching. And anyway, I didn't want to spend my time in the exhibition reading, I wanted to spend it looking. Offer something to help me engage with the works in front of me. Get me so interested in the work that by the last room of the exhibition, I want to buy one of the dozen books on the artist and read more. Maybe, just maybe, I'll even then come back to the exhibition another time, after having spent days (not just the minutes or hours I would have gotten in the show) reading about the work.

So, if the new mission of exhibition texts is to engage rather than to inform, what would they look like? Well, what if instead of three paragraphs of didactic exhibition text, the Met opened the exhibition as Deleuze opened his book?:

"Francis Bacon's painting is of a very special violence"

In fact, there's more to gain from the summary of single chapter from Deleuze's book than in the thousands of words offered on the exhibition labels:

"Man and animal — The zone of indiscernibility — Flesh and bone: the meat descends from the bone — Pity — Head, face, and meat"

Or what if, instead of telling me Bacon was inspired by T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and the work of Frederico Garcia Lorca, the labels simply quoted from the poets themselves? Or, as Peppiatt does in Studies for a Portrait, quoted Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness?:

"I saw him open his mouth wide — it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him."

Or, again as Peppiatt, why not quote the artist himself?:

"[Bacon] talked famously about wanting his pictures 'to look as if a human being had passed between them, lie a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence,' and his hope that he would one day be able to paint the mouth as Monet painted a sunset."

"'What I really like,' he once said, 'are phrases that cut me.'"

To me, these short, well-written, evocative texts give me a better grounding and more to think about than thousands and thousands of words of exhibition texts do.