What if? You wanted to…
be different.
exhibit a collection in a non-traditional venue that would draw attention.
create an event feeling that was intimate.
pull together objects, sourced from many places, & never been shown together
arrange for a group of celebrities to share past experiences with selected objects ·
move visitors through the experience (without having to say “follow me, gather round”).
provide life histories about the living entities that made the displayed objects.
allow for the visitor to share stories of their life connections to selected objects.
Chapel of the Holy Spirit church in Mechelen, Belgium
Credit to HetKunstuur web site
Two enterprising people referred to as Het Kunstuur, created and presented an initiative called The Art Hour in an historic church in Belgium. Talk about an exhibition guided tour that breaks the mould. The “collection” happens to be painting driven but it could be any collection of natural or cultural objects or artifacts. The above bulleted points collectively create an interesting list of criteria, that could be realized in different ways, as long as you stay truthful to the criteria’s essence of what it is you are aiming to accomplish. Let’s unravel this experience.
Focal point
Eight visitors are admitted at a time to do a self-guided tour of 32 art pieces during a 1 hour experience. Only one work of art is lit up at a time. This is important to establish a focal point and keep people’s gaze directed, thus preventing distractions. As the light goes off one painting and then comes on at the next painting, people will pick up their chair on the cue to move along. The intent is for a seamless and subtle coercion to migrate.
Visitors sit in a group, viewing not only the one painting but also the first celebrity narrator, who is being projected in 3D beside the painting. Headphones play the music and narration. The celebrity shares what holds significance for them in relation to the artwork and the emotional bonds they may have developed with it. Visitors progressively move around the church to sit in front of subsequent paintings and view video projections of the different celebrity narrators.
Projected image of narrator beside exhibit painting
credit HetKunstuur web site
Celebrities
You don’t have to use holavision techniques to achieve the celebrity wow factor, but you do need some visual of that person for recognition value. The focus should be after all on the object or painting in this case. Modern - day celebrities of all ages certainly bring allure to the exhibition, yet celebrities do come in all shapes and sizes, as they say.
A variation on this would be if you are dealing with an historic site for example, where a modern day descendent of a significant person from the past could be used to share their relative’s and their own connection to the object in the spotlight. At a nature centre, a bird of prey is a wonderful “object” and celebrity all rolled up in one, who may need some translation services on behalf of the interpreter in order to share some birdlife experiences for the visitor. Any idea what celebrity has visited your site recently? Discovering this may be as simple as inserting a column in your guest book titled “FAMOUS FOR…” beside “Name.”
Movement
Moving around a space is not necessary either, as your visitors could be seated together and the objects could be positioned on a stage at different heights and depths only being seen in succession because of the spotlight shining on them while the rest of the area is in the dark. The viewer’s eyes move but not their bodies, as in the classic object theatre approach, where different artifacts and short video clips are chosen to weave a story together, usually time-line based. The small group intimacy is lost however.
I have also seen a combination of these techniques used where we as natural history museum visitors were admitted to a dark exhibit space representing the ocean depths. A few people at a time were admitted and you were limited to viewing one denizen of the deep due to only one illuminating light. As the successive single lights came on from left to right, we all moved in whispered silence from one end of the cleverly “hidden” wall – to - ceiling exhibit case, to the opposite end, then exited.
Moving around within one building space creates the experience package with a co-ordinated beginning and ending feel. This would not hold up the same way if you, being the visitor, encountered the objects by moving inside/outside between buildings on a site.
People Connect to People
In the case of The Art Hour, added value is provided in the chapel by an actor’s narrated rendition of the life histories of the artists who created the pieces on display. People connect to people. Yet so many galleries ignore the public’s insatiable urge to connect with the artist as a person. Connecting to THE ART on many levels is so important, however galleries too often forget the fact that people want to know what makes these individuals, these artists, human: their desires, their foibles, their backgrounds ( the dirt, the sordid affairs, the weird factor, etc.).
If your collection contains natural history items the added value could be the life histories of the living beings that produced the chosen objects on display (e.g. honeycomb and a worker bee describing how she manufactures the comb and its hexagonal shape). In keeping with the thought that people connect with people, consider relating an interesting life history moment of a famous scientist, musician, poet, etc. who had a connection with whatever natural history object is on display (e.g. Charles Darwin and ants)
credit Bill Reynolds
Do you know what really stands out for me? It was the fact that there was no primary, traditional, fall-back dependency on little white label cards with the artist’s name, the painting’s name and the medium used. If this was banished from our stable of labelling choices would there be an outcry among the general public? Please send us comments on this blasphemous statement.
For more info on this exhibitory technique go to https://hetkunstuur.com/en
What if? You wanted to test whether:
a self-guided experience could be just as (or more) engaging with an object as a personally guided experience?
you could facilitate meaningful experiences with objects on view, when you don’t have time to properly research them?
· you could satisfy 3 goals:
to foster personal and meaningful connections to objects on display,
to have fun learning with the people you came to the museum with, and
to encourage creativity
Theresa Sotto at the Los Angeles Hammer Museum did just that with art works using a semi-self - guided experience set up for sharing between partners. She prepared prompts ahead of time in three categories under the headings 1) Select, 2) Question, and 3) Translate.
1} Select: Gallery visitors were invited to choose a work that they associated with a certain adjective. Some of her options were secretive, awkward, and friendly. Options for participants could range from choosing at random or alternatively picking an adjective they really wanted.
The great thing about having the visitor choose is that they are starting where their interest is and not where your interest is -a classic faux-pas of many a guided visit. Again, this is a technique that could be employed for artifacts, botanical specimens, zoo animals, you name it.
2} Question: Once a work was selected having been matched to the qualifying adjective, the visitor then picked one of many Question cards which directed them to reflect on issues and outcomes that Theresa desired her visitors to grapple with. These queries ranged from, “Could this work change someone’s life? If so, how?”; to “In what ways is this work relevant to people in Los Angeles?” Depending on the nature of the work other probing questions could focus on emotions in general and delving into the artists’s intentions.
Credit: Bill Reynolds
In certain situations, visitors were supplied a second question card. The number of cards chosen by people should really depend on the interest of the participants. You could really have fun with this stage of the experience as the style of questions could vary depending on the outcome the interpreter is trying to accomplish and how they want to focus the visitor. For example, in a natural history setting, using something as simple as “I wonder how that flower smells?” or “How would you describe the way that leaf feels, on its top, its bottom, its side?” catalyzes action on behalf of the visitor to explore.
3} Translate: This exercise related to describing first what the visitor thought was truly the essence of the work of art they had chosen. Then they were to think creatively about how those qualities could be translated into another form or genre–such as a Craigslist ad, a restaurant menu, or thirty seconds of sound. You could really expand on these options and have an array to choose from. One could even take the opportunity to have some cardshark fun adding appropriate lines, for example, with the film buff visitor, “pick a card, any card, sweetheart,” using your best Humphrey Bogart imitation. Be creative and send us your favourite line for a specific audience type- you may just win a book.
Theresa created this experiment for her peers during a meeting of the group she started known as The Gallery Teaching Lab, where her goal was to foster innovation in gallery teaching. Best of all though is her motto: Rules are meant to be broken. Tell us about any peer to peer learning groups you are involved in in our comments section below.
Theresa shared her Select Question Translate example, among others, in the blog titled https://artmuseumteaching.com/2017/02/28/gallery-teaching-lab/ This is a digital community and collaborative online forum for reflecting on critical issues in the field of museums. Check it out.