Wobbling in Museums

by Alice Lyons

Out of a tableau of painted persons, all with the circle of gold hovering around their skulls, one face lifts and confronts the visitor to the Convent of San Marco in Florence.  Who are you? the visitor murmurs – not to the individual fresco face and its calm regard, but to the person who conceived it, whose hands made this bit of reality. Who are you?

The presence of that maker lives.  An actual exchange takes place, breaking the bounds of space and time, a conversation occurs through the medium of this face, it is Saint Lawrence –he holds the iron grille upon which he was martyred – and his astonishing countenance of salutation.  And so the visitor to the Convent of San Marco steps into the river of time to feel it wash over her, to brush up against the used-up alleluias that float in its old air.

The artist-monk Fra Angelico and the 21st century visitor meet. On the floor above, the visitor can step into a 'human-sized viewing space' (it might be termed as such in a guide book), a monk's cell, and view a painted story, a Biblical parable in shockingly contemporary – no, timeless – compositions with odd, breathtaking shapes on an especially made arched wall for Fra Angelico's frescoes. Originally for the Dominican Brothers' contemplation, it is now available for the visitor to stand in front of, slow down and see. 

Be held in a kind of thrall.

Thrall. The state of being in someone's power. In museums, public ones, such as London's National Gallery, with megaton concentrations of power, e.g., the early Italian rooms with Piero della Francesca and Ucello, the visitor, if she inclines herself to a receptivity to the thrall, may feel herself wobble, the wobble of one confronted with the vastness of human history.  Italian emergency room doctors, having rescued many visitors to the Florentine museums, have diagnosed the wobble:  Stendhal syndrome. The French writer wobbled too.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the visitor is faced with the strange beauty of Giovanni di Paolo's The Creation, and The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the earth a blue dinner plate with concentric rings of astral blues and grays descending to a terrestrial centre of rock and map. The strange Mother rivers (the Euphrates, the Nile et.al.,) skulk off snake-like in a corner.  The visitor surrenders herself to this peculiar scene, this odd world-view, which is an entire contrast to the mediated world, the explained world of the internet news, of the academy.

The wobbling museum visitor, opening herself to these strange stories from long ago, performs an act of hope.  She makes the boundary of herself permeable to powers from other times and places, absorbing their stories. 

She resists the temptation to understand or be explained to by the authorative voices on the headphones clamped to the heads of some other museum visitors. Instead, she goes on an authentic self-guided tour, ears unencumbered to listen for the works of art that call out to be bestowed with the gift of visitor attention.

In the agoraphobically expansive Hirschorn Museum in Washington D.C., among gargantuan Pollacks and Rothkos, it is the modest Morandi who invites attention one day, a mute guest in a boisterous cocktail party. The visitor is rewarded with lemon daylight made concrete, in colours close to actual concrete, and bland bottle-objects in a state of coming-into-being. Quiet collisions of close colours happen. Implosions of space occur in blobs of dark umber-blue shadow. It is a reward to the keepers of quiet counsel, to the questioners of appearances. A strike against blather.

Perhaps, instead of entering museums to avail of the Instructive Experiences they offer, the visitor might go for the instructive experience of dismantling the strict border around the visitor.  The border that asserts its condition of Selfness in statements such as "I do not understand" or "I am not educated enough to know what to look at". The visitor might open up her body and its feelers (hard-wired in) that sense colour, shape, scale, visual data recognisable and not. 

And further still, she could practice hooking up receptors deep in a visitor body to distances of time and space, feel the wafts of the centuries in museums, hear the distant music that echoes still in old objects, old pictures. 

For here is the human story, the relics of reality –Walter Benjamin called them "counsel woven into the fabric of real life".  And in opening herself up to the old stories from everywhere, the visitor becomes in fact everyone and through culture finds unity and hope and resists the forces that would deem her separate and small.  Wobbling, she finds herself part of a fabric, an us.