Weaving narratives in museum galleries - Thomas P. Campbell

[Music] [Music] when I was considering a career in the art world I took a course in London and one of my supervisors was this IRAs Italian called Petro who drank too much smoked too much and swore much too much but he was a a passionate teacher and I remember one of our earlier classes with him he was projecting images on the wall asking us to to think about them and he put up an image of a painting it's a landscape with figures semi-dressed drinking wine there was a nude woman in the in the lower foreground and on on the hillside in the back there was a figure of the mythological God bacus and he said what is this and I no one else said so I put up my hand and I said it's a banal B Tian he said it's a what I thought maybe I pronounced it wrong it's a bar Canal by tishan he said it's a what I said it's a a bakanal bitian he said you both Bess Bookworm it's a orgy as I said he swore too much there was an important lesson for me in that Petro was suspicious of formal art training art history training because he was he feared that it filled people up with jargon and then they just classified things rather than looking at them and he wanted wanted to remind us that all art was once contemporary and he wanted us to use our eyes and he was especially Evangelical about this message because he was losing his sight he wanted us to look and ask basic questions of objects what is it how is it made why was it made how is it used and these were important lessons to me when I subse became a professional art historian my my kind of Eureka moment came a few years later when I was studying the art of the Courts of Northern Europe and of course it was very much uh discussed in terms of the paintings and the sculptures and the architecture of the day but as I began to read historical documents and contemporary descriptions I found there was a kind of a missing component for everywhere I came across descriptions of tapestries tapestries were ubiquitous between the Middle Ages and really well into the 18th century and it was pretty apparent why tapestries were portable you could roll them up send them ahead of you and in the time it took to hang them up you could transform a cold dank interior into a richly colored setting tapestries effectively provided a vast canvas on which the patrons of the day could depict the heroes with whom they wanted to be Associated or even themselves and in addition to that tapestries were hugely expensive they required scores of Highly skilled Weavers working over extended periods of time with very expensive materials the wools the silks even Gold and Silver Thread so all in all in an age when the visual image of any kind was rare tapestries were an incredibly potent form of propaganda well I became a a tapestry historian in due course I ended up as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum because I saw the Met as one of the few places where I could organize really big exhibitions about the subject I cared so passionately about and in about 1997 the then director Philipe deont belloo gave me the go-ahead to organize an exhibition for 2002 we normally have these very long leadin times it wasn't straightforward it's no longer a question of chucking a tapestry in the back of a car they have to be wound on huge rollers shipped in oversized Freight some of them were so big we had to to get them into the museum we had to take them up the the great steps at the front we thought very hard about how to present this Unknown Subject to a modern audience the dark colors to set off the colors that remained in objects that were often faded the placing of Lights to bring out the silk and the gold thread the labeling you know we live in an age where we're so used to television images and photographs a one hit image these were big complex things of almost like cartoons with multiple narratives we had to draw our audience in get them to slow down to explore the objects there was a lot of skepticism on the opening night I overheard one of the senior members of Staff saying this is going to be a bomb but in reality in the course of the coming weeks and months hundreds of thousands of people came to see the show the exhibition was designed to be an experience and tapestr are hard to reproduce in photographs so I want you to use your imaginations thinking of these wall High objects some of them 10 m wide depicting lavish Court scenes with c and dandies who look quite at home in the pages of of the fashion Press today thick woods with Hunters crashing through the undergrowth in pursuit of wild boes and deer violent battles with scenes of fear and heroism I remember taking my son's school class he was eight at the time and all the little boys they kind of you know they were little boys and then the thing that caught their attention was in one of the hunting scenes there was a dog pooping in the foreground kind of an iny face joke by the artist and there you just imagine them but it brought it alive to them I think they suddenly saw that these these weren't just old faded tapestries these were images of the world in the past and it was the same for our audience and for me as a curator I felt proud I I felt i' shift did the needle a little through this experience that could only be created in a museum i' opened up the eyes of my audience historians artists press the general public to the beauty of this of this lost medium a few years later I was invited to be the director of the museum and after I got over that who me the tapestry geek I don't wear a tie I realized in fact I believed passionately in that curated Museum experience we live in an age of ubiquitous information and sort of Just Add Water expertise but there is nothing that compares with the presentation of significant objects in a well- told narrative what the curator does the interpretation of a a complex esoteric subject in a way that retains the Integrity of the subject but makes it unpacks it for a general audience and that to me today is now the The Challenge and the fun of my of my job supporting the vision of my curators whether it's an exhibition of samurai swords early Byzantine artifacts Renaissance portraits or the show we heard mentioned earlier the Queen show with which we enjoyed so much success last summer that was an interesting case in the late spring early summer of of 2010 shortly after McQueen's suicide our curator of costume Andrew Bolton came to see me and and said I've been thinking of doing a show on McQueen and now is the moment we have to we have to do it fast it wasn't easy uh uh McQueen had worked throughout his career with a small team of designers and managers who were very protective of his legacy Pat Andrew went to London and worked with them over the summer and won their confidence and that of the designers who created his amazing fashion shows which were works of performance art in their own right and we proceeded to do something at the Museum I think we've never done before it wasn't just just standard installation in fact we RI down the galleries to recreate entirely different settings uh a recreation of his first Studio a Hall of Mirrors a curiosity box a sunken ship a burnt out interior with videos and soundtracks that range from operatic Aras to pigs fornicating and in this extraordinary setting the costumes were like actors and actresses or living sculptures it could have been a train wreck it could have looked like shot windows on Fifth Avenue at Christmas but because of the way that Andrew connected with the McQueen team he was channeling the rawness and the Brilliance of McQueen and the show was quite Transcendent and it became a phenomenon in in its own right by the end of the show we had people queuing for four or five hours to get into the show but no one really complained I heard over and over again wow that was worth it it was such a visceral emotive experience now I've described two very immersive exhibitions but I also believe that collections individual objects can also have that same power the Met was set up not as a museum of American art but of an encyclopedic Museum and today 140 years later that vision is as preent as ever because of course we live in a world of crisis of Challenge and we're exposed to it through the 24/7 news reels it's in our galleries that we can unpack the the civilizations the cultures that that we are seeing the current manifestation of whether it's Libya Egypt Syria it's in our galleries that we can explain and give greater understanding I mean our new Islamic galleries are a case in point opened 10 years almost to the week after 911 I think for most Americans knowledge of the uh Islamic world was pretty slight before 9/11 and then it was thrust upon us in one of America's Darkest Hours and the perception was through the polarization of that terrible event now in our galleries we Show 14 centuries of the development of different Islamic cultures across ofast Geographic spread and again hundreds of thousands of people have come to see these galleries since they opened last October I I'm often asked is digital media replacing the museum and I think those numbers are a resounding rejection of that notion I mean don't get me wrong I'm I'm a huge advocate of the web it gives us a way of reaching out to audiences around the globe but nothing replaces the authenticity of the object presented with passion scholarship bringing people face to face with our objects is a way of bringing them face to face with people across time across space whose lives may have been very different to our own but who like us had hopes and dreams frustrations and achievements in their lives and I think this is a process that helps us better understand our ourselves helps us make better decisions about where we're going the Great Hall at the Met is one of the great portals of the world or inspiring like a medieval Cathedral from there you can walk in any direction to almost any culture i frequently go out into the Hall in the Galleries and I watch our visitors coming in some of them are comfortable they feel at home they know what they're looking for others are very uneasy it's an intimidating place they feel that the institution is elitist I'm working to try and break down that sense of that elitism I want to put people in a contemplative frame of mind where they're prepared to be a little bit lost to explore to see the UNF familiar in the familiar or to try the unknown because for us it's all about bringing them face to face with great works of art capturing them at that moment of discomfort when the inclination is kind of to reach for your iPhone or your blackberry but to create a Zone where their curiosity can expand and whether it's in the the expression of a Greek sculpture that reminds you of a friend or a dog pooping in the corner of a tapestry or to be bring it back to my tutor Petro those dancing figures who are indeed knocking back the wine and that nude figure in the left foreground wow she is a gorgeous embodiment of youthful sexuality in that moment our scholarship can tell you that this is a banal but if we're doing our job right and you've checked the Jaron at the front door trust your instinct you know it's an orgy thank you