There are days like today when I simultaneously feel invigorated to be working in the arts and grossly inadequate for having been remiss in forging relationships and participating in other arts disciplines.
I went to the local museum today to ask them to put up a poster for a show we are going to be presenting in a couple weeks.
I ended up in the executive director’s office briefly chatting about an email I had sent suggesting possibly collaborating on a grant, though I only had a vague idea for a project.
The artistic director burst out asking if I had wanted to see some pieces they had brought back from New Orleans for a show they were going to put together. Suddenly I found myself in an area of the museum I didn’t know existed looking at African ritual masks and other works.
Apparently a university in New Orleans (I believe it was Southern University of New Orleans) has long been the beneficiary of doctors at various hospitals around New Orleans who have brought back works from research trips to Africa.
The university campus was damaged by Hurricane Katrina and now the building which housed these works was about to be renovated. Rather than store the works in a warehouse for the next few years, the university is placing the pieces in the custody of our local museum. The museum in turn is going to organize the works into shows that will be lent out to other museums.
Most of the pieces are still boxed up, but I was fascinated by the stories of the pieces conveniently at hand they were showing me. In my excitement at having the opportunity, I also felt some regret that I had neglected to really explore the visual arts until the last five years or so.
Granted, I recognize that the experience I was having was as much a confluence of personalities and opportunity as my having taken the initiative to make that first visit to the museum. Not every performing arts facility manager is going to be able to walk into a museum and establish a relationship with the directors that results in an exclaimed invitation to explore the contents of shipping boxes.
(Though I had the romantic Indiana Jones-esque notation of wooden crates with artifacts nestled in excelsior versus the rather mundane Uhaul shipping boxes and bubble wrap.)
The dynamics may not exist where a performing arts director can walk into the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and get a backstage tour of the conservators’ workshops.
Still, the overtures for these relationships probably don’t happen enough. I bet Nina Simon would be all over the right opportunity to collaborate with a performing arts organization around Santa Cruz. Maybe this sort of thing hasn’t happened as a result of a sense of rivalry, perhaps out of disinterest, or maybe like everyone else, a sense of intimidation of an unfamiliar art form.
I think we are all getting the sense that the time when we can comfortably work isolated from each other is coming to a close. At the very least, an improved understanding of the flora and fauna of the greater arts ecology is going to be necessary.
Even if they never find a project to work on with each other, arts people from different disciplines can provide useful feedback to one another.
For example, after hearing the interesting story about each of the pieces, I told the directors I hoped they would include that in the display rather than a small plaque saying “Female Rite of Passage Mask, Ibo Society.”
They already intended to have a much more descriptive display, but I think it is valuable to have someone else reinforce the idea that the story is interesting and important to the enjoyment of a piece. Seeing someone enthusiastic about their work can be infectious and energize you about your own.
And if your colleague is excitedly babbling about something that seems entirely obscure and arcane to you, a close relationship can allow you to point that out and guide them to a more accessible discussion of what is interesting about the piece. You are enough of an outsider to be confused by challenging terminology a colleague in their discipline might not catch, but enough of an insider to know where to start providing guidance.
And of course, you can get a new perspective on your own practices. I implied not liking the sparse plaques in museums, but there is a debate in visual arts circles about how much and what type of information to provide and how much to leave up to the viewer.
Have you ever thought about whether your performances are helped or harmed by the amount of information you provide audiences? As an audience member/viewer does it affect your enjoyment to learn that your interpretation of a work is diametrically opposed to that of the creator? Would you be happier not knowing?
My field is classical music and much of the information we provide is optional. You don’t have to read the program notes, attend the talk, follow the Tweets or visit the Pinterest board if you don’t want to. Much like plaques and catalogues in museums, which you can ignore if you wish, or read selectively..
But where it gets contentious (as far as concerts are concerned) is when the information is provided in a “compulsory” format: talking from the stage during a concert, for example, or accompanying videos/projected commentary while music is being played. Even when these are done very well (and sometimes they aren’t) these things may not be helpful to or necessarily desired by individual members of the audience. The equivalent would be spoken commentary triggered by a motion detector that piped up whenever you approached a painting or artefact. Potentially redundant or unhelpful and possibly very intrusive. (Headsets, of course, are optional, and that’s the common museum solution.)
So I would say, as long the medium is optional and can be controlled by the individual, you can never have too much information. Especially information that relates to the specific event and “curatorial” choices (i.e.information that wouldn’t come up in an intelligent google search or a visit to the library).
Yvonne-
Thanks for the comment. It wouldn’t be apparent to you, but when I wrote about knowing or not knowing what the artist meant, I was thinking about Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 which he never intended to be about censorship, but everyone has interpreted it to be about just that. For me that knowledge adds an interesting lens through which to re-read the book. However, there was a person who vehemently argued with Bradbury at a talk the author was delivering that the book was about censorship. He could not be happy thinking about it in any other way.
Joe, thanks for the shout out. There are MANY museums working with performing artists and groups. The best of them aren’t just presenting; they are really collaborating to bring new connections and experiences to audiences across disciplines.
I completely agree with you about the value of seeing our own disciplines from outside (or at least side-long) perspectives. And that the best museum stories are rarely told on labels. But that’s not always true – check out this great example from the LA Museum of Natural History: http://uncatalogedmuseum.blogspot.com/2013/08/whats-your-institutional-voice.html
Here are the two big challenges we’ve had in working with performing artists in a museum that prioritizes active community participation:
1. Breaking down the fourth wall. It’s often challenging for performing artists to get out of the “I present on a stage, you sit and watch for a proscribed amount of time.” Our formats almost never work this way. We have to work with performing artists to set new shared expectations of how people will engage with their work and what success looks like. We’ve been addressing this with a Participatory Performing Artist in Residence program, which allows us to collaborate with performers to create new works and forms that meet our mission and challenge all of us to learn new things: http://www.santacruzmah.org/ppair/
2. Unions. The biggest performing arts orgs in my towns are union shops, which is great, but it also means that it is apparently impossible for the members of the symphony to do a pop up (non)performance outside of their contracts. Clearly some cities have figured out how to make this possible, but here, we keep running into a brick wall when we want to engage directly with the artists as opposed to administrators or occasionally educators.
Nina-
Thanks for the comment. In fact, the museum to which I was referring actually has a Cirque de Soleil type youth performance group under its umbrella and I know there are a number of museums that are doing more performance. I had actually half-forgotten I wrote about an entry I did about dance companies collaborating on performances with museums.
I think your suggestion that your format doesn’t really accommodate static reception of an experience illustrates another way in which different arts disciplines can help each other evolve their approach. Preconceived expectations attached to a venue can inhibit experimentation. Is is potentially freeing for a performance group to be able to say “well, we are in a museum now so we have to do it differently now…”
The impetus for my entry was basically the feeling of, “wow, this is so exciting,” combined with the regret of having not done it sooner. I think my own natural inclinations got me going into museums more frequently, but I have to credit blogs like your own for reinforcing the concept that there are still many unexplored possibilities.