A good art exhibition is a lesson in seeing to those who need or want one, and a session of visual pleasure and excitement to those who don’t need anything — I mean the rich in spirit. Grunts, sighs, shouts, laughter, and imprecations ought to be heard in a museum room. Precisely the place where these are usually suppressed. So, some of the values of pictures may be suppressed too, or plain lost, in formal exhibition.
I’d like to address the eyes of those who know how to take their values straight through and beyond the inhibitions accompanying public decorum. I suggest that true religious feeling is sometimes to be had even at church, and perhaps art can be seen and felt on a museum wall; with luck.
Those of us who are living by our eyes — painters, designers, photographers, girl watchers — are both amused and appalled by the following half-truth: “what we see, we are.” And by its corollary: our collective work is, in part, shameless, joyous, autobiography-cum-confession wrapped in the embarrassment of the unspeakable. For those who can read the language, that is. And we never know just who is in the audience. When the seeing-eye man does turn up to survey our work, and does perceive our metaphors, we are just caught in the act that’s all. Should we apologize?”
Walker Evans – Boston Sunday Globe, August, 1st, 1971, p. A-61.
Walker Evans gets it exactly fucking right. Every time I walk into some pristine white cube with its hushed reverence and security guards treating me like I’m a potential vandal, I want to scream, not at the art, but at the entire apparatus designed to domesticate my response to it.
My mother ran an antique print gallery in San Francisco that actually understood this. She let people react, encouraged it, demanded it, even. Laughter echoed off those walls. She held court there, spinning story after story about these long-dead artists, the provenance of each piece, the historical moments and cultural currents that birthed what hung before a visitor. And there was always music, because silence, she understood, isn’t reverence. It’s death twice over. That space proved Evans’ point daily: art doesn’t need protecting from human response. It needs it. Craves it. Dies without it, and these artists were already dead. The least she could do was let their work breathe.
Because here’s the thing: Evans understood what I’m still desperately trying to articulate in my journal and my late-night editing sessions, that the work is a confession whether I admit it or not. Every photograph, every constructed space, every durational performance is me saying “this is what I saw when no one was looking, this is what moved through me, this is the shape of my hunger.” And the museum, that glorious mausoleum, wants to file it under “contemporary practices” and stick a wall text next to it explaining what I allegedly meant.
The “rich in spirit” Evans mentions? Those are the ones who get it without the PhD, who grunt and sigh because the image or the theatrical gesture hit them in the solar plexus before their critical faculties could erect the usual barricades. Meanwhile, I’m standing there with my theoretical frameworks and my Sontag and my Artaud, convinced I need all this intellectual scaffolding to justify what is essentially an act of exposure.
And that vulnerability, fuck, that’s the unbearable part. I’ve spent years in archives (LINES and Mabou Mines) and rehearsal spaces, constructing these elaborate structures of meaning, when really I’m just desperate to be seen. Truly seen. Not what I’ve constructed, or arranged or currated. But me. By someone who reads the language, who catches me mid-confession and doesn’t look away.
Should I apologize? Fuck no. The apology is already baked into the work, in every desperate frame, every constructed sightline, every moment I arrange for an audience I simultaneously court and fear. The museum wants decorum; I’m offering my guts on a wall. The only question is whether anyone’s brave enough to look.