Every week, Bor Beekman, Robert van Gijssel, Merlijn Kerkhof, Anna van Leeuwen or Herien Wensink take a position in the world of film, music, theater or visual arts.
For those who are visually oriented, and that is most museum visitors, it is a relief that museums are ‘unstickered’ again: the brightly colored arrows of corona-safe walking routes and the instructions about the maximum number of people are gone. I won’t miss them. This way nothing can distract from the art. Although, almost nothing. I’ve been angry about something I saw in Kunstmuseum Den Haag for over a week now. And that was not art.
Because museums want the best for their artworks and visitors, they are still warned about everything. Warnings I see regularly, roughly classified by most common, are: do not touch, keep your distance, do not flash, do not photograph, beware of the wet floor, beware of this step, beware of the flashes of light. Plain language, I don’t take offense.
Another category of warnings concerns the content of art in an exhibition, if it can be shocking or hurtful. Explicit nudity, for example, is sometimes shielded with a curtain, a bit like the old days in the video store. Nowadays such a curtain is no longer sufficient and people expect a text, a trigger warning† How do you handle that?
Kunstmuseum Den Haag now has an exhibition by the Russian-American artist Boris Lurie (1924-2008) and the German artist Wolf Vostell (1932-1998). That exhibition is called Art after Auschwitz, as the artists, for example, incorporate photographs of the Holocaust into their art. This has to do with their own traumas, explains the hall text. The museum decided to put a warning on the door to the exhibition. It contains this remarkable sentence: “If you continue, you are solely responsible for your reaction to the content you find.”
This caused a slight short circuit in my head. Since when am I personally responsible for my reaction to works of art? Am I not going to the museum precisely to be surprised, to discover how I react? And if I thought the exhibition was great, was that entirely my own fault or could such a reaction be attributed to the artists and the museum?
It is also worded so unnecessarily unkindly and strictly, it might as well have read: ‘Does this affect you? Own fault! Don’t bother us with it.’ How can you program an exhibition about war traumas and then have so little empathy for your own visitors? It seems advisable to me, if you want to show something confrontational or potentially hurtful, to facilitate a conversation about it instead of gagging visitors upon arrival.
Irish curator Margaret Middleton recently listed some helpful dos and don’ts for museums wanting to warn visitors about the content of their exhibits. I came across them on twitter. The first tip: be specific, tell visitors what to expect. Tip two: don’t speculate about who this content is shocking to. Tip three: offer an alternative route. I suspect Middleton thought the “stay nice” tip was unnecessary.