It should be so much more than just a label
OUR great national museums are attracting unprecedented numbers of visitors from all over the world and reaching out to people from very different cultural and educational backgrounds. Few visitors could explain the mystery of the Trinity or identify the three principal constituents of granite, many are uncertain as to the identity of Guanyin or what is meant by egg tempera and some, it must be painfully admitted, have no clear idea of who Athena is or even what she represents.
For decades now, Education Officers, recently renamed Heads of Learning, have fought to have such matters explained on labels. Nowadays, there is surely less need for this. Handheld devices can easily provide the relevant information. Athena is more ambivalent about the audioguide, which seems so often to induce passivity in the user. The voice may urge listeners to look more closely, but many stay put, happy to allow the few steps forward be taken on their behalf.
Allowing for the fact that technology may, in the future, change the way in which labels are presented to the public, what then are they for?
A label should help visitors look more closely into—and look again at—the object it relates to. They may check, for example, whether, in a sculpture, the colour of the iris is indeed suggested by the way the clay is cut—a point of both technique and style that’s easily missed.
They may look again, but now with awe rather than mere delight, at the hairpin ribbon of white in a lump of dark gneiss, having read how powerful shifts in the Earth’s crust, sufficient to ‘close oceans and raise mountain belts’, can bend even the hardest of rocks.
It is rare to meet, in art museums, the magnificent prose that’s applied to explaining the minerals displayed in the Oxford Museum, but a poetic turn is sometimes encountered and it sharpens the eye. To read of ‘impossibly pliant fingers coyly toying with the strings of pearls’ in a Baroque portrait in the Metropolitan Museum is to be encouraged to ponder the visual equivalents of alliteration, assonance and lovingly outstretched syntax.
However, label writers are also liable to common faults. The scholarly curator who looks through an object to another elsewhere finds it hard to resist informing visitors of a variant in the Vatican or the preliminary studies in Stuttgart. The enthusiastic Modernist feels the need to tell visitors how to respond: the work of art almost always ‘challenges’ a preconception of something that we never even knew or to which we were never attached.
As for success, it can be measured by CCTV, which reveals whether visitors who search the label for more than a name, a date or the medium return their eyes from the text to the object itself. That, after all, is what they’re really there to see.
‘Labels should help visitors look more closely into the object they relate to