I made a visit to the De Young last night to check out the Hiroshi Sugimoto show (which is awesome!), and I’d love to have the chance to harp again on how badly laid out (from a viewer’s perspective, anyways) the De Young is. Both of their “internal gift shops” that serve their special exhibitions are positioned in such a way that one is dumped into them “at the end of the ride.” As someone who’s not just looking at the art, but looking at the museum as well, it’s crass and off-putting, especially following an experience like the Hiroshi Sugimoto show, where you’ve just had your nervous system taken down a notch through the real experience of sublime works.
I know I’ve harped about this before, but Thursday’s thought session about the Murakami gift shop extravaganza has got my radar attuned to gift shop issues. What I’m seeing at the De Young is a sort of worst case scenario, especially in their basement galleries where their blockbusters reside. There are three gift shops at the De Young, and I think their main one is two stories (I could be wrong on this). Why in a museum so badly in need of floor space, does the merchandising have so much of it? Are they that desperate for cash?
The end of the Sugimoto exhibition is abrupt, at the end of the darkened, intimate space, after being exposed to works that are simultaneously powerful and quiet, one enters a low ceilinged, badly lit stub of a hallway, and then makes a sharp right hand turn into a lackluster collection of objects and texts. After so much money and attention was paid to the exhibition, so much of the gallery transformed to suit the needs of the work, why then the abrupt stop? Why not continue the lighting and just integrate the gift shop? Why is there no real close to the show, just an ending? It’s almost like the gift shop removes any sense of exit from the show and is intended to slap the viewer awake while shouting “Buy This!”
A Dead Woman’s Walk-In Closet
The Nan Kemper: American Chic show at the De Young is possibly one of the strangest things I’ve come across in a museum. First I’m thinking “why her? why now? why is this what the museum chooses to support?”, but then I start to get a little unnerved by the semi-morbidity of what seems like the Sotheby’s preview for an estate sale. Then that feeling is followed by a sense that the exhibition is out of place and time, a focus on glamour and excess while the country is simultaneously in an economic doldrum and fighting a vaguely defined, potentially endless war.
But that’s just first impressions. But then there’s the good side. Although I’m not interested in the objects, mainly because I’m not a particular fan of the kind of clothing on display, it’s not aggressive enough, not really a strong reflection of the times (although there is a really excellent collection of Yves St. Laurent women’s suits that really captures the relationship between modernist movements in fashion and architecture), I am always a big proponent for museums exhibiting “objects of use.” My interests are divided between a desire to see history through objects and a passion for aesthetics, and I think a teapot can be as valuable any “fine art” object.
So there is an opportunity here, but it’s not well articulated by the wall text or by the layout of the exhibition. This estate sale, has (or had) the potential to be a real window into a societal class that 99% of the museum’s visitors will likely never really have any significant interaction with. Although it seems to unapologetically celebrate that class division, presenting Kemper’s lifestyle as a natural and normal thing, the viewer is still able to walk through, and palpably feel the economic and mental difference between ourselves and this strange woman. In addition, there’s a certain blessing of having almost total awareness of the user and producer of the objects on display, a contextual advantage that isn’t very often available to a curator arranging a craft oriented show, but that information is never really brought to bear on the focus of the exhibition, it just hangs there limply, as unused potential.
18th Century Photography
Just outside the special exhibition gallery where the Nan Kemper closet currently resides, in the hallway, where once again, I’m reminded of how badly designed the entire interior of the De Young is, is a really excellent collection of 18th Century photography from the museum’s expanding permanent collection. While there’s a case full of brutally well kept tintypes and daguerrotypes on display, the real attraction is a series of photographs taken in mid-century across the globe, at familiar sights. All of these sites and subjects, the Colosseum, the Taj Mahal, a temple in India, the Parthenon in Athens, are somehow barren and alone, far different from their contemporary existence. I was taken by surprise that there were images of these things. I’d kill to see an exhibition focusing on even one of these traveling Europeans that brought back the first real images of things only known through the interpretations of painters and writers. There’s potential here, run with it!
Why this is in a hallway is beyond me, and why the De Young continues to give the shaft to their excellent photography collection is also beyond me. Works like these, although less sensational than the closet of a recently deceased fashionista, are what museums are built to house and display. The potential for learning and perspective in these images, as well as the appreciation of craft and the aesthetics of the images is massive, and it’s confined to a series of nooks off of a hallways, where it’s really difficult to get a look at them. I’m not sure if this problem stems from the initial failure to design and build the new De Young, or if it’s a failure of the curatorial and managerial staff of the museum to realise the potential of their collection, but it is a failure. The special exhibition gallery that’s currently doubling as an expansive closet could have made an exceptional home for the museum’s photography exhibitions, either on a permanent or on a rotating basis.
Technorati Tags: merchandising, photography, FAMSF, De Young Museum, De Young, fashion, Nan Kemper, museum, art museum
This “end of the ride” feeling– I hate it. The Tate Modern has an amazing gift shop, squared away at floor level apart from any exhibits and it makes sense. But in the Gilbert & George show they had a gift shop and coffee shop in the middle of the show– people were eating scones beneath the AID’s related, scatology panels and it was just insane– as all the work was hung very high, over the tables like some kind of product-tie-in wallpaper.
The connection between high art and product tie in marketing does fascinate me– these posts regarding the Murakami show, etc. are really interesting.
[...] Saint Laurent show, since the whole “make love to some dead socialite’s closet” Nan Kemper show is. It’s all Yves Saint Laurent. It’s basically a Yves Saint Laurent show. [...]