Tag: Museum of Modern Art

Observation: Visitors, artwork, and technology at the Museum of Modern Art

In 2013 the Guggenheim hosted a James Turrell’s retrospective that transformed the iconic rotunda of the Guggenheim into Aten Reign, a large scale and site specific work using light, changing colors, air and space, and the curves of the museum itself. Turrell transformed the Guggenheim into a site for artful reflection for all who entered the space. Rather than an object to look at or a subject to contemplate, the experience of being in this transformed space was the work of art. “A lot of it is the idea of seeing yourself seeing, and how we perceive” Turrell has said of his work that lacks image, object, or “one place of focus” (Guggenheim).

During the length of this exhibition, there was no art on the walls of the Guggenheim’s spiraled hallway. Visitors were encouraged to lay on the ground of the lobby and gaze at the ceiling, which, using light and color, had been transformed into overlapping ovals of bright fluorescent hues. It was ethereal, magical, meditative, sublime. In an attempt to preserve the sense of bliss and encourage quiet, unmediated reflection, no photography was allowed in the space. 

Something I can say with complete certainty is that hearing a security guard shout into an echoing rotunda “NO PHOTOGRAPHY” every two minutes was not conducive to an ethereal, magical, meditative, or sublime experience. Something I learned during my visit to the Guggenheim that day was that visitors will do whatever they want. They will get the validation of their experience that they expect. They will share their experience no matter what.

This experience, six years ago, has stuck with me and prompted me to think about how the relationship between people and their smartphones has affected the experience of viewing art in a museum gallery setting. This experience, among others, has largely influenced my interest in museum studies, digital media, and tech theory. 

Background

I used to always bring a journal into a gallery and take notes on the works I liked, the artists, themes, books I should follow up with. Now I take photos of wall texts, books I want to look into, and of other people taking photos in the galleries. Sometimes I feel weary and critical of my own increased use of technology in galleries, but recognize that people, including myself, want to personalize, document, and share their experiences. In Finding Augusta, Cooley discusses Michel Foucault’s conception of “speaking the self,” and that often “much of what we document of ourselves transpires at the nonconscious level of the proto-self, at the level of impulse” (Cooley, 2014). This interest in “speaking the self” extends into many, if not all, facets of our digitally connected world.

Prompted by this assignment to conduct an observation relating to information studies and our personal interests, I decided to do an observation at the Museum of Modern Art. My intention was to observe specifically how people use technology, specifically smartphones, in a museum gallery setting. 

Perspective, or, guiding questions for assignment

General questions to guide my inquiry:

  1. How do people engage with art in a museum gallery setting?
  2. How do people engage with technology  in a museum gallery setting (both their own devices or provided by the museum)?
  3. How does technology, specifically the use of personal devices, mediate a viewer’s experience with art in a museum gallery setting?
  4. What do people do with their personal devices? Social media, digital scrapbooks, text messaging, etc?
  5. How does the use of technology by others affect an individuals experience in a museum gallery setting?

Specific questions for observations:

  1. How many people who walked through the gallery used a photo to take a photo of a work of art?
  2. How many people used their phone for non-art related purposes, namely, communication?
  3. What other phone use did people engage in?
  4. How many people used a camera to take a photo of a work of art or the gallery?
  5. What other technology was used (either personal devices or provided by museum)

Observations and data

I sat between rooms 205 and 206 (marked on Fig 1) within an exhibition titled “1970’s-Present.” Immediately upon entering this exhibition space on the second floor of the museum, there were large paintings by Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, and Basquiat. Further into the gallery I found a place to sit, where I could observe visitors walking through the gallery in either direction. My focus was on visitors who walked into room 205 and then through rooms 205 and 206. 

Fig 1. Area I was observing marked in pen.

I used a worksheet to tally how people took photos of artwork in these gallery rooms with a smartphone, camera, or other device. Using a tally system I recorded how many people used their phone for communication (in some cases I couldn’t tell, in some cases I could see that people were texting, snapchatting, emailing, on Instagram, etc.). When I could, I recorded when people were using their phone for non communication or photographic purposes. The accuracy of these recordings were to the best of my observations as someone casually sitting on a bench in the gallery (I did not walk up to people or move to try to see anyone’s screens).

Fig 2. Worksheet/observations

Breakdown of tally (from Fig 2):

Phones used to take pictures33
Phones used for communication22
Other phone use5
Cameras used to take photos5
Other tech* seen
*Airpods, iPads, earpods		8

I realized while taking these observations that I did not include a section for audio guides. I added a section on my worksheet, but studying and observing audio guide use in the galleries could be an entirely separate set of observations and data that could easily include analytics from the devices.

A few things that stood out to me during these observations and while reflecting on the data:

  1. Within the scope of half an hour I had collected more data and notes than expected. I had intended to stay in the gallery for one hour but decided to end observing at half an hour.
  1. Almost as many visitors used their phones to communicate as take photos of the works, although visitors mostly used their phones to take photos.
  1. It was noticeable how many people idly held their phones in their hands. Rather than reaching for a phone from a pocket or bag to take a picture or send a text, the phone was constantly ready to be used. 

This last phenomena of visitors constantly holding their phone also points directly to our class discussion around Steve Jobs saying of the iPhone that it “fits beautifully in the palm of your hand.” This also relates to Foucault’s conception of “speaking the self” mentioned earlier, where we, as visitors in a cultural institution, see something that we react to (either emotionally, aesthetically, personally, etc) and find ourselves compelled to document and/or share. By focusing on cell phone use within the space of the gallery, I was in a unique position to notice a seemingly small detail that could have interesting implications in understanding how people connect to their technology in a museum setting.

Further research

Further research may include doing similar observations near works of art that are of higher profile. Had there been a place to sit and observe unobtrusively, I may have chosen to sit in the room with the Haring, Holzer, and Basquiat works. Immediately upon entering the 1970’s-Present exhibition, visitors are confronted with large scale, recognizable, and graphically engaging works by artists that are more recognizable than in the rest of the gallery. I am confident that different observations would have been recorded in that space given those particular works of art.

Further research that would be fruitful would be to understand what visitors do with their photos after they’re taken. If asked, “what are you going to do with that photo you just took?” Answers could range from, “I want to post it to my Facebook page,” to “I want to save this memory,” to “I am sending it to my friend who loves this artist,” to “I am working on a research paper.” I am interested in what the actual responses would be and their frequency. 

Conclusion

The conversation about technology in art and museum spaces is continuing to unfold as our lives and relationships become more and more mediated by technology. Much thought is being put into how museums and cultural institutions should relate to users and their lifestyles, many institutions have dramatically changed their photography policies in the past decade (Gilbert 2016), a direct result of the ubiquity of smartphones and visitors interest (and adamance) in documenting their experiences. As technology changes and evolves in ways that affect habits and our attachment to convenience and accessibility of social media, public institutions will need to grapple with how these developments affect their mission, rules, and expectations of visitors. 

Works referenced

Cooley, Heidi Rae. Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2014.

Gilbert, Sophie. 2016. “Please Turn On Your Phone in the Museum.” The Atlantic. Accessed October 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/please-turn-on-your-phone-in-the-museum/497525/ 

“Introduction to James Turrell.” The Guggenheim Museum. Accessed October 2019. https://www.guggenheim.org/video/introduction-to-james-turrell

Posted on by knadel 0

The MoMA Archives: Toeing the Fuzzy Line

For my event review assignment, I chose to attend The Museum of Modern Art Archives, Library, and Research Collections Fall Orientation on October 1, 2018. I was initially intrigued by this event because of the experience I’ve had working as a GA at the Pratt Institute Library in Brooklyn. There, I spend a decent amount of time paging artist’s books — which I learned often aren’t even books at all. One document I’ve come across actually most closely resembles a bag of flour. The experience of spending time in this environment (which is closed off from patrons and requires the assistance of library staff to access) has been interesting to me in that relates to some of my Knowledge Organization readings. (I still don’t know for sure if an antelope is a document, but I do understand how and why a bag of flour-looking piece of artwork is, and why it must be stored on an oversize bookshelf.)

If I am being completely honest, another driving reason I attended this particular event was that it lined up with my schedule. While I have always enjoyed my time visiting the MoMA, I did not study art/art history in undergrad, nor am I particularly interested in working in the art world upon graduation. Because of my general lack of interest in the area of modern art, I was surprised to find that many aspects of the event did prove quite interesting to me and very relevant to my LIS studies so far.

Several different staff members from MoMA’s archives spoke throughout the course of the orientation, which was largely a walkthrough of MoMA’s online catalog (called the DadaBase) and finding aids. They peppered in ample encouragement to obtain a MoMA library card (which is super easy to do).  One person who spoke was in charge of long-term preservation of materials; essentially ensuring files don’t corrupt in storage and are migrated to formats that can still be opened in, say, 20 years. This entails making sure “.doc” files are changed (en masse) to “.docx,” for example. It made me think of points raised by Nick Krabbenhoeft, digital preservation manager at the New York Public Library, when he visited our class, like the storage aspects of the Open Archival Information System. Before starting the LIS program I had never thought of archiving as a constant process. I was taking for granted all that must happen in between a document being processed and later retrieved.

I found the presentation from Jenny Tobias, Reader Services Librarian, to be the most engaging. She explained that MoMA has 6.5 million “pieces of paper” in its holdings that supplement its collection and discussed the increasingly “fuzzy line between informational and artifactural.” The documents she described included correspondence between MoMA librarians and artists, which revealed greater context surrounding the exhibits these artists were putting on at the time.

“It just gives you the nitty gritty sense of how these artists were working and talking with each other and what their thought process was,” she said.

She added that there is an increased interest in archival materials within the museum field, and that MoMA has plans to intermix documents from its archives into its exhibits and permanent collection. This made me think of part of the Whitney’s recent exhibit “An Incomplete History of Protest,” which I really enjoyed. I was particularly interested in the letters on display that comprised “Strike, Boycott, Advocate: The Whitney Archives,” which were classified as “collective, artist-led engagement with the Museum”: essentially, letters written to the museum about planned strikes and boycotts. Some were letters from artists requesting their work be taken off display as a protest measure.

Tobias explained that she and her colleagues are currently in the process of going through the collections to “select things to digitize that represent works of art when there’s no object available, such as documentation of performances, or event scores, diagrams for how to assemble an installation, mail art, [or] visual correspondence.” She said that “these types of materials could themselves be considered artwork or represent[ative of] art.” This caused me to reflect on the 1991 article from Michel Buckland “Information as Thing,” which I read for my Foundations of Information class. Specifically, it made me think about the notion as information as process and information as thing. While information as process typically refers to the intangible, I feel that the evidence or documentation of process apparent in these types of documents is still pertinent. I somehow hadn’t made the connection between information as process and process art before attending this event, but this is now helping me conceptualize the actual value of process art in a new way. I suppose, however, that “information as thing” is a better comparison here. This connection caused me to think critically about what actually contains more information — a piece of artwork or the accompanying documents (e.g. visual correspondence surrounding the exhibit that the artwork was shown at it).

Posted on by Allee Manning 0