In the weeks before the exhibit opened, while the interpreters were still practicing our moves, Tino gathered us in the reading room and told us what we were doing. Museums were places that addressed people, but that demanded no speaking back. Much like our over-mediated society, he said, the speech and thought of citizens, much like art observers, was not expected or required. Tino was worried about these mute public spaces, and wanted museums to be more participatory. I listened, with skepticism, even though just an hour before I had also taken note of the dull tired trudge of the people walking up the ramps, carrying their winter coats, barely pausing to look at the Kandinskys. It was a very expensive stroll up a ramp, I thought to myself, if one did not even bother to pause and look at the things. Even after this, I remained skeptical of Tino’s vision. Yes, there were codes of painting. But there were also codes of conversation. Weren’t we merely replacing one set of codes with another? After all, the interpreters were never asked to practice what we said. We had been chosen because we knew how to do our job already.
Our task in the piece was to interrupt an ongoing conversation by interjecting a new starting point, talking with that stranger for a few minutes as we walked, and then surreptitiously slip away from this second conversation before it had properly ended. We disappeared through a doorway and ran down two sets of stairs, to begin the loop again. Everything in the rotunda of the Guggenheim is designed: the patches in the floor and the signage are both intentional and unique. Painters come every morning to cover the last day’s smudges. By contrast the stairs that we disappeared into were undistinguished and indistinguishable. They could be anywhere, an afterthought. It was in that space, between the floors and between conversations, where I would scribble notes, and where I would on occasion feel a nagging sadness competing with my skepticism. Neither feeling could last long, however: out in the rotunda I was easily distracted by the light pouring in through the skylight and all the chatter.
After the first busy weekend, on a Wednesday afternoon I was walking down those nondescript stairs and met Asad, Tino’s friend who had originally convinced me to sign up, over a conversation about trains and focus groups and Adorno and strangers. Asad mentioned that a mutual friend had been to visit the piece earlier in the day. Had he liked it? I asked. Asad said that he had, adding that it was “probably for the best” that our friend had decided not to be an interpreter after all. I knew immediately what Asad meant by this, and felt the sting of my skepticism resonate strongly. “That’s not fair, he’s a very nice man,” I responded quickly. Thinking of my friend, his penchant for verbal pugilism, his overt impatience with chatter that merely rehearses the well-grooved paths that pass as thinking, that sting felt sharper. Why was I so patient with the people I met? So patient with their awful, boring comments? What would happen if I were to say to a museum visitor, “you really know nothing about that, you know…” Who were these people, all those people in the museum, in the subway, in the focus group, in the train, with whom we can talk without feeling discomfort? Or without feeling much of anything at all?
In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.
Not everything is without feeling. Wealthy women pushing strollers or carrying Prada bags know exactly how to push the buttons of an unidentified college professor of similar age. As do graying European travelers who refused to believe that interpreters were more than actors, and could opine on law, Freud, Seneca.
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