Rika Burnham is one of the most respected theorists and practitioners of art museum education I know. A former Director of Education at the Frick Museum, she is the co-author, with Eliott Kai-Kee, of the book Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience. I had the opportunity to work with Burnham on many occasions and partake on some of her art interpretation workshops. Her artistic background is in dance: she studied under Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham and went on to found her own dance company before moving onto art museum education in the 1980s. As part of her dance experience, she places great emphasis on how one moves through a gallery and actively incorporates her knowledge of choreography on how viewers experience an artwork in an exhibition space. She is also very experienced at provoking reflections using inquiry-based techniques. One thing that struck me during one of her educator trainings was the question of how one ends a gallery discussion. Rika’s suggestion was that one should simply say “we should stop here”, which felt to some of us as anticlimactic, and we tried to challenge her about it. Shouldn’t one offer some kind of concluding remarks? She said no. “I know it feels very satisfying”, she said then, for an expert to end with a grand interpretive soliloquy that can serve as the illuminating explanation of the work; however in her view this can undermine the learning process and wrest the autonomy of interpretation of the viewer substituting it with the authoritative interpretation of the educator. The slight discomfort left, Burnham believes, is important to keep.
I wrote to Burnham to confirm my recollection and elaborate, which she did:
“In the decades I tried to understand the practice and theory of dialogical engagement in the art museum, I had two great realizations. The first was the idea that questions, any questions, no matter how "open," are impositions, and the second was this that you describe, to leave the discussion open at the end rather than closing it with a grand finale.” Burnham explained that by embracing the Deweyan model that prioritizes experience over facts “I realized the sudden appearance of a grand finale/answer/conclusion would topple the inherent and vast mystery we set out to explore, and falsify by means of a predetermined conclusion, the necessary commitment to openness and ‘not knowing.’”
I have often thought myself about that interpretive issue and on my own discomfort on the idea that one should leave a door open that way: lacking closure goes against my personal instincts. Then again, I have thought about how resolution can often represent dismissal: once we know the “answer” to a question, we don’t have to think about it anymore, and when we do not have to think about it anymore the question loses its urgency. This is what we often refer to when we describe works as “one-liners”: works (often by amateur artists) that attempt to be witty but are not very interesting beyond a certain gimmick the artist employed to draw attention.
There is so much to be said about artworks and riddles- a whole book’s worth. In thinking about the topic, three Italian examples came to mind ( which makes me think that riddle-making might be an Italian specialty).
Leonardo was a prolific riddle-maker, often using humor in order to mock superstition. In one of them, he writes what appears to be a Nostradamus prophecy: “A great part of the sea will fly towards heaven and for a long time will not return.” And then noting, “(That is, in clouds.)”
Another category involves ideas that can be retroactively construed as riddles through art. Many years ago, I read what to this day is one of my favorite books: Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory. Yates was one of the most important Renaissance historians of the 20th century, as well as one of the most influential scholars on the subject of Hermetic thought and the occult. Two of her other major works include Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) and The Rosicrucian Enlightement (1972). Hermetics, should be said, were some of the most obsessive riddle-makers, constantly building symbols upon symbols upon symbols, creating a dizzying edifice of secret meanings that seems impossible to disentangle. But Yates was a brilliant disentangler, and explainer, of 17th century esoterism. In The Art of Memory, she discusses the ways in which Neoplatonists and other mystics used ancient mnemonic techniques (from as far back to Ancient Greece) to concoct powerful images. She describes, in wonderful detail, the case of Italian mystic philosopher Giulio Camillo (1480-1544), who dedicated his life to the construction of a memory theater — a Teatro della Sapientia; a monumental construction where all manner of practical and divine knowledge could be attained and a total repository of human experience, physically organized through mnemonic images. Camillo traveled to Paris at the invitation of Francis I to present his ideas and was given some funding to develop them further, but he ultimately was unable to build his theater.
Camillo’s memory theater, a place where all the things could be known, struck me as very similar to Borges’ short story, El Aleph, about a character who encounters a point where all the things of the universe can be seen from every angle without overlap of confusion. In some ways, I reflected, these concepts were prophetic riddles to the dominant answer to represent the totality of knowledge in the early 2000s: the search engine.
A decade later I unexpectedly bumped into Italian riddles again (just like the way the Borges character encounters the Aleph in a cellar). I was in Bologna, working on a proposal for a public art project funded by the Legislative Assembly of Emilia-Romagna. The curators and producers of the project, Julia Draganovic and Claudia Loeffelholz, were my hosts as I was doing an initial site visit. I was interested in the activist history of Bologna (in particular the student movement of 1977) and was contemplating to propose a temporary radio station for the city, exploring is cultural and political history. One of my questions was how to name the project.
The evening before I returned to New York I learned of the existence of the “Stone of Bologna” (la Pietra di Bologna), a spurious Roman-era tombstone (likely dating back to the Renaissance) commemorating someone named Aelia Laelia Crispis, stating the following in Latin ( here in the English translation ):
«DM
Aelia Laelia Crispis
neither man, nor woman, neither androgynous
nor child, neither young, nor old
nor chaste, nor prostitute, nor modest
but all of this together.
She was killed neither by hunger, nor by iron, nor by poison,
but by all these things together.
Neither in heaven, nor in water, nor on earth,
but everywhere lies,
Lucius Agatho Priscius
neither husband, nor lover, nor relative,
nor sad, nor happy, nor weeping,
this neither mass, nor pyramid, nor burial,
but all this together
knows and does not know to whom it is dedicated."
The following morning I ran first thing to Bologna’s Museo Civico Medievale to look for the stone. At first I could not find it and had to ask for the help of the museum staff who could not locate it either. We later realized that it was hiding under a projection screen used for lectures at the museum, and when they screen was lifted the marble stone appeared in all its enigmatic glory.
I then asked to go into the museum’s library to access the only book that specifically tries to trace the history of the stone. As I was trying to make copies in the small xerox machine, the director of the museum took the book away from me and kick me out, protesting that I was going to use up all the ink cartridge (“si spenta tutto il toner!”). The book in question (which I procured later), “Aelia Laelia: Il Mistero della Pietra di Bologna”, edited by Nicola Muschitiello, studies how the stone’s riddle has been a subject of fascination for historians, psychologists and authors, dating from the16th century and going through the Romantic era (Nerval, Stendhal) up to and including Carl Jung, none of which have likely unlocked the answer. In honor of that stubborn riddle, I proposed to name my radio station Ælia Media, which sought, in a small way, to chronicle the history and mysteries of the city of Bologna.
Solving a riddle makes one feel very powerful. But the more interesting question to me (and I wonder if I am being a traditional modernist here, but I believe I am not) is whether riddles should be solved at all. Like artworks, in an interesting way the attempt to resolve riddles with a final interpretation or “solution” might at times feel like a violation of the purity of their “unanswered” state. In the famous words of Susan Sontag in “Against Interpretation”: “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.)”
I recall when David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles was made famous by Lawrence Weschler’s book “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder”, a wonderful work that narrates Wilson’s conceptual exercise in institutional critique in the form of a Broodthersian museum, partially using it as a departure point to talk about postmodern irony and wonder. Weschler does that by doing deep detective work on each one of Wilson’s exhibits and installations, describing each of the “believe it or not” stories told in them and then showing that in fact many, if not most of them, were rooted on real facts —such as, for instance, the exhibit of the micro-sculptures of the Armenian-American sculptor Hagop Sandaljan, who worked with a microscope and human hair to make pieces that would fit the eye of a needle. The exhibits at the museum would make it appear that it was a complete fabrication, when in fact, as Weschler showed, they were authentic.
One time I was discussing Weschler’s book with a well-known scholar who was critical of it. He argued that Weschler “tried to solve all the mysteries of the museum”, which in his view undermined Wilson’s project. I think Wilson might have agreed, because from what I know he was not very happy with the book when it came out (but it passed). In retrospect, what I think went on with Weschler’s book about Wilson’s museum was some kind of unintended (and gentle) appropriation, wherein Weschler tried to make his explanation more compelling than the museum itself.
So the best art works are not only just like riddles in that they can never be solved: they also give us the feeling that the answer is tantalizingly within the reach of each of us.
Back to the exchange I had with Burnham on the question of grand conclusions about artworks: she told me about her dilemma between leaving questions open and providing summations of meaning:
“Both of these practices -- questions and grand summations — were hard to give up, they were seductive and made me feel very smart.” But, she added, offering an “answer” to the meaning of the work robbed them from their ability to find meaning on their own, which she questioned: “So why was I suddenly the authority, imposing "a truth" or "an answer" or a "conclusion" on them that may or may not be in sync with their innermost experience? […] As I write this, I realize how similar the two "awakenings" were: if I stopped asking questions, participants could ask their own questions, and if I stopped stating the grand finale/answer/conclusion, participants could each fully claim their own meaning. Which is where the heart of the enterprise is.”
Thanks! A great discussion about an issue I often wrestle with while teaching and writing about art. Brings to mind Jacques Rancière's early book on education, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987)) and his ArtForum article that is more directly related to viewing art, "The Emancipated Spectator" (March 2007).
Well written and engaging
R Chalfin