Sonata for a Museum Employee and the Devil

Tartini's Dream by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1824)

I. Larghetto ma non troppo

While we are amidst this approaching holiday of ghouls and goblins, it might be appropriate to remember the story of Giuseppe Tartini.

Tartini was a baroque composer and musical pedagogue born in in the town of Pirano, then Republic of Venice, now part of Slovenia.  Tartini is known for developing the “Tartini Tone”, an auditory phenomenon that happens where two high pitch notes are played together, producing the effect in a listener of a third, lower pitch note. This is described in the theory of sound as intermodulation, or difference tone.

As to Tartini’s creative output, it is comprised of primarily of violin concertos, but the main work for which he is remembered by far is his violin sonata in G minor, also known as the Devil Trill’s Sonata.  The piece has a unique biographical origin, dating to a night in 1713, when Tartini was 20 years old, and dreamt of being visited by the devil in his bed. This is how he described the encounter:

One night, in the year 1713 I dreamt I had made a pact with the devil for my soul. Everything went as I wished: my new servant anticipated my every desire. Among other things, I gave him my violin to see if he could play. How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and I awoke. I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least, the impression of my dream. In vain! The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best that I ever wrote, and I still call it the "Devil's Trill", but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so great that I would have destroyed my instrument and have said farewell to music forever if it had been possible for me to live without the enjoyment it affords me.

Starting with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, literature has been populated by many variations of stories around a person making a pact with Satan, as well as real-life instances where men who had seemingly supernatural abilities were thought of having such secret deal with evil forces. Doctor Faustus was in fact inspired on the real-life story of John Faustus, a Renaissance-era German alchemist and magician who was rumored to have evil powers. And after Tartini, as it concerns violin-playing in Italian music, there would be another real-life case of a violinist with such virtuosistic abilities that sparked pact-with-the-devil theories: Nicolo Paganini.

Did Tartini enter into an agreement with Lucifer?  Per his own account, the interaction was only imaginary, within a dream. Would that still make the deal valid?  Whatever it was, it was so transformative that it resulted in Tartini’s masterpiece, reaffirmed by posterity. Out of all of Tartini’s works, The Devil’s Trill is the only piece that has remained in the classical music canonical repertoire, while his other compositions have receded into obscurity.

II. Allegro moderato

Halloween week also marks an important personal anniversary for me:  Thursday, October 23, 2020 marked the last day of my museum career. After 29 years of working in 5 different museums and maintaining a dual identity as both a museum employee and a professional artist, I finally left that world for good, in order to work as artist with museums but not as staff member. I jokingly call October 23^rd my “Museum Independence Day”.

But while you can take the artist out of the museum you can’t take the museum out of the artist. In 2021 I published a small memoir of sorts that tried to sort out my relationship with the museum, titled, A Journal of the Year of the Pharmacy.

While writing that book, I often thought of Robert Graves’s novel I, Claudius— based on the Roman emperor following Caligula’s assassination in AD 41. The novel builds on the historical fact that, because of his stammer and limp, Claudius was perceived as stupid and weak, which saved him from the palace intrigue, assassinations and power struggles that eliminate various members of his family. In some ways, Claudius is the original survivor.

I hope when you read this you don’t believe that I am ridiculously pretending to compare my banal bureaucratic experience with the one of becoming an emperor: the parallelism in my mind merely has to do with my role as a witness and a listener.  I was never even interested in ever having a museum career in the first place— it is something that happened almost by accident with me—, less in ascending in the museum hierarchy or having political power. Primarily, all I always wanted then, and still today, was to have the time to make my artistic work. I was dedicated and (I hope) competent enough in what I did that allowed me to exist in the museum field for three decades.  But maybe, and precisely because I was not in for the political gain, I was increasingly given more responsibilities. And most importantly, because I was an educator and an artist and not an ambitious curator in search for professional ascendance, I was likely seen as a safe and impartial interlocutor; and as a byproduct of that fact, often people forgot that I was in the room when they shared revealing or important insights about their work.

For many years I sat at a weekly, agenda-less meeting comprised of a handful of curators who had the pulse on the contemporary art scene and were eager to take the museum outside of the perception that it only dealt with 20^th century (primarily mid 20^th century ) art— a serious problem for an institution that once was at the forefront of defining the art of their time and was increasingly perceived as an august institution that could not react rapidly in documenting emerging practices.

I always felt incredibly uncomfortable at these high-end meetings. While they were meant to be informal, there was an implicit competitiveness, based on how much insider information curators had about current exhibitions, artists and issues in the art world. I was certainly unable to compete with them, but occasionally they would turn to me for footnote-like, contextual commentary if the subject turned to education or to Latin America. Mainly, I was a silent listener, and I guess not very relevant to the general thrust of every conversation. But my role, in retrospect, was what my role has always been in my life: the one of an observer, and sometimes, a chronicler. Observing those social dynamics informed my work in very important ways, first allowing me to make my version of what is now known as socially engaged art; in addition, by distilling real-life conversations and experiences I produced cartoons and performances that examined the idiosyncrasies of the art world.

While physically and intellectually draining, I loved my museum job in many respects. I loved the service to the public, but it also allowed me  to pursue a conceptual practice  that did not have to have a monetary outcome nor enter the traditional process of  exhibiting collecting, so I could produce ephemeral experiences like trips, songs, ethnographic research, or do performance lectures.

Yet I always felt that I didn’t belong at a museum. Sometimes I even felt that I had intruded into that world to spy into the annals of privilege and posterity, and report about them. What had brought me there? And would I end up paying for that privilege, and if so, how? Sometimes I even wondered: had I made a pact with the devil?

III. Andante

The Occupy era exacerbated the complexities of being a museum worker. Seen from the outside, large art museums are often seen, and sometimes with reason, as colonialist, extractivist, corporate institutions that reify inherently unfair hierarchies on the basis of class and race, and survive on the support of an out of touch elite, only paying lip service to an educational mission posted on their websites.

But the other side of the coin, which is much less appreciated or articulated, is that these very institutions are constituted by hard-working individuals whose purpose is to produce the best work possible, both in terms of creating meaningful artistic products and advocate for the public. They are regular individuals like you and me, but also committed people who work for a living and take pride of their professional expertise as curators, educators, visitor service specialists, conservators, registrars, exhibition designers and installers.

For many of us it was often dispiriting to see all that work dilute in the background around the protests concerning the unethical investment practices, behaviors and/or politics of museum board members.   Most dispiriting of all was being grouped as nothing more than a cog in the system.  I remember a time when an artist—who is now a friend‚ that I was once working with to do an in-residence project, kept pushing for some aspects of the project to occur at the museum. I was in the difficult middle place of advocating for her but also having to push back on her demands because I knew that certain things are not possible do to at the museum, either due to legal, ethical or safety purposes. Throughout the conversation she repeatedly complained that she did not understand why “the institution” would refuse to take that direction. For some reason this angered me, and I asked her who, exactly, she meant by “the institution”.  I wanted to impress on her that by speaking that way she was dehumanizing me and my colleagues who were trying to do her best to make her project work.

IV. Allegro assai

I believe that most of us who worked or work in museums always aimed toward, and fervently believe in contributing toward a greater good, steadfast in our thinking, misguided or not, that our good work might somehow redeem us. And in many ways, museum employees all confront a similar type of conflict that exists all around the art system, both in the for-profit and non-profit world, among artists, curators,  in collecting and in fundraising: we always face moral compromises and negotiate ethical quagmires  when we dig into the actual sources of wealth that fund our work. At what point do we draw the line in our ethical standards within the gray zone of funding and real-world constraints?

Fables and  Hallows eve aside, artists or not, arts administrators or mere mortals, the more perplexing reality is that these are questions we confront in our daily living. As much as we wish it wasn’t that way, every day is a bit of a negotiation with the devil, hoping that at the end of the day the grand sum of those dissonances result in harmonious outcome.

In other words: for better or worse, we all survive —politically, ethically, artistically, psychologically— against, for, and within a Tartini tone.