In the first chapter of her wonderful memoir of, in her words, ‘art and life and sudden death’, the UK art critic Laura Cumming makes the following statement;
‘.. pictures can shore you up, remind you who you are and what you stand for. The relationship we have with them is so singular and unique that nobody can gainsay our experience. What you see is what you see, yours alone and always true to you, no matter what anyone else contends.’
Having looked up what ‘gainsay’ means (it means to deny or contradict), I have been mulling over this observation, which resonates in many ways with how I think about the experience of looking at art. We bring our own perspectives, informed by our life experiences, different knowledge and emotional state to any encounter with an art object. Hopefully, we gain understanding and make meaning though connecting with art, almost by being in conversation with it. If the encounter goes well, the artwork ‘speaks’ to us and we in turn communicate back to it, bringing our ideas and feelings to interpret what we see and sense more broadly. Through this dialogic process we enter into a relationship with the art that is, as Laura Cumming acknowledges, ours alone.
But what if the encounter does not go well? What if the art object remains silent and we cannot make any connection at all? Rather than entering into a dialogue we are confronted by an unfamiliar, and intimidatingly inaccessible object. In that moment we can feel uncomfortable and, as I have experienced so often, make the decision to turn away and move on. The opportunity to develop a relationship with the art object is lost, and with that all the potential richness and inspiration that comes with a positive encounter.
It comes as no surprise then that many of the principles on which gallery education practice is based are intended to support visitors to make that personal connection with art. The aim is often to give people ‘tools for looking’ and strategies for making meaning creatively. One of these approaches is the ‘Ways In’ approach that was originally conceived as ‘Ways of Looking’ at Tate Liverpool in the 1990s and for a while was implemented across all of Tate’s learning programmes. The approach, which is documented in the publication ‘The Art Gallery Handbook‘ is based on four frameworks – ‘A Personal approach’, ‘Ways into the object’, ‘Ways into the subject’ and ‘Ways into the context.’ Each framework is underpinned by a series of questions to help the viewer engage with the artwork, without dictating what their interpretation should be.
The ‘Personal approach’, for example, includes the questions ‘what are my first reactions and why might it make me feel this way?’ ‘Ways into the object’ invites the viewer to question, amongst other formal qualities of the work, why the artist might have used particular materials and processes. ‘Ways into the subject’ focuses on what the work is about – what questions is the work asking? And ‘Ways into the context’ invites the viewer to explore when and where the work was made and who was the artist, as well as taking into account the space the work is being shown in. These frameworks are not intended to be rigid, but rather are springboards for personal investigation. In some cases, the answers to the questions cannot be provided by the artwork alone and rely on the viewer having access to information that might be provided by an interpretation label or leaflet or online. This information however, is also not intended to determine what the viewers’ understanding of the artwork should be, but rather to help them to make, as the Handbook states, an ‘informed response’.
I have been thinking of the ‘Ways of Looking’ framework in relation to Laura Cumming’s statement. For, while I agree that ‘pictures can shore you up, remind you who you are and what you stand for,’ if we cannot find a means by which to connect with an art object, this fantastic affirmative process cannot happen. Galleries are complex places where entrenched hierarchies of knowledge and opaque rituals can be intimidating (for a helpful analysis of the impact of epistemological hierarchies I warmly recommend Deborah Riding’s paper which can be found here). And that is before you get to the art object itself. Having a few interpretive tools to draw on can help to build connections and get the dialogue with art started.
PRAM 