The Tartan

By Nina McCambridge

The Carnegie Museum of Art is free to Carnegie Mellon students. I go there frequently and would recommend you do the same. However, as entitled as it might sound, I admit that I dislike having to go through Scaife Gallery 2 to see the rest of the art. This gallery currently houses an exhibit called “What Brings Us Here?” I love a lot of the art in this exhibition, but I find it very difficult to appreciate the display.

“What Brings Us Here?” is essentially an essay. Paragraphs of text are printed on the walls at the same scale as the paintings. Some paragraphs explain that the art has to do with senses of place, and some paragraphs have personal reflections from the five curators. I’ve noticed the average museum visitor spends the majority of their time reading labels rather than looking at the art. This gallery is made for those people. 

On the other hand, if you’re like me and can’t read, the exhibit makes absolutely no sense. Many of the pieces have no way of answering “What Brings Us Here?” unless you read their labels, which generally convey what the artist was trying to get across. (Weren’t we supposed to have killed the artist?) The extreme discordance of the various styles make everything hard to parse. Is this a real Van Gogh? I didn’t even notice it among this pile of rocks and this portrait of the United Nations. Anything beautiful should have a sort of coherent but creative naturalism. On the white walls, this art is free from any natural connections. They had to be imposed. In Shakespeare’s time, we used to say that we were going to “hear a play,” but now we “see a play.” Now, we “see art,” but soon, if we find it necessary to explain art, will we “read art”?

One of the art pieces is a television playing three videos (“Homage to Milltown,” “The Fall 1980,” and “Cite Specific”) by Tony Buba in a loop. All of the videos are text-centric; the text is read aloud in one of them. At some point, the narrator says, “before we get accused of didactical left-wing preaching, we conclude this broadcast.” However, the broadcast does not conclude, so I will accuse him of whatever I want. I will admit I do not want to hear about how 26 percent of Americans voted for Reagan while I am looking at “Wheat Fields after the Rain.” Even if you can’t read, you’re assaulted by words from this piece.

The video piece actually couldn’t be placed anywhere else. The narrator says, “If you’re seeing this, you’re probably in a gallery or a museum.” The point is to lecture you as you’re trying to look at art.

Many of the famous art museums (the Louvre, the British Museum, etc.) were established in the 18th century. According to Wikipedia, the first true art museum was established in 1661. A state-owned museum is a modern, liberal conception in much the same way as universal public education. Why do I get to see this Van Gogh? I’m nobody. Thank you, Carnegie (for founding the museum) and the Sarah Scaife Mellon Family (for donating the painting in question).

Throughout history, art has usually fulfilled some clear purpose: heroic monuments, religious icons, ancestors who watched over the breakfast table. Fine art, on the other hand, was often made on commission. Through these instrumental pieces, people saw a glimmer of something else — a universal, irreducible beauty. C.S. Lewis says, “These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.” We used to allow our artists to transcend the propaganda and to make art for nothing but beauty. But we forgot that art itself and the beauty we saw in art are not the same. Now much of fine art is empty — nothing but a diagram for the artist’s statement, that dreary and meaningless form of philosophy. We couldn’t be free from the real and constraining narratives that old art adhered to, so we had to write these fake, forced narratives instead. “What Brings Us Here?”

Sometimes in older museums, art is stacked so high on the walls that much of it is near impossible to see. I think that this is essentially how galleries used to be set up. Many artists were displayed at once. Art was put up, sold, and taken down at a lively clip. Now, the style (in both gallery and museum) has changed in order to center a single artist or, moreso in the case of museums, a unified style, with all the art visible and with few distractions. In fact, the art is displayed essentially in a formless void. In an unreal prism of white light, we look at the captions with an appraiser’s eye. The museum gallery is modeled on a gallery where art is sold. Institutional art seems too serious and hierarchical, and we can’t see privately-held art because it’s private. Now as a public, we can only see art as it is in transit, waiting to be purchased and put somewhere real, even if it never ends up anywhere.

There is not a unified style in Scaife Gallery 2. There is absolutely nothing binding this art together. Not even their unifying question has anything to do with these artworks in particular. “What Brings Us Here?”, cry the pieces in every gallery of every museum. Were these statues lopped from a temple? Why was this panel cut from that altarpiece? Who sold off these ancestors? I still like going to the museum, though. Thanks for the free tickets.