Presence/Absence

Navigating through a museum can be difficult and overwhelming for the museum visitor: the innumerable art pieces each with intricate details provoking thoughts, the sound emanating from  fellow museum visitors, the overly loud audio guides, and the crowds of people. A museum is a place where certain things are put in the spotlight, implying the absence of the others. However, as we observed the museum visitors and reflected upon our own gazes, we realized that the line between presence and absence is not so definitive after all.

               

In the Baldessari exhibit, for example, Baldessari was never physically present in the exhibition. However, reproductions of him including artworks made out of his own pictures, videos of him, and the knowledge that his hands transferred oil paint onto the canvases upon which we gazed, were all subtle ways that he became "present". Baldessari became simultaneously present and absent. In addition to Baldessari's "presence," there were a number of other participants who were present in the exhibit as well as the museum experience. One such participant was the curator, Marla Prather, who arranged the exhibit in a chronological manner. Thanks to her arrangement, the art observer may place his work in a time-centered context beginning with the earlier works of Baldessari. 

Prather organized most of the art objects at the same height on the walls with a few exceptions, such as several short films displayed throughout the exhibit that are not presented at eye-level. The observer is forced to bend down in order to engage visually with these videos.  The curator is even less present than Baldessari-- her name was not printed in large font anywhere,  certainly not on the large banner hanging outside of the Museum. However, she was not absent either. One of the museum visitors we interviewed expressed her dismay with the way the art works were shown, while the other thought adjusting the height of certain pieces, as well as the choice of dead white walls (as opposed to cream) was brilliant. These museum visitors were more aware of the work of the curator, but even the museum visitors who didn’t know what a curator is were able to perceive the curator’s presence in some ways. The curator is, like Baldessari, a figure bordering between present and absent.