Jim Shrosbree

Video via David Lynch Foundation Television.

Tales of a Museum Guard part 2

Antony Gormley, Field, 35,000 terracotta figures, each 6 inches high

As a guard, you're constantly dealing with people as well as the art that you're watching over. Sometimes though, things just go wrong. A case in point was during the Antony Gormley show at the Modern in Fort Worth during the autumn of 1991. A family of brick makers in Mexico was commissioned by Gormley to make 35,000 handmade terracotta figurines to be used as an installation in various venues around the world. They were installed at the Modern in a lower level gallery space just eight steps down from the main floor, engulfing the entire space they stood in. A few days after the opening, a woman had visited the museum and was paying more attention to what was on the walls rather than where she was walking. As she stepped down the eight stairs to enter the gallery where the figurines were installed, she quickly found herself as one of them; another figure in a multitude of figures. The guard on duty had been slow to respond as she had descended into the terracotta abyss, too late to stop her as she blithely ambled down the wrong path altogether. As she was helped to her feet, embarrassed yet unhurt, she explained that she had thought the sea of orange was simply carpeting. So, as a museum guard, not only does one have to deal with the actions and attitudes of museum-goers, one also has to deal with their perceptual problems as well.

Blindsight and the Collective Unconscious

Chartres Cathedral Labyrinth, France

Sometimes it seems that we can still see, despite ourselves. A fascinating phenomenon is the case of a man who suffered a stroke to the visual cortex of his brain which left him blind. The important thing to remember here is that while his brain was damaged, his eyes and the rest of his visual array were left in pristine condition.

Researchers conducted an experiment with this individual. He had to negotiate an obstacle course without any sort of cane or device whatsoever and was able to pass by each object in his way without touching any of them.

The phenomenon at work here is the concept of “blindsight” which has been identified in patients with similar cases of brain damage. It seems that there’s a primary visual pathway at the subconscious level that the brain is constantly using. This subconscious pathway is bridged somewhere in the brain, feeding visual data to the conscious part of the brain, making a person aware that they are actually seeing something.

In the case of the man mentioned here, the stroke damaged the ability of his brain to bridge visual stimuli to his consciousness. Although he can walk through an obstacle course and he’s aware from a non-visual perspective that he’s doing it, he’s not aware from a visual perspective that he’s doing it.

This shows that there’s so much more that we experience at different levels on a daily basis; so much that we’ve yet to understand. When I first read the accounts of this blind man who can still see, it immediately brought to mind the concept of the “collective unconscious” as postulated by Carl Jung:

My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.^[1]

^{Could the core, basic part of the brain and its activity actually be a main part of the equation that Jung calls the “collective unconscious”? Was it this basic structure in the brain that gave Jung the impression that there are inherited archetypical forms simply because the brain is at work in mysterious ways, helping to organize experience? How then does this affect our perception of art? Are we seeing and responding to things at another level, despite our conscious selves, then adding to that basic response with what we have already learned and known while we were aware?} 

^{Further scientific research will eventually shed more light on this. On our part, we'll just have to keep on looking and thinking about art within all of our own various levels of consciousness.}

1. C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (London 1996) p. 43

Tales of a Museum Guard part 1

Having found myself in Fort Worth, Texas in 1990, I set out to find a part time gig to supplement my day job. Every Saturday and Sunday for the next two years, I found myself in another world, that of the museum guard. The people I met and the art that I saw, along with the inside story of what goes on in a museum is exactly what I will share in this series. 

After a short interview and on-the-spot job offer as a weekend guard to watch the galleries and keep people from touching the art, I was given a short tour of the museum -- the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. One key instruction that I was keen to remember was when I was shown where the break room was. That room, which resembled a kitchenette with a breakfast table, was very close to an office and restroom, just six feet away. The advice given to me was that the office was for the Director of the Museum, and so was the restroom. Employees were not to use that restroom; it was reserved just for the Director. "Interesting", I thought to myself, "that little thing called 'social stratification' that I learned about in school really does exist".  Stay tuned...