Museum Guards—Dissertation Topic #2

After the Younger than Jesus show last summer at the New Museum (good installation photos here), I became interested in artists working with or performing as museum guards. Three works inspired the interest, and I even considered it as a dissertation topic—taking a longer viewer and institutional histories of museum guards. Maybe I should be in anthropology or sociology.

First, there was the limp banana peel on the floor, which, after reading an odd label about 30 feet away, I learned was a work by Adriana Lara. A museum employee eats a banana every morning and discards the peel somewhere in the exhibition space. What great play between protecting art versus putting viewers in danger. It made me laugh.

Then I saw a man walking around in a white tracksuit with red embroidery that looked like bullet wounds. I had heard about this work—called This Consequence (2005)—by Ryan Gander, and so I was looking out for it. The description of the work for someone associated with the institution to wear the suit, “exhibiting the work whenever they are present in the exhibition space.” I had heard it was a museum guard at the New Museum, and I saw an African-American man wearing the suit. Considering the usual racial breakdown of museum guards (especially compared to the notoriously white museum going public in America), I took both Lara’s and Gander’s works to have racial under(over?)tones.

The third work didn’t exactly intend to involve the guards, but it was a malfunctioning—or at least difficult—video game by Mark Essen that viewers were invited to site down and play (the piece past the sleeping woman, naturally). Not really having any clue about video games, the nearby guard came over and showed me how to maneuver my figure through some sort of obstacle. I quickly lost interest and handed off my controller to the eager guard who adeptly began to play. He surely had passed many an hour keeping the controller warm. As artists grow increasingly interested in participatory projects, guards take on new roles as instructors and even more often technicians. 

I knew of a couple other artists that had integrated museum guards. Tino Sehgal, who has recently received much well-deserved attention after his (our?) show at the Guggenheim, had guards singing “this is so contemporary!” at the 2005 Biennale—certainly a slight mockery of the biennale goers. Andrea Fraser played a museum tour guide under the pseudonym Jane Castleton for her Museum Highlights (1989) at our very own Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Just last week when I visited the 1969 exhibition at PS1, I noticed a guard standing guard over a case of documentary materials. When I peered in, I saw posters from the Art Workers Coalition’s insurrections into the museum space (institutional critique being guarded by the institution at its finest). I also saw a photograph of a Yayoi Kusama’s guerilla action “The Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at MOMA—Featuring the Usual Display of Nudes,” where she gathered a group of young people to get naked and frolic in a fountain in the outdoor sculpture area of the MOMA. The crowd of gawkers, the quintessential hippie liberalism of it all was interesting, but most intriguing was the African-American guard on the edge of the fountain bending down in a gesture of, “can you please get out now so that all can return to normal?”

But the real breakthrough of the museum guard was staged by some enterprising guards at the Met who, like many artists throughout history (including Pollock, Marden, and Ryman), are artists as well as guards. This group, so reported WNYC (NPR) yesterday, got together an exhibition and a journal of their own artwork. Listen to the piece here. And, better yet, check out their magazine SW!PE and show at 25 CPW Gallery (NYC), both of which showcase their own work. I wonder how their work will live up to those artists that depend on or use guards in their projects.

There’s my musings on museum guards…never to be turned into a dissertation but interesting nonetheless.