* * *

{AFTERWORD.}

It has been found that most museum visitors, on average, spend three seconds in front of one work of art. I work in an art museum; this is a fairly discouraging statistic. In response, museum educators have developed a barrage of art educational programs in the hope that visitors might have more meaningful encounters with art works. For the individual museumgoer, the options are centered, by and large, around the use of new media: there are audio guides, which often provide celebrity or curator-narrated audio tours of the museum's more popular or unusual works of art, and more recently, touch screens, strategically placed within galleries, which help the visitor to navigate through online collection databases and virtual museum spaces. For groups of visitors, of course, there are docent-led tours, where in the span of a half-hour’s time, the herding metaphor shifts from sheep to cats…. Finally, if a visitor chooses to go it alone, there are always the dusty placards, dutifully delivering the artist's name, date, medium, provenance, and just a few sentences of art historical context.

Yet, this statistic, the one about spending about three seconds in front of a work of art, still holds. It exists as a nagging reminder that we haven’t quite gotten it right.

I felt a need to respond to these mediated, managed encounters, and think about what wasn’t reaching the visitor. I asked myself what might happen if a viewer were to personally invest in an artwork, allowing a relationship to develop, and deepen? Specifically, I wondered how my experience of a work of art might change over time if I were willing to invest in extended looking of my own.

I was inspired to investigate this conundrum by the concept, or the act, of nurture. The story goes, the more time you spend with something, the more you invest in something, the more that relationship deepens and strengthens. We spend time with a book, a musical performance, a dance performance, because we can only experience these modes of art in time. When we visit a new town or a foreign city, we like to take the time to get to know the spaces and places that make it unique. We spend hours, weeks, months, and years with friends, family, and loved ones. In contrast, the experience of art is self-dictated, and even though the importance of art museums as a cultural institutions is undeniable (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I work, for example, is one of the top-visited tourist destinations in New York City, bringing in 4.6 million visitors a year), we often spend only a few moments, or a few minutes, in front of one work of art. I began to consider what might be getting lost by not exploring this relationship in more detail. Conversely, what might be gained by exploring the relationship? I wanted to develop a pedagogy for the single museum visitor, thereby shifting the dynamic from art work–individual museum viewer to art work–individual museum participant. This gap in the field of art education has interested me for quite some time during my studies at Teachers College, and I have explored the conundrum by designing a museum curriculum that would facilitate extended looking vis-à-vis art-making and repeat visits to a single work of art. I’d like to further explore this idea in a more focused, sustained, and personal/experiential way.

Rika Burnham, a museum educator in New York City, explores this idea through the practice of extended looking through her class, The Observant Eye, and through her writings. She advocates for and bases her teaching style on extended looking at one work of art with a group of people as an art discussion class, which typically lasts between one and two hours. I remember that Rika once said, “My dream is to spend an entire semester on one work of art…” While she referred to a dialogue-based class group, I remember being inspired by this idea, and wondered what it would be like to try this on one’s own, using journaling and art-making as a way to relate to and build the relationship between art work and viewer over an extended period of time.

What might happen if I spend one year with one work of art? How might my art practice be inspired by this extended looking?

My hope is that through extended looking and responding to a work of art by journaling and making new artworks, that the relationship between myself (as artist, as educator, as art historian) and the art work will have much deeper intended and unintended meaningful consequences as compared to a typical passing glance, the use of an audio guide, or even the more unusual and rewarding extended dialogue that comes about through group classes like Rika Burnham’s The Observant Eye. Based on my findings, I would like to create a template for self-guided aesthetic encounters with works of art as a way to encourage visitors to actively engage with works of art in museums. Additionally, it is possible that artists, teachers, and art educators might employ aspects of my research and findings to either a school or museum studio art curriculum: this research, for example, could be adapted to a semester-long studio art course or an independent study as part of a studio art, art history, art education, or museum studies curriculum.

Conundrum that just occurred to me: is it hypocritical to suggest a “template” as a solution to the over-mediated, over-managed educational programs available (aren’t I suggesting another mediated experience myself by proposing a template for others?) I want to adjust the wording to acknowledge the viewer’s primary role in the aesthetic experience. I’m curious about the process and sharing the process with others, but I will need to work this out and articulate it differently, ultimately.