(Do Not) Touch!

Félix González-Torres, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA), 1991

As a museum- and gallerygoer, I qualify as timid, which is to say that I typically err on the side of caution and assume that I may not touch or step over the line. For this reason, I revel in opportunities to touch, or, as is the case with Félix González-Torres’s lyrical (and delicious!) candy spills, to take. The spill at right was included in the recently closed Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Brooklyn Museum. When I approached the spill it was surrounded by a group of onlookers. They were alternately reading the caption and examining the work, from a couple of feet away, of course. I felt a little dangerous as I walked up and took one—not because I was doing something illicit; I wasn’t—but because others may have thought that I was. Those who read all the way through the caption quickly realized that the depletion of the pile is integral to its meaning.

The question of interactivity came up for me at the New Museum’s triennial, The Ungovernables. The most audaciously user-friendly work in the show is undoubtedly the Slavs and Tatars’ PrayWay (2012). When I was there the carpet/bookstand was draped with teenagers. I confess not to have gotten much out of this work, but people seemed to enjoy it; perhaps the take-away here is that the New Museum should invest in some gallery benches.

More intriguing is Abigail DeVille’s Dark Day (2012), which occupies the awkward little space halfway between the third and fourth floors. The niche is reimagined as an irregular black and white grid and crammed with all manner of detritus that seems to have been sucked toward the back wall and up. Wary of stepping over the threshold, I craned my neck from my perch on the stairwell, hoping to catch a glimpse of where all of this junk was headed. Then I noticed a sad little green scrawl beside the wall caption instructing me to walk into the space and look up. And so I did, and it was pretty cool. Perhaps I should have known—and didn’t I on some level?—that this work demanded to be entered. Museum regulations have so thoroughly conditioned me not to trust my instincts—after all, how many deliciously tactile works deny the viewer’s touch—that I hate even to think about the opportunities for interaction that I may have missed over the years.

A final note: The transgression of traditional museum regulations invited by many works of art sometimes becomes the experience of the art, to such a degree that the work itself all but disappears. This is not the case with Dark Day, which, in retrospect, seems very clearly to require that the viewer step inside (even in the absence of handwritten instructions). This has, however, been my experience of other works; even, regrettably, González-Torres’s delicious spills.