Disclosure Posted on February 11, 2010 by Dodie Bellamy
When I visit SFMOMA I am both an outsider without status and an artist in my own right, with a peculiar variety of privilege. Being a writer, I’m not central to the Bay Area art scene, but I bisect with it in overlapping circles. If you know any curators, the first thing that you’ll realize is that in private they love to act out, to throw off the formal constraints of writing copy for catalogues and signage, or whatever they call those informative blocks of text that hang on the gallery walls, from which the first person in forbidden. In private they take enormous pleasure in disclosing, in writing the forbidden, getting all personal and critical and gossipy, throwing around the first person with abandon. Get them alone and they’re eager to extricate themselves from the official discourse of the museum, to show the human side of the process, all the insecurities and resentments and near catastrophes. They expose their feelings about their jobs, and how at times when rushing around the museum they’re stopped in their tracks by the wonder of a piece of art.
Even with my privilege, there’s something about art museums that makes me feel diminished, like I need to be on my best behavior: all those rules for participation, you can’t bring in any water, if you want to carry your backpack you have to carry it in front of you, don’t stand too close, don’t touch, and everywhere the noticing guards. The whole set up makes one long to act out, to do something naughty. In the late 90s I brought the students from the composition class I was teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute to the museum to write about Kara Walker’s room-sized installation No Mere Words Can Adequately Reflect the Remorse This Negress Feels… (1999).
Kara Walker, No mere words can Adequately reflect the Remorse this Negress feels at having been Cast into such a lowly state by her former Masters and so it is with a Humble heart that she brings about their physical Ruin and earthly Demise, 1999
Their writing instructions were to subvert the objectivity of the essay form, and to narrate their unique experience of viewing Walker’s work, including the mood in the room, the behavior of other viewers, and how they were feeling that day. So my students took in Walker’s silhouettes depicting the violence of slavery and the sexual horror of the plantation, and used it as an opportunity to use the word “fuck” in their writing. They used it over and over again, like they were wallowing in their liberty. They were being silly and libidinal, yet they were making a point, for the word “fuck” does crumble the stuffy rigmarole of undergrad comp class culture.
