Watching Paint Dry.
Once again, it’s night at the museum. An exaggerated evening. Taking the overnight watch for the next six weeks, privately contracted security guards. An essential service, these custodians supervise the empty hallways and the hoards of hanging artworks. Their sole task turned on its head; to ensure that the art is inaccessible and enjoyed by no-one. Suspended on the wall, suspended from the public, lonely paintings, photographs, and sculptures are momentarily dormant. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If an artwork cannot be seen in a gallery because no one is allowed to view it, does it cast a shadow? Somehow, these forsaken works of art have been shrouded in silence and stillness. Inanimate turns lifeless.
Gallery invigilators of better days have always passed the time people-watching. Observing the inane behaviour of the passing visitors, staging photoshoots, flinging their hands around dangerously close to the exhibited works. Looking at those looking. What is left to gaze at when the museum closes its gates to the public? The artworks themselves? Surely not. That was never a part of the job description. No doubt, the prospect of the guards actually observing the art would be a distraction, a security threat. Strict instructions: under no circumstance allow yourself to see, even for a moment, the artworks in your view.
Pacing the hallways, back and forth, counting the seconds. Supervising the artworks becomes a lesson in watching grass grow, or paint dry. I wonder if the security staff have a favourite place in the gallery to guard. I wonder if they have an appreciation for art, if that’s the reason they are babysitting paintings over international borders, or overly inebriated adults. Surely, any affection that lured them into the role has been superseded by endless days of blinding constancy. I wonder if they miss their visitors, the ceaseless changing faces of patrons and their potential threats to security? Like a hero that longs for a villain, the tangle of needing. Who will they ask to “step back please”? I wonder if it gets lonely in those empty hallways. I like to imagine that the security guards are counting the days until restrictions are lifted, that they are equally restless as those on the other side of the gates.
The marriage of surveillance and artistry is, in many ways, unexpected. A world of fantasy, imagination and creativity has been reluctantly wedded to precaution and wariness. Deliberately intimidating machismo brutes inadvertently find themselves in shrines of craftsmanship, like fish out of water. If only we could catch a glimpse of this aesthetic dissidence.
The first wave of our severance from the museum, confinement in March, saw the emergence of a series of digitised gallery experiences for international publics. Visit the Louvre without leaving your living room! Your favourite artworks uploaded to the main frame! This consolation, a tactless re-representation of that which was already accessible, centralised in a sort of false immersion. Performing normalcy and business as usual in the simulacrum. Any thrill previously associated with virtual reality eclipsed by the despair of a year spent at home and the desperation not to acknowledge this rupture. I wonder if the computerised gallery space had it’s own security guards, minding the pixellated hallways, guarding the url from defacement or theft.
In many ways, this digital theft had already taken place. In the frenzied endless reproduction of images, copy, paste and screenshot rule supreme. The final vestige of the institution; the ‘real thing’ duplicated infinitely. Once the gallery itself is a re-representation online, what separates the Louvre from your Google Images search result? The sacred has been desecrated, vandalised with a huge spray-painted cock, security has been compromised. I wait, to make my pilgrimage, reconciling with my sweet adversary, the security guard.
