One of the tasks I was given was to find a piece of artwork in the museum that was ‘about noise’ not really knowing what to expect as I couldn’t think of anything from the week before that represented sound I didn’t know what to expect. Eventually I found a painting entitled; ‘Una and the Satyrs’ by William Hilton. The Picture features a lot of bright and loud colour, a wide and wild scenes scape and liveliness in the characters actions that speak noise too me. Tied with this and following on from last week, with my observations of the floor creaking being part of the museum experience, I decided to ask the museum staff if anybody had been removed from the museum for being too loud. They told me that they hadn’t and that it would only be an issue if the noise being made would border on anti social behaviour. This struck me to think if it’s possible to be loud in a museum and not have the behaviour become anti social. How the artefacts in the museum were laid out, struck me to consider it as a performance in its self, The way they were presented, by being put beneath glass, labelled and arranged for optimum viewing seemed to become an art form in its own right. It leads me to think, that in some way, the way we view to artefacts is a type of performance of its own. As it is put forward in Theatre & Museums (2013), “Today’s museum is a ‘theatre, a memory palace, a stage for the enactment of the other times and places, a space of transport, fantasy and dreams’” (Bennet, p.4, 2013). Depending on how we view the art leads us to interpret it in a different way all together. For instance, remembering back to the lesson before we were told that some room were dark than others as some of painting require to be lit specifically. It, although not intending to, created a different atmosphere, causing the objects displayed to stick out in my mind more than the others.
When I asked the museum staff about if they had any rules about noise they responded by saying ‘no’ and ‘this is not like a library’. I found this to be contrary to my previous thoughts that a museum should be quiet in order to absorb and interpret the art before you. I believe that if a museum was indeed loud, it would become chaotic and hard to focus and change the way we interpret the art. In the reading this week it was pointed out that “Traditionally, of course, museums arranged their collections in predictable, linear narratives; committed to organizational categories intended to be definitive” (Bennet, p.4, 2013) I Believe that by being chaotic, a museum would loose its organisation and become unpredictable to what we perceive the atmosphere of a museum to be, creating an unexpected social ambiance.
Works Cited
Bennett, S. (2013) Theatre & Museums. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hilton, W. ( Una and the Satyrs [Online] UK: BBCi.co.uk, Availble from: http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/images/paintings/lcnug/large/llr_lcnug_1927_147_large.jpg [Accessed 18 Febuary 2014]