This afternoon I packed up my exhibition entitled Presente! at the Cathedral in Bradford, where it has been on display for the past month.* It was a curious experience in at least one respect. Talking with the staff in the Cathedral they were unanimous in reporting the very positive response to my material. This was in contrast, however, to the remarks in the comment book that had been left next to the display. It was not that the remarks written there were negative in spirit, but that there were so few of them. I know that hundreds of people will have passed through the building during the past month, and that a large proportion of them will have looked at my work. There were, however, only about twenty comments in the book. What should I make of that?
At first I found this disappointing, despite the positive tone of the responses recorded there, and the fact that some recorded visits by old friends I have not seen for a long time. As I drove home afterwards, however, I reflected on this situation and began to ask myself what I might have expected. Perhaps our expectation as artists is rather unrealistic, when it comes to popular responses of this kind.
Did I anticipate that there would be profound crucial observations, conveying novel and interesting insights into my work? No: in fact had there been such I would have been really surprised. Even when we are talking with people directly about our work, artists typically find that they have difficulty in articulating a response. There could well be at least three reasons for this.
First of all, when I think about my own response to exhibitions it is often the case that I have difficulty in bringing into focus my response, and more often than not it is only after some reflection that what I think about the material comes into focus. Why should I expect that the general public will find it any easier to put their impressions into words?
Then, the educational system (certainly in this country) doesn’t prepare children very well at all for the task of speaking about art and their responses to it. As often as not they are expected to do little more than say whether or not they “like” something, but not equipped to put into words the precise nature of that experience.
Finally, it does seem slightly strange that I should be expecting that a response to painting always must be verbalised. The fact that somebody refrains from speaking about an experience surely does not imply that the experience has been trivial or superficial. Our emotions do not always map directly onto our vocabulary, and the words we use (sometimes quite readily) can be terribly imprecise. Take the fact that several of the visitors commenting on my exhibition said that it was “moving”. If I stop to think about it, I’m not entirely sure what that might mean as a description of their experience. If visitors could not find words with which to comment this does not necessarily mean that they were entirely indifferent to it.
Perhaps it is the case that not only do I need to rethink my appreciation of the value of “Comments Books”, but that artists in general should be reappraising their use. Perhaps in a future post I’ll tell you about two experiments I once did that are relevant to this issue.
*The exhibition dealt with my response to Italian experience during the Great War. I was invited to show it in the Cathedral to mark the Centenary of the ending of the war.