Intended as a companion
I wrote earlier this month about my disappointment at the disparity between the exhibition conjured by Edmund de Waal’s leaflet for On White and my experience of the display itself. I felt that his wonderful language very successfully evoked ideas about the power and vulnerability of porcelain, but that both his work and the pieces he chose from the Fitzwilliam didn’t achieve his claims visually. I’ve been thinking since that this is part of a broader question around the function of leaflets in a museum display.
Now, I am all for leaflets. I will purposely hunt one down, if I can, for every show that I visit, and I keep them all as reference for ideas, discussions, blogs … One day perhaps the ‘Barrett Collection of Museum Ephemera’ will be a popular resource. Museums use leaflets in different ways. I find the kind that you get at the RA useful, as they reproduce the wall panels for each room, with key images, so that you can read as you go around the show without crowding around the panels. This also makes them invaluable for checking details when you get home (and want to write a blog), and they’re a cheap alternative to a catalogue.
But, I also enjoy leaflets that attempt to do something different. The whole question recurred to me on Sunday when I went to see Martin Creed: What’s the Point of it? at the Hayward Gallery. I have written before about my reservations about recent Hayward shows, and about my worries about ‘experience’ art, both of which did come back to me in the show, especially in Creed’s balloon room Work No. 200; Half the Air in a Given Space. It was, however, a versatile and engaging experience with some works that were both visually and intellectually intriguing. To an extent it does exactly what the title advertises, leaves you asking ‘what’s the point of it?’ for both better and worse.
What really helped me to answer that question, though, was the leaflet. This is a ‘Martin Creed A-Z,’ which explains itself from the start as being ‘intended as a companion, rather than a guide to finding your way around the exhibition.’ The alphabetical entries range from materials and objects used in the works – blu-tack, car, dogs, metronomes, paper, walls – to discussing different types of Creed’s work that the retrospective covers – dance, drawings, juvenilia, formulae, protrusions – to concepts that interest Creed – ambiguity, expressionism, half and half, kinetic, nothing, order, zero.
As a different means of categorising and ordering the works, I felt this leaflet really helped me to think more broadly about Creed’s work and it’s creation over a lifetime answering a series of questions. As a living entity, rather than a final statement. Precisely a companion rather than a guide, that kept me thinking about the show long after leaving the gallery.