Read me like a book
Less is more when it comes to exhibition text these days. The movement in museums seems to be towards ever shorter labels and introduction panels, to an emphasis on creating a myriad of separate digital content that the visitor can choose to access but is not confronted by. But what about exhibitions where the objects themselves need to be read?
The British Library often confronts this question for obvious reasons. Their exhibitions highlight the library's fabulous book collections, and the power of the written or printed word in history. Interpreting a multi-page book requires you to select a single explanatory page, attach a label that presents the importance of the work as a whole to the reader, and point at a part of the text to read. The viewer must put in the concentration to read both, often switching between wildly different styles and periods of writing.
This requirement was brought home to me last month on visiting the BL's Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK exhibition, now sadly closed. I know comparatively little about comics, other than their broad history developing from eighteenth-century graphic satire (yes, I was of course excited to see a Hogarth print in there) and their increasing popularity today, so took along a friend who overflows with expertise and enthusiasm on the subject.
The display was enjoyably diversified from endless cases of open magazines by the specially-commissioned design of comic artist Jamie Hewlett. He themed the whole around the genre-changing V for Vendetta graphic novel, with slightly menacing mannequins in Vendetta masks grouped in corners of the exhibition. Spaces were separated by colour and style around different themes: social exclusion, lust, politics etc. I particularly enjoyed the sections that evoked a comic artist's studio and book shelves. The sense of production and influences was really helpful and I felt could have been put earlier in the display.
I was also really aware, however, of the level of reading and concentration that the display required from me. With my little knowledge base, I needed to read every label to understand what I was looking at, and then every comic page in order to see what was being pointed out. I realised how much I am used to skimming across the surface of exhibitions, 'reading' the relationship of pictures and objects in my own way. Because this display required me to read text and pictures together (I hugely enjoyed looking at the visual developments in comic art), I felt I couldn't do that.
I sat down in the final room to look through some of the fabulous contemporary comics that only exist online. As I clicked backwards and forwards through different options, I realised how much my looking is now conditioned by these digital possibilities for short attention and rapid change. Thanks to the British Library for creating a space that re-emphasises the power of the printed word, and the careful attention that it merits!