What’s in a label?

I’ve been at a conference in Germany this week, which has involved visits to a whole host of wonderful museums: in Kassel, the Cabinet of Astronomy and Physics, Marble Bath, Gemäldegalerie alte Meister, Murhard Library, and Naturkunder Museum; the Institute of Physics and Astronomy in Göttingen; and the Historical Museum of Frankfurt. This has got me thinking about labels, interpretation and how we use them.

The majority of interpretation in these museums has, of course, been in German and, not speaking German at all, I found this very frustrating at a basic level. When looking at an interesting object your first impulse is to look at the label to find out more. Likewise, on entering a gallery, you look for the orientation panel for an idea of how to approach the space and the displays. Yet, it is so easy to treat an exhibition essentially like an essay, and focus almost exclusively on the text, barely looking at the objects with any real attention. My irritation when I see people doing this has the same foundation as my frustration with audio guides.

In the absence of intelligible labels, you are in fact, forced to look more carefully at the objects, making sense of their function and aesthetics for yourself, and working out your own relationships between them. This makes both you and the displays do more visual work. I had such an experience in the ‘Dialoge’ exhibition at the Gemäldegalerie alte Meister, in which I was forced to combine the displays with the few words I could decipher from the room labels. This meant I really had to look at the paintings, and work hard to see relationship between them. My conclusion was that the exhibition is a ‘dialogue’ between the two contemporary baroque collections put together by the rulers of Kassel and Darmstadt. Any German speakers, please do enlighten me. But, to an extent it doesn’t matter if I’m correct or not as the experience forced me to engage unusually with the art, and come away with a different appreciation of the collections of the Gemäldegalerie alte Meister.