2023
Curated images from the RISD Museum’s collection and essay
Written and compiled for the RISD Museum Mellon Internship Independent Project
Originally published here
do i want to publish this here ??? would need to make my gifs smaller....
Untitled (Couple) in Any distance between us
Any distance between us sparked my interest in museum work. It was the first experience I’ve had in a museum that drew a visceral emotional reaction up from my stomach. I cried walking through the gallery. It was an important moment for me. I realized the power of curatorial choices and of museums to show work that means something to people and their experiences. I was so enamored by the show, I visited it four times while it was up, dragging friends, family, and even love interests with me. I wrote a paper on it for a class, using any chance I had to talk about it.
This summer, I’ve had the opportunity to work within the registration department of the RISD Museum. I’ve gotten to learn how to navigate and search within the two main digital databases, Museum Plus and Picturepark. Both require at least a basic understanding of how the search functions work and how to manipulate the search in order to get closest to what you’re looking for. In other words, you have to know what you want if you want the abyss of information to gift it to you.
Naturally, the first thing I did when given free reign to search in Museum Plus was to look in the Exhibitions tab for Any distance between us. A neat and tidy list of each piece in the show appeared in what is called an object group. Most pieces had pictures attached to their records. I was so excited to see them all again, linked together in the database.
However, seeing them this way was a bit jarring to me. The little lines that each piece occupied on the list contained almost all of the information you could desire: title, artist/maker, year created, dimensions, department it belonged to, medium. Its little picture sat on the far left side, peeking out at me. But this list lacked the emotional information that you get when you witness a piece or an exhibition in person. It felt cold and human-less, despite every piece and the show itself having everything to do with humanity, intimacy, and feeling.
I wanted to see if the museum had ever had or loaned any other Félix González-Torres works. By accident, I hit enter before typing the full name into the search bar, landing at just “felix”. To my surprise, there were 229 results. Some of the objects were made by artists who had “Felix” in their name. A very small amount had it in the title. My very own favorite Untitled (Couple) sat towards the bottom of the list. But the vast majority seemed to be connected to the search “felix” by chance. How did they get there?
My favorite objects that came up in the “felix” search
To search in Museum Plus and get accurate or desirable results, you have to be specific. I started to wonder, what would happen if I wasn’t specific? What would the mysterious depths of the data yield? Rather than being specific, simple, and straight to the point, what would happen if I searched for something complex, like human emotion or experience? What would the database give me if I asked it to reflect my human life back at me, in the form of the RISD Museum’s collection?
Branching off of Any distance between us’s themes, I searched for “intimacy”. 118 found. “intimate”. 211 found. “queer”. 49 found. When I searched “love,” 823 results appeared. The number was so big that I couldn’t export the search results to look at another time. That felt pretty poetic. This first batch of search results yielded a lot of pieces I expected it to. I saw familiar pieces from Any distance between us as well as pieces discussed in the RISD Museum’s publication Manual, which had an issue titled Intimacy. I took all of the charts that I exported from these searches and began to look for their images in our other database, Picturepark. Picking some of my favorites, I created little collections from each search.
The next round of searches broadened the scope of human emotions/actions I was interested in. “cry” 543 found, “crying” 28 found. “want” 260. “fight” 216. “anger” just 17. “miss you” 274. “happy” 238. A lot of pieces came up multiple times, in various searches. Patty Chang’s In Love (2001) was potentially the most popular piece. Looking through these searches, I found amazing things, both expected and not. For example, when I searched for “hug” (498 found), a majority of the pieces were made by artists with the first names Hugo or Hugh. Vast amounts of crystal or objects that contained it came up when I searched “cry”. Other results seemed entirely contradictory. A piece titled Lamentation of Christ came up in the search for “happy.” Upon further research, I learned that the reason this piece came up was because of its provenance. In the database, under the provenance section, it explains “A note in the object file states that this drawing came from the Bondy collection, and that this collection was confiscated by the Nazi government after the annexation of Austria, which took place in March-April 1938… It is unclear at what point the drawings were returned to Mrs. Bondy, but she clearly sold them freely to RISD, and was apparently quite happy about this transaction.” It was a fascinating way to get to know the collection. Does it mean something that there were more search results for “happy” than “anger”? And more results for “cry” than “happy”?
School of Anthonie van Dyck, Lamentation of Christ, 1600s, Walter H. Kimball Fund. RISD Museum, Providence 48.426
I couldn’t help but wonder what the database was “thinking” when I searched for these things. I’m sure there’s some complex and intellectual reason behind each object for every search, but I’m not entirely interested in that. Perhaps it’s up to me (or us!) to take the cold depths of information and see something there. The discovery of the provenance of Lamentation of Christ made me realize that perhaps even if the database doesn’t feel very human, it can only go off of what a human put into it. Whoever wrote this provenance included the word “happy”, and another human (or more!) kept that word and transferred it to its digital home. This summer has taught me that perhaps it shouldn’t be about humanizing the database itself, but humanizing the process and maintenance of it. The human interactions with the database are, in fact, the key and the thread to the mystery.
Below, I’ve paired some of my favorites from each search collection I created. In their human searches and coupling, the database has revealed more than perhaps it was created to be capable of.