The Museum and the Fire Hose
You are in an art museum. Like most museums, and especially most art museums, you stare at the art. Something happens while you stare and contemplate. You get into a zone of understanding and reflection. This zone is something that has been described before. Shari Tishman wrote a book on it. The Slow Art Day activities at museums stress the importance of looking — slowly, while paying attention. Looking and paying close attention is something stressed by all art museums.
Look at the above photo I took while in Prince Edward Island. I had been looking at the art in the museum and when I looked around, I couldn’t help but stare at the fire hose access panel. You are probably thinking: sure it is a fire control thing. And while this is true, the museum is doing something tricky. It is creating a way of thinking and contemplation while wandering around an enclosed space. It is natural to see the panel as a utilitarian artifact — something that is to be used in case of fire. But it is also possible to suspend the utility judgement, just for a short while, to stare at the panel as if you were looking at art. It is about paying attention.
Lot of ideas came into my head while looking at the panel. My computer science background got me thinking about water as data. Data flowing through a pipeline with gates and transformers. I also wondered about art that might include fires of the past, like this one:
What are the mathematics of the panel? Geometry and algebra came to the rescue. What were the social consequences of fire in the past before the ubiquity of such panels? What are models of the panel and of fire? What is fire anyway? There are many places to go when slow looking at the fire panel.
This way of slow thinking does not require an art museum, but art museums provide this training as a matter of course. It is what they do. The fire hose panel is not a work of art in the traditional sense, but you can use this newfound ability to see things in new ways.
While on an extended trip to Canada, where I went into various museums, I also visited the Metropolitan in New York City. The primary purpose of the visit was to spend time in the Van Gogh’s Cypresses exhibit. However, I also spent time considering a work by Dove Bradshaw from 1978.
I loved this work and also a performance created by Bradshaw. Zoom in to read the text. Bradshaw put postcards of this in the Museum’s gift shop:
