Through the Light Loupe, Part I

Condition-reporting is the task that must happen before a museum exhibit gets installed. It involves checking every object for tears, rips, paint chips, cracks, etc., and recording their location with a painstaking exactness. A tiny excerpt from my thesis:

Not many people enjoy condition-reporting, especially after the first few hours. It is painful. It makes your eyes cross, your back sore, your brain numb. Combing every centimeter of every surface of an incoming exhibition takes days. Your hand cramps from holding the light loupe for too long, but you can’t loosen your grip; you might drop the heavy metal tool on the painting. Your palms sweat inside the cotton gloves. You arch your back, squeeze your eyes shut, and stretch your neck upward to counteract the constant stooping and squinting. You switch places with your colleague over and over; you measure the exact location of a tiny chip of lost paint or unknown detritus, visible only under the light loupe, while your colleague records it. A day of condition-reporting starts early and ends late. This other world, a world where time slows to a crawl, is immersive. This other world, a world where you are locked in the gallery for hours at a time, is imprisoning.

But I loved it. I loved breathing the same air as the painting, running my gloved hands over the frame to check for dust, calling out, “white accretion, two inches from the right, sixteen inches from the top.” I loved being so close to the paint that my eyelashes were in danger of brushing it. I loved the thrill of finding something that nobody else had ever noted before, of finding that miniscule scratch in the paint that had gone unnoticed by dozens of condition-reporters. I loved poring over every painting’s surface with my eyes inches above the canvas, gripping the sides of the table to prevent me from literally falling into the wideness and wonder of the piece.

The locked, hushed gallery contained only a few people and several dozen crates. I belonged to an underground society whose sole purpose was to uncover the secrets of paintings. And such secrets! Only we knew exactly where the thin strokes of black and gray swirled together on the gnarled tree trunk in a knotty seam. Only we could see where the canvas buckled under bulky layers of paint. Only we knew where the artist had splattered paint across a corner of her canvas in microscopic dewdrops. We stood on hardwood floors underneath bright lights and interrogated each painting: we asked what it knew, who had touched it, whose cat hair was forever embedded in its thick paint. The interrogations took place on old morgue tables covered with archival foam. It was strange to place something so rich with history, something so alive, on something that was built to hold the dead. The paintings changed from one exhibit to the next in ways obvious to our secret loupe-wielding society; minute damage was the inevitable trade-off for thousands of museum-goers having access to the works. But they changed more subtly when we carefully lifted them off the morgue tables and placed them on brightly colored walls next to each another, when we put a red-and-brown West Texas tree next to blue Taos skies. We could unlock an infinite number of melodies; we could play the paintings off of one another and watch the song change. I loved this part of the installation process, of entwining ourselves into the paintings’ histories, of adding ourselves into their complex equations.

south of the loop

Through the Light Loupe, Part I