Museum Visitor Breaks a Clock Exhibit
Surveillance video from the National
Watch and Clock Museum in Columbia, Pa., shows a man handling a clock on
display, only to have it come crashing down in pieces.
By NWACM on Publish Date August 8, 2016.
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A man walked into the National Watch and Clock Museum in Columbia, Pa., in May. A video showed him admiring a sculptural wall clock on display, touching and pulling on it at least five times to see how it works.
Any observer could sense that something bad was about to happen. And, indeed, it did.
The wooden clock, which was made by the artist James Borden,
fell off the wall and collapsed into pieces, footage showed. The
unidentified visitor alerted a museum staff member and confessed, PennLive.com reported. The director of the museum, Noel Poirier, said the clock was sent to the artist to be repaired.
The
episode is one in a recent series of disastrous encounters between
humans and historical, natural and artistic exhibits that resulted in
the art or displays being defaced, punctured or broken because of
curiosity, clumsiness or carelessness.
Officials
in the museum community say that no plan to protect exhibits is
foolproof, and that the recent episodes reflect the balance that museums
seek between making their collections accessible to visitors and
keeping them secure.
Wayne LaBar, the president of the board of the National Association for Museum Exhibition, a professional network of the American Alliance of Museums,
said common sense guides museums about what precautions to take, but
even with the best systems, “every once in a while, people surprise us.”
The problem is a global one:
■
Last month, two boys used a sharp object to outline a 5,000-year-old
historical carving in Norway thought to be among the earliest depictions
of skiing anywhere in the world, The Telegraph
reported. They apparently intended to “fix” it to make it more visible,
but permanently defaced the carving, on the island of Tro.
Norwegian officials described the episode as a national tragedy, according to news accounts.
■ Also last month, a 90-year-old woman visiting the Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Germany, used a pen to fill in the spaces in an artwork
that depicted part of a crossword puzzle. Officials filed a criminal
complaint about the unidentified woman for defacing the exhibit,
“Reading-work-piece,” by the avant-garde artist Arthur Koepcke.
A lawyer for the woman later said that she did not damage the artwork — which included the phrase “insert words” — but merely completed it as the artist intended, the German news agency DPA reported.
■ In June, a boy smashed a giant LEGO sculpture of Nick from “Zootopia” at an expo in Ningbo, China. The artist had spent days piecing it together, reports said.
■ In May, two children at the Shanghai Museum of Glass were caught on camera
touching a sculpture, “Angel Is Waiting,” by Shelly Xue, as their
parents recorded them. When one child pulled the sculpture away from the
wall, it fell and broke. A video of what happened went viral.
■ In 2015, a 12-year-old boy in Taiwan tripped and punched a hole into an oil painting that was more than 300 years old and valued at $1.5 million.
Steve
Keller, who has worked in museum security since 1979, said the
phenomenon of visitors’ defacing exhibits has been going on for years.
He linked their actions to mental instability, a lack of appreciation of
art or sheer ignorance.
Mr. Keller, the president of a consulting firm, Architect’s Security Group, in Ormond Beach, Fla., worked at the Art Institute of Chicago.
He recalled a visitor who wanted to take a photo of himself with a
sculpture in the foreground and a painting in the background. The
visitor could not frame the photo to his liking, so he wrapped his arms
around the abstract sculpture, which was the size of a person, and
turned it on its pedestal to get the best angle.
On
another occasion, a teenage boy lifted a girl so that she could put her
lipstick marks on a portrait at the same museum. While it was not
necessarily a malicious act, Mr. Keller said, it was “kids being
stupid.”
“You can’t protect every object on display and guarantee it will not be damaged,” he added. “That is the nature of display.”
Mr.
LaBar said the number of exhibits being damaged has not prompted any
widespread discussion within the museum community because curators,
designers and security experts wrestle with these issues all the time.
Jim Coddington,
the Agnes Gund chief conservator at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, said: “I think the first and most important point is that events
like these are outliers. While they trend on social media, they do so
because they are highly unusual.”
The
balance comes in not putting up barriers that distract from the
exhibits. For instance, Mr. LaBar said, visitors want to be able to
appreciate the brush strokes of a painting without protective glass
inhibiting the view. Forms of protection can be static, such as barriers
that make you pause before going farther, or more active, such as
posting security guards. Other systems sound an alarm if a visitor breaches an area.
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Beth Redmond-Jones, the senior director of public programs at the San Diego Natural History Museum,
said there had been a shift over the past 30 years with the growth of
children’s museums, which have led visitors to expect hands-on,
interactive exhibits. She said research has shown that museum-goers have
a better appreciation of their experience when they can make a personal
connection.
Ms.
Redmond-Jones called the recent episodes “incredibly unfortunate.” She
said she hoped that parents and teachers instill in children a sense of
museum etiquette, including the notion to look but don’t touch.
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