Leseprobe

159 Labels make a contribution to the myth of the ‘pure’ artwork since they are instructive about what significance is to be attributed to the work (a Picasso? a copy?), and in doing so they suggest certainty. They seem to be so closely interlinked with artworks that they can be included in what Joseph Grigely described as ‘exhibition prosthetics.’ 12 Grigely, an artist and a theoretician, wrote, ‘a prosthesis remediates—it fills, it extends, it supple- ments. But it does not do this without also becoming a part of, not a part from, the body that it fills, extends, and supplements.’ 13 ‘[W]e read titles, labels, and catalogues because their authority establishes for the artwork a sense of place,’ Grigely states. 14 Empirical observations of museumgoer behaviour have shown that 85.1 percent of the visitors observed actually read museum texts. 15 It can be assumed that many more read labels. After looking briefly at the object, viewers—as has also been observed by another author— turn to the object label to cross-check the visual against the linguistic information. 16 Because of their often temporarymaterializations as well as their replaceability, labels are ephemera by nature. Detached from the object, they are placed not only in the above- mentioned tension between information and aesthetics, but also in a tension between ‘fact’ and form. In what follows, I am going to investigate further the power and the asso- ciation of object labels as well as the tensions and conflicts which characterize them. ‘Death by Wall Label’ In his 2008 essay, ‘Death by Wall Label,’ the artist and media-art curator Jon Ippolito polemicized against the dominant norms of object labels’ content. 17 Ippolitowas opposed to the practice of ascribing a single artist’s name, title, date, or definite specifics on mate- rial and media or dimensions to a piece of media art, and thus fixing it in a way which is in most cases impossible to preserve. To his mind, media art crucially depends on its variability, i.e. the possibility of modifying most of these features if necessary. The wall label, for him, was the symbolic representation of the obsolete urge for an original: ‘The gravest threat to the cultural survival of newmedia art may very well be its wall label. Fewmanacles on creativity have been as ubiquitous [...]. [T]he reductionism of the wall label [...] threatens to obliterate digital culture. For new media art can survive only by multiplying and mutating. From computer-based installations to video multicasts, digital collaborations are the rule rather than the exception, and a work often undergoes an extension of it?’  13 Grigely, Exhibition Prosthetics , 2010, p. 8.  14 Grigely, Exhibition Prosthetics , 2010, p. 7.  15 McManus, ‘Oh, Yes, They Do,’ 1989, pp. 174–189.  16 Tyradellis, Müde Museen , 2014, pp. 117–118: ‘90% of all visitors first look at the exhibit, then look at the wall label. It is a cultural reflex of ours that sensory experience immediately strives to be cancelled out conceptually, which in everyday life takes care of itself (in that we attribute the correct terms to everyday objects without much prior thinking), which is achieved, though, in the artificial context of the museum through the textual authority of the standard items author and title. Both indications represent knowledge which helps deprive the object of its disquieting strangeness.’  17  Ippolito, ‘Death by Wall Label,’ 2008, pp. 106–132.