When I was considering a career in the art world, I took a course in London, and one of my supervisors was this irascible Italian called Pietro, who drank too much, smoked too much and swore much too much. But he was a passionate teacher, and I remember one of our earlier classes with him, he was projecting images on the wall, asking us to think about them, and he put up an image of a painting. It was a landscape with figures, semi-dressed, drinking wine. There was a nude woman in the lower foreground, and on the hillside in the back, there was a figure of the mythological god Bacchus, and he said, "What is this?"
当我打算从事艺术相关的工作时, 我在伦敦选修了一门课程, 众多导师中有一位暴躁的意大利人 名字叫彼得罗,他总是酗酒, 是个老烟枪,还经常破口大骂。 但他也是一位充满热情的老师, 我记得他给我们上的一堂入门课, 他将图像投影到墙上, 要求我们去思考, 他投影了一张画。 画中有风景和人物,一半的人装着衣服, 喝着葡萄酒。这是一个裸体的女人 在前景较低的位置,而在后景的山坡上, 画的是酒神巴克科斯, 他问,“这是什么?”
And I -- no one else did, so I put up my hand, and I said, "It's a Bacchanal by Titian."
于是我——看到其他人都没吭声,就举起手来回答, “这是提香的《酒神祭》。”
He said, "It's a what?"
他再问,“这是什么?”
I thought maybe I'd pronounced it wrong. "It's a Bacchanal by Titian."
我以为是自己的发音不准。 “这是提香的《酒神祭》。”
He said, "It's a what?"
他还问,“这是什么?”
I said, "It's a Bacchanal by Titian." (Laughter)
我重复,“这是提香的《酒神祭》”(笑声)
He said, "You boneless bookworm! It's a fucking orgy!" (Laughter) As I said, he swore too much.
他说,“你这个书呆子!” 他说,“这是他妈的纵酒狂欢!” (笑声) 如之前所说,他总是破口大骂。
There was an important lesson for me in that. Pietro was suspicious of formal art training, art history training, because he feared that it filled people up with jargon, and then they just classified things rather than looking at them, and he wanted to remind us that all art was once contemporary, and he wanted us to use our eyes, and he was especially evangelical about this message, because he was losing his sight. He wanted us to look and ask basic questions of objects. What is it? How is it made? Why was it made? How is it used? And these were important lessons to me when I subsequently became a professional art historian.
通过这件事我学到了重要的理念。 彼得罗质疑这些正儿八经的艺术培训和 艺术史教学,因为他担心 这种教育让学生限于教条,最后他们只学会了 如何去鉴别,而不是鉴赏, 他想提醒我们,所有艺术都曾是“当代艺术”, 他希望我们用双眼去直接感受, 他尤其热衷于传播这一理念, 因为他的视力正在衰退。 他希望我们对目标物进行观察和提出基本问题。 它是什么?它是如何制作的?为什么要制作它? 它是怎样被应用的? 这些经验教训对于我后来 成为专业的艺术史学家是非常重要的。
My kind of eureka moment came a few years later, when I was studying the art of the courts of Northern Europe, and of course it was very much discussed in terms of the paintings and the sculptures and the architecture of the day. But as I began to read historical documents and contemporary descriptions, I found there was a kind of a missing component, for everywhere I came across descriptions of tapestries. Tapestries were ubiquitous between the Middle Ages and, really, well into the 18th century, and it was pretty apparent why. Tapestries were portable. You could roll them up, send them ahead of you, and in the time it took to hang them up, you could transform a cold, dank interior into a richly colored setting. Tapestries effectively provided a vast canvas on which the patrons of the day could depict the heroes with whom they wanted to be associated, or even themselves, and in addition to that, tapestries were hugely expensive. They required scores of highly skilled weavers working over extended periods of time with very expensive materials -- the wools, the silks, even gold and silver thread. So, all in all, in an age when the visual image of any kind was rare, tapestries were an incredibly potent form of propaganda.
几年后当我在北欧学习宫廷艺术, 我有了一次灵感的迸发。 当然学习期间会终日讨论 绘画和雕塑 以及建筑风格。 但当我开始读历史文献 和当代的描述, 我发现有一个被众人遗忘的艺术形式, 在所有的地方,我都遇到了对挂毯画的描述。 挂毯画的盛行是从中世纪开始 恰恰好,结束于18 世纪, 这里的原因非常明显。 挂毯非常便携。你可以将它们卷起, 放在身前,而当你将它们挂起 你可以将一个阴冷的内室, 装饰得色彩丰富。 挂毯有效地提供了一个巨大的画布 在那个时代,人们可以在上面描绘英雄 他们期望能够追随, 或者他们自身的肖像, 此外,挂毯极其昂贵。 它需要大量熟练的织布工 通过日以继夜的工作 使用非常昂贵的材料——羊毛,丝绸, 甚至是金丝银线。 所以,总而言之,在各类视觉影像稀缺的时代, 挂毯是一种难以置信的 有效的传播媒介。
Well, I became a tapestry historian. In due course, I ended up as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, because I saw the Met as one of the few places where I could organize really big exhibitions about the subject I cared so passionately about. And in about 1997, the then-director Philippe de Montebello gave me the go-ahead to organize an exhibition for 2002. We normally have these very long lead-in times.
后来,我成为了挂毯画历史学者。 在适当的时候,我又转职成为了馆长, 因为我认为大都会博物馆 是少数可以用来组织 真正大型展出的地方,包括那些主题 我投入了大量的深情。 大概是1997年,时任馆长菲利普·蒙特贝罗 让我牵头来组织一场2002年的展览。 我们通常会有相当长的准备时间。
It wasn't straightforward. It's no longer a question of chucking a tapestry in the back of a car. They have to be wound on huge rollers, shipped in oversized freighters. Some of them are so big we had, to get them into the museum, we had to take them up the great steps at the front.
策展并不是那么简单。将挂毯固定在车子后面 已经不再是问题。 它们必须散绕在大型的滚轮上, 由超大号的货船装运。 其中一些太大以至于无法在博物馆安放, 我们不得不将它们放在前厅的大台阶上。
We thought very hard about how to present this unknown subject to a modern audience: the dark colors to set off the colors that remained in objects that were often faded; the placing of lights to bring out the silk and the gold thread; the labeling. You know, we live in an age where we are so used to television images and photographs, a one-hit image. These were big, complex things, almost like cartoons with multiple narratives. We had to draw our audience in, get them to slow down, to explore the objects.
我们苦思如何去将它们呈现给 对此一无所知的现代观众: 用深色来衬托出那些挂毯上 经常褪色的颜色; 灯光的布置来凸显丝绸和金线; 说明性的标注。 你知道,我们身处的时代对 电视图像和照片这样一闪即逝的图像 已经司空见惯。而这些巨大的、复杂的作品, 浑似多重叙述的卡通动画。 我们需要吸引观众的眼球,让他们沉浸下来, 去探索这些展品。
There was a lot of skepticism. On the opening night, I overheard one of the senior members of staff saying, "This is going to be a bomb." But in reality, in the course of the coming weeks and months, hundreds of thousands of people came to see the show. The exhibition was designed to be an experience, and tapestries are hard to reproduce in photographs. So I want you to use your imaginations, thinking of these wall-high objects, some of them 10 meters wide, depicting lavish court scenes with courtiers and dandies who would look quite at home in the pages of the fashion press today, thick woods with hunters crashing through the undergrowth in pursuit of wild boars and deer, violent battles with scenes of fear and heroism. I remember taking my son's school class. He was eight at the time, and all the little boys, they kind of -- you know, they were little boys, and then the thing that caught their attention was in one of the hunting scenes there was a dog pooping in the foreground — (Laughter) — kind of an in-your-face joke by the artist. And you can just imagine them. But it brought it alive to them. I think they suddenly saw that these weren't just old faded tapestries. These were images of the world in the past, and that it was the same for our audience. And for me as a curator, I felt proud. I felt I'd shifted the needle a little. Through this experience that could only be created in a museum, I'd opened up the eyes of my audience -- historians, artists, press, the general public -- to the beauty of this lost medium.
有很多质疑的声音。就在开幕当晚, 我无意中听到一位高级职员说, “这将会是一个哑弹。” 但事实上,在接下来的几周和几个月, 成百上千的人们来参观这场挂毯秀。 展览的设计旨在让人身临其境, 挂毯很难通过照片的形式重现。 所以我希望你们能够发挥想象, 想象这些有墙那么高的物品, 其中一些宽达10米, 描绘奢华的法庭场景和那些名门望族 像是今天在家中看新闻中的时尚版面, 猎人在密林中穿越灌木, 追逐野猪和鹿, 激烈的战争场景充满了恐惧和英勇。 我记得那天接待我儿子的班级。他当时只有8岁, 所有的小男孩,在坐各位都清楚,他们这样的小男孩, 引起他们注意的画面 是在一个狩猎场景中有一条狗 在前景里便便 — — (笑声) — — 一种艺术家肆无忌惮的玩笑。 你可以想象这些。 它栩栩如生地呈现在观众眼前。我认为他们会突然发现 这些不只是褪色了的旧挂毯。 这些属于旧时代的意象, 在我们的观众面前并没有改变。 我作为馆长,我感到自豪,我感到这是一点进步。 通过这种只有在博物馆内才可以创造出的效果, 让我的观众开了眼界 让历史学家、 艺术家、 记者、 一般大众 — — 发现这已快失传的介质的美。
A few years later, I was invited to be the director of the museum, and after I got over that -- "Who, me? The tapestry geek? I don't wear a tie!" -- I realized the fact: I believe passionately in that curated museum experience. We live in an age of ubiquitous information, and sort of "just add water" expertise, but there's nothing that compares with the presentation of significant objects in a well-told narrative, what the curator does, the interpretation of a complex, esoteric subject, in a way that retains the integrity of the subject, that makes it -- unpacks it for a general audience. And that, to me, today, is now the challenge and the fun of my job, supporting the vision of my curators, whether it's an exhibition of Samurai swords, early Byzantine artifacts, Renaissance portraits, or the show we heard mentioned earlier, the McQueen show, with which we enjoyed so much success last summer.
几年以后,我被邀请接任博物馆馆长, 在后来我适应了这些问题 — — "谁,我吗?挂毯极客吗?我连领带都不系!"— — 我意识到这样的事实:我对那场 博物馆策展的成功经验深信不疑。 我们生活在一个信息爆炸的时代, 拥有"只需加点水"的专业技能, 但是没有什么可以与策展相比: 通过充分的叙述将重要的对象进行呈现, 馆长所做的,就是解释那些复杂的, 深奥的主题,并保留它的原汁原味, 然后做出解读 最终呈现在大庭广众之前。 对我来说,今天,正是我工作面临的 挑战和乐趣,支持我的策展人的愿景, 无论展览的是武士刀,还是 早期拜占庭古器物,文艺复兴时期画像, 或者是我之前提到的, 麦奎因的服装秀,它让我们在 在去年的夏天享受到成功的喜悦。
That was an interesting case. In the late spring, early summer of 2010, shortly after McQueen's suicide, our curator of costume, Andrew Bolton, came to see me, and said, "I've been thinking of doing a show on McQueen, and now is the moment. We have to, we have to do it fast."
这是一个有趣的实例。 时间是在2010年的春末夏初, 麦奎因刚刚自杀不久, 我们的服饰馆馆长安德鲁·博尔顿,过来与我商量, "我一直想策划一场麦奎因的服装秀, 我认为现在正是时机。我们必须尽快行动起来。”
It wasn't easy. McQueen had worked throughout his career with a small team of designers and managers who were very protective of his legacy, but Andrew went to London and worked with them over the summer and won their confidence, and that of the designers who created his amazing fashion shows, which were works of performance art in their own right, and we proceeded to do something at the museum, I think, we've never done before. It wasn't just your standard installation. In fact, we ripped down the galleries to recreate entirely different settings, a recreation of his first studio, a hall of mirrors, a curiosity box, a sunken ship, a burned-out interior, with videos and soundtracks that ranged from operatic arias to pigs fornicating. And in this extraordinary setting, the costumes were like actors and actresses, or living sculptures. It could have been a train wreck. It could have looked like shop windows on Fifth Avenue at Christmas, but because of the way that Andrew connected with the McQueen team, he was channeling the rawness and the brilliance of McQueen, and the show was quite transcendant, and it became a phenomenon in its own right. By the end of the show, we had people queuing for four or five hours to get into the show, but no one really complained. I heard over and over again, "Wow, that was worth it. It was a such a visceral, emotive experience."
这件事并不容易。麦奎因生前工作的团队 是一小部分设计师和管理者 他们对麦奎因的遗产太过保护, 后来安德烈去伦敦做他们的工作, 过了整个夏天,才赢得了他们的信心, 这些设计师凭借他们在表演艺术中的实力 创造出麦奎因时装秀惊人的效果, 而我们着手博物馆的策展工作, 我认为效果是旷古绝今的。 它并不只是标准化的策展。 事实上,我们推翻之前的画廊布景来重建 完全不同的设置,再现他的第一个工作室 布满镜子的大厅, 引人好奇的宝箱, 一艘沉船,被烧毁的内室, 伴随视频和音乐,风格变化 由歌剧咏叹调到猪交媾之声。 在这样非比寻常的布设中, 服装就像是男女演员,像是有生命的雕塑。 展览有可能像火车脱轨成为一场失败的事故。 也可以像圣诞节第五大道商店橱窗里的展示, 但正因为安德鲁采取的方式 与麦奎因团队的沟通,他成为了 连接最朴素和最辉煌的麦奎因的桥梁, 这场展览因此相当的出众, 凭借着它自身的力量成为了一次奇迹。 在展览的尾声,还有人为了进场 而排了四、五个小时的长队, 但没有人在抱怨。 我再而三地听到,“哇,太值了! 这是怎样的一次直觉和感性的体验啊!"
Now, I've described two very immersive exhibitions, but I also believe that collections, individual objects, can also have that same power. The Met was set up not as a museum of American art, but of an encyclopedic museum, and today, 140 years later, that vision is as prescient as ever, because, of course, we live in a world of crisis, of challenge, and we're exposed to it through the 24/7 newsreels. It's in our galleries that we can unpack the civilizations, the cultures, that we're seeing the current manifestation of. Whether it's Libya, Egypt, Syria, it's in our galleries that we can explain and give greater understanding.
现在,我已经描述了两个非常沉浸式的展览, 但是我也相信收藏品,独特的物品, 也可以拥有同样的魅力。 成立大都会博物馆的目的不只是为了美国艺术, 而应是成为一个百科全书式的博物馆, 今天,博物馆已经成立140多年 ,这一初衷 是多么的有先见之明, 因为,我们生活的世界充满危机和挑战, 我们通过日以继夜的新闻汇编 来接触它们。 正是我们的画廊,可以用来解读文明和文化, 就像我们现在看到的示威活动 无论是利比亚、 埃及还是叙利亚, 我们可以在画廊中对它们进行解读 并赋予更多的理解。
I mean, our new Islamic galleries are a case in point, opened 10 years, almost to the week, after 9/11. I think for most Americans, knowledge of the Islamic world was pretty slight before 9/11, and then it was thrust upon us in one of America's darkest hours, and the perception was through the polarization of that terrible event. Now, in our galleries, we show 14 centuries of the development of different Islamic cultures across a vast geographic spread, and, again, hundreds of thousands of people have come to see these galleries since they opened last October.
依我所见,我们的新伊斯兰画廊是一个恰当的例子, 画廊几乎就在 9·11 之后的那周开放,至今已10多年。 我认为大多数美国人,对于伊斯兰世界的认知 在 9·11事件之前是相当欠缺的,之后却被 美国最黑暗的几个小时内 发生的极端恐怖事件 强化了对伊斯兰世界的偏见。 现在,在我们的画廊,展示来自14世纪 不同的伊斯兰文化的发展 跨越广阔的地理分布, 并再次吸引成千上万的人来参观 这些去年10月开放的画廊。
I'm often asked, "Is digital media replacing the museum?" and I think those numbers are a resounding rejection of that notion. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a huge advocate of the Web. It gives us a way of reaching out to audiences around the globe, but nothing replaces the authenticity of the object presented with passionate scholarship. Bringing people face to face with our objects is a way of bringing them face to face with people across time, across space, whose lives may have been very different to our own, but who, like us, had hopes and dreams, frustrations and achievements in their lives. And I think this is a process that helps us better understand ourselves, helps us make better decisions about where we're going.
我常常问,"数字媒体正在取代博物馆吗?" 我认为这些参观访问量是最响亮的反驳。 请不要误会我的意思, 我也是网络的积极倡导者。 网络可以让我们接触到世界各地的观众 但是没有什么可以取代亲眼所见 这些被热情研究过的展品。 让人们直面我们的展品 是一种方式带领他们 面对那些不同时代的人们 与我们的生活方式迥异,却和我们一样, 有着希望和梦想、挫折和成就。 我认为这是一个很好的过程 可以帮助我们更好地理解自己, 帮助我们选择方向,做出更好的决策。
The Great Hall at the Met is one of the great portals of the world, awe-inspiring, like a medieval cathedral. From there, you can walk in any direction to almost any culture. I frequently go out into the hall and the galleries and I watch our visitors coming in. Some of them are comfortable. They feel at home. They know what they're looking for. Others are very uneasy. It's an intimidating place. They feel that the institution is elitist. I'm working to try and break down that sense of that elitism. I want to put people in a contemplative frame of mind, where they're prepared to be a little bit lost, to explore, to see the unfamiliar in the familiar, or to try the unknown. Because for us, it's all about bringing them face to face with great works of art, capturing them at that moment of discomfort, when the inclination is kind of to reach for your iPhone, your Blackberry, but to create a zone where their curiosity can expand. And whether it's in the expression of a Greek sculpture that reminds you of a friend, or a dog pooping in the corner of a tapestry, or, to bring it back to my tutor Pietro, those dancing figures who are indeed knocking back the wine, and that nude figure in the left foreground. Wow. She is a gorgeous embodiment of youthful sexuality. In that moment, our scholarship can tell you that this is a bacchanal, but if we're doing our job right, and you've checked the jargon at the front door, trust your instinct. You know it's an orgy. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
大都会博物馆的大礼堂是全世界最宏伟的大厅之一, 像一座中世纪的教堂,令人敬畏。 从那里,你可以按任意方向去游览, 然后遍历几乎所有的文化。 我经常进入大厅和画廊 注目着前来参观的游客。 他们中的一些感觉很舒适,就如同在家里一样。 他们明确自己在寻找什么。 其他人很不自在,觉得这个地方令人生畏。 他们认为这座建筑是属于社会精英的。 我努力尝试打破这种精英主义的感觉。 我希望能将观众带入一种冥想的状态, 在这种情境下他们有点儿忘我,开始探索, 开始在熟悉中发现陌生, 或者体验完全未知的神秘。 因为对我们来说,所有的职责就是是让观众直面 这些伟大的艺术作品, 抓住并制止一些不合适的行为, 比如你想着去拿出iPhone, Blackberry去进行拍摄,虽然有限制但是我们创造了 一个让你充满好奇的地方。 是否这种希腊雕塑的表达方式 让你想起了一位朋友, 又或许是绘在挂毯角落的一只正在便便的狗, 或者,让我回忆起导师彼得罗的那堂课, 看着那些纵情舞蹈的人物 他们的确在一杯接一杯的痛饮葡萄酒, 还有赤裸人体在画的左前方。 哇哦。她是年轻性感的华丽化身。 在那一刻,我们的专业知识可以告诉你 这是一场“酒神祭”, 但是,如果我们做的工作到位, 您也已经查阅了相关术语, 那么请相信自己的直觉。 你知道这是一场狂欢。 谢谢。(掌声) (掌声)