The Viewer Speaks - artist Ken Aptekar

Art in America, Feb, 1999 by Norman Bryson

What made the exhibition such an extraordinary experience was that Aptekar had found a way to dramatize the contradiction that is triggered the moment the viewer sets foot in the museum. At least officially, contact with works of art is supposed to heighten or exalt the viewer's subjectivity, to let subjectivity dilate and expand beyond the bounds that usually restrict it. But at the same time all of the museum's discipline--the combined force of its art-historical expertise, its need to tell the "story" of art, to educate and instruct the viewer in the values housed in art--works if not to crush subjectivity, then certainly to guide and manage the viewer's heart and mind. Among all the wayward, vagabond, autobiographical responses that arise, only a few are acknowledged by the institution as appropriate.

By projecting into the core of each work a set of responses that would almost certainly be filtered out by the time most viewers reached Art History 101, Aptekar was able to indicate how a viewer might behave who had not yet acquired the final hypocrisies. And by the same token, "Talking to Pictures" showed that, the alleged birth of the viewer notwithstanding, it is still the museum that has the last word in deciding the ways ordinary viewers are expected voluntarily to repress what may be their truest and deepest responses to art. For as long as the museum continues to muddle along with its old, 19th-century brief--with one hand welcoming viewers in as free agents, while the other hand pummels them into proper disciplinary shape--"Talking to Pictures" will remain one of the sharpest analyses to date of the museum's still undiminished legislative and managerial powers.

"Ken Aptekar: Talking to Pictures" appeared at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. [Oct. 18, 1997-Apr. 5, 1998]. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Terrie Sultan, Mieke Bal and Albert Boime. Aptekar will have a solo show this spring at Steinbaum Krauss Gallery, New York [Mar. 27-May 1].

Author: Norman Bryson is a professor of art history at Harvard University.