A Placard

A good art exhibition is a lesson in seeing to those who need or want one, and a session of visual pleasure and excitement for those who don’t need anything — I mean, to the rich in spirit — that’s you.

Grunts, sighs, shouts, laughter, and implications ought to be heard in a museum room, precisely the place where they are usually suppressed. So, some of the values of pictures may be suppressed too — or plain lost in formal exhibitions.

I’d like to address the eyes of people who know how to take the values straight through and beyond the inhibitions of public decorum. I suggest that religious feeling is sometimes to be had even at church, and, perhaps, with luck, art can be seen and felt on a museum wall.

Those of us who are living by our eyes — painters, designers, photographers, girl-watchers — are both amused and appalled by the following half-truth: “What we see, we are;” and by its corollary: “Our collected work is, in part, shameless, joyous autobiography, cum confession, wrapped up in the embarrassment of the unspeakable.”

For those of us who can read the language, that is —I mean, I never know just who is in the audience— when the seeing eye man does turn up to survey our work and does percieve our metaphors, we are just caught in the act, that’s all. Should we apologize?

Walker Evans, from: A Transcript of his Discussion with the Students of the University of Michigan, 1971