Without interpretation panels in galleries, no one knows what you’re doing.
An A4 sheet, pritsticked to the wall, looks neat, costs next to nothing, and is the difference between people thinking “gosh that’s pretty” and “wow that’s changed my world”.
Art is as much about its ideas, processes, and shared inspirations as it is about the quality of the final work. If you’re leaving your work to speak for itself, just consider for a moment what guiding your viewers’ interpretations might do.
I’m not saying you should spell everything out letter for letter, but consider the scale of description that goes into world-building in a novel. Every hair on your arm can stand on end from written words, but you’re still taking something unique away from it, guided, gently, by the author’s hand.
You don’t need an interpretation panel to share every tiny detail of the public engagement, the rationale for material selection, or who your inspirations were. It’s not an academic exercise.
But, consider that your exhibition is being seen by people who haven’t ever been in a gallery before. Consider that those people don’t have a clue who you are, or about what you’re making work about.
That’s as relevant to landscape painting as it is to conceptual work. It’s important to know where you’re painting, and there’s a significance in whether you’ve called it ‘Untitled’ or not. Is it part of a series or a standalone work?
A single painting of a field in Warrington is one thing, but knowing that it’s part of a series of paintings from around the country, in semi-urban towns, might completely change how people interact with or respect your work. It becomes a documentary, rather than a document.
If you’re making conceptual work about your own experience, or that of a specific community, the temptation is that the concept is best left to interpretation, but without any starting point, there’s just no way for people to begin interpreting beyond a material understanding of what’s in front of them.
That applies to interpretations by QR code, too, just fyi. Just because they exist somewhere doesn’t mean your audience will (or should be expected to) put additional effort into seeking them out.
That’s actively putting a barrier to access in your exhibition. Not everyone has phones that are capable of using QR codes, not everyone is confident enough online to seek out the information either.
This is becoming a more and more worrying fashion in major and artist-led galleries.
There’s absolutely an argument that in artist-led spaces, you’re opening for a private view, and physically present to explain the work to the visitors who turn up through the week after the launch event. That’s fine, because you’re engaging and explaining in other ways.
But if you’re simply removing the opportunity for people to understand your work and failing to offer an accessible alternative, you are failing your audience and your artists.
If it’s an aesthetic choice, offer handouts that people can walk around with. If it’s a cost limitation, write it out in pencil on the wall. If it’s a time limitation, it doesn’t need to be for every work, but something about the basic reason behind the artist’s purpose.
Above everything else, art galleries are daunting places for people who’ve never been to one. They’re alien worlds that people picture based on what they see in films. If they turn up and you’ve not given them a chance to engage by providing context, you’ve segregated your audience into those in the know and those outside.
