A Case for Extensive Wall Labels

In the September 14 issue of the New Yorker, Anthony Lane writes about the photographer Robert Frank's The Americans, now on view again at the Met, as this New York Times article covers. It's a wonderful article in its own right. Despite the fact that Lane is primarily a film critic, he's easily able to venture outside that narrow field to write about literature, art and more, and he delves deep into the ways different groups have viewed Frank's work as well as his own take it (documentary, not polemical or explicitly political), but in the course of doing so, he explains why wall labels should cover more ground rather than less:

What pulls me into the picture is the fuzz of its focus and the murk of its grain; Frank was using Kodak Tri-X, a famously tolerant film, which only proves how low the light was on the assembly line. Sometimes, to judge by the contacts, he switched to Plus-X, a slower emulsion, but nobody in the catalogue can tell us whether this was a deliberate choice, or a simple matter of loading what came to hand. Again, what lens did he fit to his Leica for the River Rouge shot? Much of “The Americans,” I would guess, was shot on 50-mm. or wider, but the way in which the Ford workers are stacked up tight suggests a short telephoto lens; if museumgoers are informed, by a small plaque, that a painting was executed in egg tempera, or oil on poplar, why should lovers of photographs be left in the dark? These things matter, whenever battle is joined over art. It matters, for instance, that Jasper Johns’s “Flag,” on which he labored from 1954 to 1955, was painted in oil and encaustic, a wax-based medium: first, because it allowed him to embed barely visible scraps of newsprint beneath the pigment, like messages from the journalistic beyond, and, second, because the rough stickiness of the surface—so uncomfortable a contrast to the dry nap of an actual Stars and Stripes—added to people’s genuine unease about whether he was paying due homage or making insubordinate sport.

Media are especially easy to overlook in a book, where, no matter how good a photograph and scan are, texture tends to blur, but they are indeed a crucial aspect of any work of art and well worth examining.