I get off my bus at the Bisham Gardens stop to be greeted by a quaint street full of charity shops and pubs. It’s a sunny April day, one of those when you can feel the promise of spring hovering in the air as I slowly make my way into the Three Highgate gallery. It took me so long to get here from South London that I’m now seriously excited for this show entitled ‘Threshold’. As I continue to compare the CityMapper on my phone with my surroundings, I finally see the big glass windows, sharing a sneak peak of the gallery space. I press my hand onto the door handle. To my surprise, I’m met with resistance and the door doesn’t open. My eyes scan through the big windows to find no one inside. I ring the doorbell and even though I expect a person to materialise in the room at the sound of the ringing, I’m met with stillness inside the space. Oh? Thankfully, the windows offer more to me than solely a peak inside. They display a phone number for me to have some form of contact with life inside of the gallery. I dial the number to find out that due to an emergency the gallery is closed today. Bummer… Though the gallery director was kind enough to invite me to visit on another occasion, I know I won’t come again, it’s too far away. Therefore, I decide to make to most of what I have presented in front of me. I glue my nose to the big window and stare. 

It’s early afternoon on a sunny day, so to my luck, the room is very well lit. The space is neatly organised with the majority of works hanging on the walls, and a few placed on tables or plinths. My eyes, which usually search for details during art shows, now switch to scanning mode. A splash of blue and green on the left wall, wooden chair and ceramics around the centre, a drawing hung quite close to where I’m standing outside, objects pinned to the wall and a black table with information right next to the window. Though I usually amble around gallery space and spend at least a couple of minutes looking at each piece, this time I find it quite difficult to focus on one object. A sense of irritation arises as my eyes attempt to scrutinise their surfaces, yet are forced to do it from afar. Additionally, the fact that my body remains at the same distance to all of those makes it difficult to focus on just one of them, instead of consuming everything all at once. I get distracted easily by the sound of buses or chatter of passersby. The fact that I need to concentrate so much in order to just look at those objects reminds me of my first months as an art history student at university and being taught the key exercise of my future professional practice. The principle tool for any art historian’s work is visual analysis and detailed observation of their case study. I bottle up my tiredness, and hold my position with my nose pressed onto the window. While its translucence teases my retinas with the exhibition space, my eyes are denied direct access to the what seems to be the star of any exhibition – art.

Surprisingly, being left outside of the gallery space allows me grasp the physicality of the exercise by feeling my eyes get tired while the delicate muscles behind my eyeballs stretch as far as possible to seize the details. It becomes evident that close looking is not solely standing or sitting in front of the work (or computer screen actually), and scanning its surface in search for details. It’s a physical connection to the work, even though in the vast majority of cases you’re not allowed to touch it. Even performing slight movements of tracing a surface from one corner to another the eyes’ muscles stretch and shrink, while one engages in a material imagination of an artwork; the eyes scrutinise the surface so that the brain can imagine what the material feels like. I actually have to engage in quite a lot of imagining as it‘s more difficult than I expected to piece the artworks together into a narrative of this exhibition, while looking at them through a glass window. I’m aware that in modern education theory, there is a term ‘threshold knowledge’, which denotes concepts crucial to transforming an understanding of a subject by its student.[1] In other words, it’s a piece of knowledge which alters the view over a subject, either partially or completely. Coined by Jan Meyer and Ray Land, it proposes a transformative view of certain knowledge. A threshold understood in this sense, is a gateway to a (deeper) understanding of a subject.[2] Keeping this information in mind, I wonder which piece of information could be transformative for me in this situation? How does one direct oneself to understand an art show deeper while not being able to fully access it? 

The answer appears in my head faster than I can process it. My eyes settle on a piece of paper, which, if obtainable, would settle my brief enquiry. Sadly, though it’s centimetres away, I can’t get hold of it. It’s a piece of paper with black letters printed on it - a press release. Another playful teaser of the show, it was so close to where I was standing, but placed upside down from my perspective, thus, unreadable to me. Without it, the works seemed difficult to decipher and the meaning behind them eluded me. The press release seemed to be exactly what I needed, a threshold, which would allow me to dive into context and read the artworks as intended by the creator of the show. Perhaps my art degree didn‘t teach me well enough, but while I wasn‘t able to fully grasp the works visually, the press release was the centrepiece with a promise of clarification. Only weeks later did I notice what exactly I was doing. My agenda for that day was clearly a desperate search for a missing piece to solve a puzzle. I was standing there trying to piece it all together and create an argument or a story about what I was looking at. How does one link canvas, wood, ceramics and clay? How does on relate it to threshold, the main theme of the show? What kind of thresholds exist and which exactly are explored here? Which threshold is this canvas on the right and which one is the chair in the middle? 

To look was to know, right? That’s what I thought, hence, I was looking, intensely, in a nose-glued-to-the-window uncool way, but not really knowing, or rather not really finding what I wanted to know. I was convinced that in order to say that I saw an art exhibition, I had to have an opinion on it, that is know what I was looking at. I realise now what misdemeanour I was engaging in. after having been caught red handed reading an essay ‘The Art of Not Describing’ by Georges Didi-Huberman. He notes how pictures tend to be contemplated as if they were coded text waiting to be deciphered by somebody who could see ‘behind them’.[3] In this approach, he explains that putting a major focus on details by favouring close analysis of the case study seemingly allows for an ‘exhaustive description’, which is supposed to lead to full understanding.[4] To relate it to my situation, it would be the details, which could, thus, allow me to fully comprehend the art displayed. Since these were inaccessible to me, I was clearly defeated. Didi-Huberman accuses this approach of being too obsessed with the signified referent and viewing visual arts through a semantic lens.[5] He wants his readers to notice the magnetising space of ‘not quite’ of painted images and points out that, even some of the realistic paintings of the Dutch masters include details which are not quite their referents.[6] For example, one of the feathers in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1560) is not quite a feather when examined closely, but simply a smear of white paint. Importantly, this particular smear of paint is not pretending to be a feather; it proudly flaunts its materiality.[7] Rather it’s the proximity of other feathers, perhaps some a tad more realistic than the others, and the figure of the falling mythological idealist himself that make it tempting to take this mark of white paint for a feather. The ‘intrusion of paint’ into the fairyland of figurative, realistic representation constructs a ‘representational void’, i.e. a moment when representation exhales and puts its legs up.[8] In other words, it’s a gateway allowing for a different understanding of the work - threshold knowledge. 

My case would have been better described as intrusion of glass, posing a solid barrier between me and the exhibition I had been so determined to see. By no means less materialistic than Huberman’s patches of undisguised paint, locked doors undoubtedly taught me a lesson about materiality of it all. Big glass windows separated me firmly from employing an inquisitive eye of an art historian onto the show. While I was attempting to search for a narrative and explanation, my circumstances said: access denied. The bits of interpretation I managed to gather while my nose was stuck to the window were not enough to even form a couple of sentences about the exhibition; their syntax would have been lacking terribly and the narrative - taken out of the blue. By not being able to enter the gallery space, I had the opportunity not to dissect everything that was in front of my eyes and translate it into text. I couldn’t even properly look at it. The arguments I would have made about thresholds as interpreted by artists participating in the show, all slipped away upon a simple door lock, the most literal threshold of all. 

When I left I naturally had neither sentences running in my head about these works nor  a notebook page filled with observed details. I just turned around and walked back to the bus stop. For me there was no a story or a description to be found in the exhibition on that day. It was the literality of the gallery space and its firm borders separating art from the outside world, which were offered as the main course for me. For all I suspect now, it’s not always about full understanding and deep scrutiny. Not every threshold needs to be crossed. Sometimes, you physically can’t do it due to a big, glass window in front of you, but on other occasions you might want to reflect if it’s truly necessary. Does obtaining threshold knowledge about a particular discourse always enrich one’s view of it? Or is it better to saunter in the phase of ‘not quite’ from time to time? It might be fruitless to attempt to decide in advance, though it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s not always about letting the eyes do the looking and knowing, but playing it by ear once in a while. 

Bibliography:

•   Didi-Huberman, Georges, ‘The art of not describing: Vermeer -the detail and the patch’, History of the Human Sciences, 1989, Vol. 2 No. 2, pp. 135-169

•   Meyer, Jan J. F., Land, Ray, ‘Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge (2): Epistemological Considerations and a Conceptual Framework for Teaching and Learning’, Higher Education, Apr., 2005, Vol. 49, No. 3, Issues in Teaching and Learning from a

Student Learning Perspective: A Tribute to Noel Entw

[1] ‘Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge (2): Epistemological Considerations and

a Conceptual Framework for Teaching and Learning’, Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land, Higher Education, Apr., 2005, Vol. 49, No. 3, Issues in Teaching and Learning from a Student Learning Perspective: A Tribute to Noel Entwistle (Apr., 2005), Springer, p. 373

[2] ibid., p. 373

[3] ‘The art of not describing: Vermeer - the detail and the patch’, Georges Didi-Huberman, History of the Human Sciences, 1989, Vol. 2 No. 2, p. 137

[4] ibid., p. 136

[5] ibid., pp. 144-146

[6] ibid., p. 141

[7] ibid., p. 141

[8] ibid., p. 156 and p. 164