Some remarks on Duke Riley's exhibition

I have been thinking a lot about the Duke Riley exhibition at the Historic Society of Pennsylvania. First off, I recognize that my comments are completely subjective. I understand people might completely disagree with me, but the truth is, I bet they won't. Duke Riley needed an editor or a few guinea pigs to look over that exhibition before he put it up. If he had reached out to someone, I think he would have been told to make the bulk of the pieces on display a little more vivacious. The biggest problem I had with the exhibition was that there was little compelling me to read everything. Had I not been there with a class, knowing we were going to discuss the piece in more detail, I would have read even less than I did.

So, the question I want to raise is, how important is it for an exhibition to be captivating? How important is it for art to be pleasing to look at? Or, if not pleasing, compelling? Eye-catching? Alluring?

The bulk of Riley's exhibition fall in a handful of glass enclosed cases. Inside he has a mish-mosh of reproductions of authentic and fabricated documents, articles, and photographs showing his family lineage to the small island between Camden and Philadelphia: Petty Island. The documents seem tea-dyed, folded and crinkled, torn and burned, in order to give them the universal appearance of being old heirlooms. While the strategy for aging these documents was not necessarily well or poorly done, what stands out are the labels for these documents. Riley took large index cards, tea-dyed them like he did the other documents, and typed the signs using a manual typewritter, pushing and pulling at the text so that it is slightly irregular and clumsy.

As I write the description of these index cards, they sound more charming than they actually are. In reality, they just stand out as being a little silly--historical or scientific museums do not and have not used such cards to label their exhibitions. The result looks more like a middle school presentation than the falsification of actual documents. Perhaps if he had committed to making the documents look really old and thought more about what a real museum would use to label these items, the result would have been more convincing. Or maybe if he had committed more to the silly, comically inept labeling of these documents, to bring more attention to their authenticity, it would have been effective. But, not committing either way just makes the whole thing look sloppy.

Pinned up, clumsy documents in glass cases does not catch my eye. The few non-text based items were also less than alluring. The only parts of the exhibition that I really enjoyed were the plates on the mantel and the short video that combines an interview with a family member and images of Riley and an assistant painting the tops of the massive oil containers on Petty Island to match the plates. Maybe if he had used the plates or more stills of those tanks throughout the exhibition, placing the "royal" family members next to their relatives, maybe I would have been more interested. But as it was, I felt repelled by the cases.

So, the question is, does it matter? Some people will look more closely than I did. Some people do not have the same aversion to text heavy exhibitions. Some people might delight in the lack of aesthetics in the cases. My thinking is, though, that few people will. So, if we can just pretend that we know that very few people will read everything and get out of the exhibition everything that Riley intended, does that make it any less successful? Does the audience have to like/get/spend time on a piece for it to be "any good?"

I have no idea what the artist would say. I can only speak for myself. I would be really disappointed if, after all my hardwork, people wouldn't even engage with the work. While I know the romantic notion that artists make work for themselves, because they have this insatiable need to create, is a highly seductive idea, the truth is most artists I know are trying to communicate something. If no one is listening, what is the point discussing your point of view?

The sad thing about Duke Riley's exhibition for me is the fact that I really like the idea behind it all--finding out about this off-kilter family history, the history of an island located in the Delaware River that was once the home of a reclusive pig-farmer and now is owned by Venezuela, a country that has strained relations with the United States, is just super interesting. For this reason, I wish Riley had shown his exhibition to some trusted critics and mentors. I think they would have told him that the exhibition did not do his concept nor his work any justice.