Journal Entry #6 by Meghan Hers

Observing Laboni, one of the younger Education Officers at the AGO, was a welcome change from my previous sessions observing tours at the AGO under other Education Officers. Laboni comes from a formal teaching and visual arts background, having taught Grade 6 in a classroom setting for several years before realizing that she needed to teach in a different kind of environment, like that of the AGO. On the tour that I observed, one focused around the theme of portraiture, Laboni led a group of Grade 8 boys and girls from a public school all over the museum. She started, as many of the E.O.’s do, with a brief introduction to the museum rules and the theme of the tour. One of the first questions that she asked struck me as particularly relevant to her audience; she asked the students to think of occasions that they had been photographed, or occasions that our society tends to document with photos. Students offered up the standard, expected answers, but none of them mentioned Facebook or internet communication, an area that I know is integral to their social lives. I thought it was a shame to have missed this opportunity to relate the tour to something that teenagers so gladly participate in on a daily basis, and then use this point of recognition to work towards a conversation regarding the changes which portraiture has undergone, with the current proliferation of digital and cellphone cameras, and the way that their spread has impacted contemporary photography.

Laboni’s first stop on the tour was in the Rembrandt/Freud exhibit of drawings, where she brought the group of students before two images, one by each of the artists. I must also mention that this particular group was pretty devoid of energy and she had to persist in order to make them respond most of the time. Although I respect her choice of this exhibit to talk about portraiture, at this instant it was really hard for all of the students to see the images that she was discussing and some of the students at the back of the group, visibly less enthusiastic, quickly tuned her out. After seeing this I started to imagine an alternative to the standard mini-lecture in front of a work, where students were encouraged to wander around the room with a goal in mind, perhaps a scavenger hunt for particular features of the different portraits. In an even more ideal world I would love to wander with them and engage in conversation about what they saw, encouraging them to ask me questions and offering anecdotes regarding the artist and their processes and subjects. I am a strong believer in the potential of relational engagement, and the way in which its impressions on children are more lasting than the standard hierarchical structure in place in classrooms.

Our next stop on the tour was a painting of an Italian aristocrat in one of the European salon-style galleries. I really appreciated Laboni’s attempts to entertain the students as she went into greater detail regarding the personal life of the subject, who she described as “the Paris Hilton of her time.” Most of the students were willing to respond with adjectives to use to describe this woman, but there remained a stubborn clump of boys who seemed constantly bored and struggled to pay attention. What particularly caught my attention, however, was the way in which these students were entranced with Willie Cole’s work, which we visited after considering the sculptures in the African section as portraiture. This is a theme that I am noticing developing among students of all ages on the tours; I have yet to see a class who does not love Cole’s sculptures and the faces hidden in their complex composition. One comment made by one of the students on Laboni’s tour that stuck with me was a brilliant comparison of the work with the movie “Alien vs. Predator.” A quick Google Image search explains why: Cole’s abstracted and simplified human forms are not a far cry from the creatures featured in this sci-fi movie. Hearing this boy independently link the sculpture with his own interests made me want to turn the whole tour around and place it firmly in the hands of the students. I wanted to put them at one end of the hallway and let them explore as we walked down it, getting them to tell me what they were interested in and letting their desires guide the tour, rather than feeling the need to make them listen to boring facts about Brancusi and Modigliani.

In addition, I always notice the way in which the students are consistently visibly interested when we pass as a group through the large Henry Moore gallery on our way to the Willie Cole exhibit, and the way in which the E.O.’s and Gallery Guides seem blind to this palpable sense of excitement on the part of the students, and fail to even acknowledge the work or the artist in passing through the area. One activity that I really would love to do with students in this gallery, especially a younger, less inhibited crew, would be to imitate the organic, flowing shapes of Moore’s sculptures with their bodies. I’ve even heard rumors that the AGO owns a series of large, bright body socks that the students can wear in attempts to have fun, and give their own bodies a more streamlined look. The spacious Moore gallery would be the ideal place to do this as well, as there is ample room between the sculptures to make sure that students do not knock into the works.

Another brief intervention activity that I would love to try with a group that is particularly antsy or seems distracted would be a improv/dance activity that I have termed the “bored museum walk” in my mind. I would turn to the students and say “What do people who are bored in a museum look like?” and then get them to exaggerate the features that they notice in those around them, hunching over, yawning extravagantly, etc. Then I would encourage the students to “Shake it off!” or shake off the feeling of boredom to get energized about where they are. This would be followed with more interpretive activities that would pay specific attention to how they interact physically with the works in the museum.

For the last stop on our portraiture tour, we headed up to Contemporary where we stopped in front of Andy Warhol’s large Elvis diptych screenprint. I thought the opportunity contained in this piece to talk about both Elvis and Warhol was too good to be true, and wished that we could have had more time as a group to discuss these two characters. If I had been leading the tour at this point I would have asked the students if they knew anything about Warhol’s life and eccentric personality, and if they didn’t I would entertain them with anecdotes about his strange yet brief life. With Elvis I would ask the students to name some celebrities who are as famous today as he was in his time (some age-appropriate answers that immediately come to mind might be Miley Cyrus or the Jonas brothers). I would then steer the conversation in the direction of the changed role of portraiture by asking them to consider whether or not they could imagine their own set of celebrities portrayed in this manner, or if this would even happen today. I would imagine most students of this age would be able to make the connection to the way in which celebrities are frequently portrayed in a similar manner, but now in the pages of Vanity Fair or Vogue, as the subjects of exclusive photo-shoots.

On the whole this tour offered up many opportunities for me to imagine alternatives to the ways in which I saw this tour guided, and yet I really appreciated the ways in which Laboni tried valiantly to engage a group that seemed royally unimpressed by what they saw in the AGO. I think that all of the AGO tours could really benefit from someone with “insider knowledge” on what really interests and engages the different age groups of students. I imagine that there would be logistical difficulties to tours led by peers of these students, who would be armed with specialized training and a love for art, but even consultation with representatives of different age groups of students could be greatly beneficial for E.O.s and Gallery Guides who are interested in finding out what makes the students they teach tune in and remain engaged.