There’s a part of the Met that you have to either be told about or get to by accident. You wouldn’t find it on a map of the museum and, even if you did, you would never select it as part of a well-planned museum visit. I had probably visited the museum hundreds of times before I found it. Visible storage is hidden upstairs in the American Wing, nestled behind the American Colonial decorative rooms, another part of the Met that you probably wouldn’t visit on purpose either. But open the right door, and long rows of glass cabinets appear like a hall of mirrors or a very gentle nightmare. Here, a huge swath of the Met’s collection – mostly American art and decorative objects – not publicly on display is lined up for show, neatly crowded together and arranged by genre like a shelf of books. Objects are indistinguishable from one another, grouped for their similarities; silver filigreed gravy boats repeat and repeat again in dizzying iterations down a narrow corridor. The point is the archive, the fact of accumulation, rather than any narrative curatorial display. The idea is that you are encountering the art as it would be stored in a warehouse. When I encountered visible storage for the first time, it felt like having the floor drop out from under me. Look how much is here, how much there is that we don’t see, look how much collects and exists, meaningless except for the fact that it happened, given significance by its stacking up together, by its repetition and continuance.
Visible Storage
Visible Storage
Visible Storage
There’s a part of the Met that you have to either be told about or get to by accident. You wouldn’t find it on a map of the museum and, even if you did, you would never select it as part of a well-planned museum visit. I had probably visited the museum hundreds of times before I found it. Visible storage is hidden upstairs in the American Wing, nestled behind the American Colonial decorative rooms, another part of the Met that you probably wouldn’t visit on purpose either. But open the right door, and long rows of glass cabinets appear like a hall of mirrors or a very gentle nightmare. Here, a huge swath of the Met’s collection – mostly American art and decorative objects – not publicly on display is lined up for show, neatly crowded together and arranged by genre like a shelf of books. Objects are indistinguishable from one another, grouped for their similarities; silver filigreed gravy boats repeat and repeat again in dizzying iterations down a narrow corridor. The point is the archive, the fact of accumulation, rather than any narrative curatorial display. The idea is that you are encountering the art as it would be stored in a warehouse. When I encountered visible storage for the first time, it felt like having the floor drop out from under me. Look how much is here, how much there is that we don’t see, look how much collects and exists, meaningless except for the fact that it happened, given significance by its stacking up together, by its repetition and continuance.