The advent of social media is changing the way we visit galleries and how we perceive and experience art. While ‘selfie’ culture prompts extensive public debate, many cultural institutions now actively encourage visitors to engage with their organisation through digital platforms. Adam Suess unpacks his research into the use of Instagram in art galleries, especially at our recent Gerhard Richter exhibition.
Gerhard Richter: Instagram in the art gallery
In 1826, French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce captured what is known to be the oldest surviving photograph taken with a camera. Nearly 200 years later, it is estimated that over 1.3 trillion photos will be taken in 2018 alone, with the growth attributed to the global rise in mobile smartphone ownership and social media use. Modern smartphones include highquality cameras, making amateur photography cheaper and easier than ever before. Many of us carry smartphones wherever we go, changing the story of personal photography from a practice once reserved for capturing iconic moments, such as birthdays and holidays, to something more ephemeral, spontaneous and mobile.
Instagram has more than 800 million users and is arguably the world’s most popular social media platform dedicated to sharing digital images. A search for QAGOMA’s own hashtag #qagoma displays a wealth of visitor photography, especially from its most popular exhibitions. The Yayoi Kusama exhibition ‘Life is the Heart of a rainbow’ at GOMA during ‘Gerhard Richter: The Life of Images’ attracted thousands of visitor posts to its associated hashtag #KusamaGOMA.
The use of Instagram in art galleries raises interesting questions about its effect on our experience of art, and whether it could be leveraged to deepen our engagement with the arts more broadly. The popular practice of taking selfies has polarised opinion in the debate on photography in museums and art galleries.
Museum Selfie Day occurs on 17 January each year and celebrates museum selfie taking — the #museumselfie hashtag on Instagram holds more than 55 000 images. Many cultural institutions promote social photography to generate affinity with museums, yet some consider that it interrupts their visitors’ experience. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has prohibited photography inside the exhibition space to avoid what they term a ‘nuisance’ to other visitors. The de Young Museum in San Francisco took a softer approach by introducing ‘photography free’ viewing times to meet the diverse expectations of visitors.
However, recent research suggests that selfie sharing represents only a small component of Instagram use in cultural institutions; the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada analysed 263 693 social media visitor images, including those on Instagram, finding that selfies represented less than four per cent of the total visitor images.
I conducted a study at GOMA coinciding with the ‘Gerhard Richter: The Life of Images’ exhibition. The study, part of a Griffith University PhD project examines visitors’ use of Instagram. I am intrigued by how people experience and respond to art, and I wanted to investigate what we could see and learn through the lens of Instagram that may not ordinarily be seen.
Previous research at cultural institutions has shown that visitors used Instagram to re-curate exhibitions, extend dialogue outside the physical building, draw attention to exhibition objects, and link themselves to the exhibition. In my study, I observed 550 Instagram posts made by visitors to the Richter exhibition, using grounded theory for analysis. I interviewed a subset of 17 visitors to critically understand why they had posted part of their experience to Instagram. The results of my study showed three major findings:
Visitors who used Instagram extended and evolved their aesthetic experience
Instagram shaped the way visitors sawand used gallery spaces
Sharing images on Instagram promoted their experience and built affinity with the exhibition, artist and Gallery.
A number of scholars contend that the goal of an aesthetic experience is to know something, and to achieve this goal we construct an aesthetic experience through an evolving process. When faced with art, our mind seeks information in an effort to build knowledge. Like individual building blocks that together form a whole, our aesthetic experience evolves as we acquire information and physically experience our surroundings, fulfilling our goal of constructing knowledge.
Participants in my study reported using Instagram as part of their visit to evolve their aesthetic experience through language, relationships, creativity, technology and place. Instagram also amplified aspects of their observation, making them more mindful of how they might represent their experience on Instagram, such as mimicking or copying Richter’s signature blurred style.
Instagram also extended the aesthetic experience of some participants. An aesthetic experience extends when it stretches beyond the time and space of the physical visit, starting earlier and finishing later. Extension complements the concept of an evolving aesthetic experience, as it allows more time and space to build knowledge and engage in reflection.
Since the exhibition was a ticketed event, many participants commented on how Instagram gave them an opportunity to glimpse other visitors’ experiences before deciding whether to attend the exhibition themselves. Participants also used Instagram to reflect on their visit afterwards during a period of contemplation when they decided which image to post.
Instagram also influences how people move through the gallery space, and visitors often took close-up photos of the intricate detail of Richter’s tapestries or placed themselves between the photographer and the artwork. Richter’s Atlas overview 1962–ongoing highlighted this relationship; this section of the exhibition was an extensive 400-panel extract of the artist’s collected photographs, sketches, collages and cuttings displayed along a long corridor in the exhibition. Several visitor Instagram posts reflected the Atlas exhibit as a space rather than a composition of individual works — visitors represented themselves as being in the exhibition space, rather than looking at separate objects.
Watch as we install Gerhard Richter’s Atlas overview 1962-ongoing
The final major theme that this study found was the impact of visitors sharing on Instagram. Participants shared by viewing others’ images on Instagram, and shared their own for...
For Gerhard Richter, history, painting and photography are intimately linked, we therefore have listed five things that help understand one of the world’s leading and most influential living artists.
5 things to know about Gerhard Richter
1. History
Born in 1932, Gerhard Richter has been making art for as long as many of us have been alive. He was 12 years old when his city of birth, Dresden, was bombed by allied forces during World War Two. He and his mother were living in a rural town outside of Dresden at the time. When he returned to Dresden in 1951 to study at the Dresden Art Academy, more than five years after the end of the war, the city was still in ruins.
‘There were only piles of rubble to the left and right of what had been streets’. Every day we walked from the academy to the cafeteria through rubble, about two kilometres there and back’
Such events formed part of Richter’s early life and were to inform his art throughout his career. The two paintings, Uncle Rudi 1965 and Aunt Marianne 1965 are based on photographs from a family album that Richter took with him when he fled East Germany in 1961. They relate to his own family during the war years and their tragic history.
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2. Freedom
Freedom can often require leaving something or someone behind. It comes at a price.
When Gerhard Richter left East Germany in March 1961 he had to do it covertly. He travelled as a tourist alone, first to Moscow and then to Leningrad. On the return the train stopped at West Berlin where Richter stashed additional suitcases he had brought with him, before returning to Dresden to collect his wife, Marianne Eufinger, known as ‘Ema’.
The borders between the Communist, German Democratic Republic and West Germany were being sealed — just months away from the erection of the Berlin Wall that was to divide the two Germanys for 28 years until its demolition in 1989. Trains and subways were still operating between the Soviet-occupied East and West Berlin making it the last remaining link to the free west.
Richter had a friend drive himself and Ema from Dresden to East Berlin where they boarded a train (without suitcases, which drew suspicion) for the western sector of Berlin where they registered as refugees. Between 1958 and 1961, 700,000 people fled East Germany for the West. Richter’s parents were never allowed to leave East Germany or to visit their son. They died in 1967 and 1968.
Richter was nearly thirty years old when he left East Germany. In Dusseldorf, where he studied and eventually taught, he began to number his works and reject almost everything he had done that was associated with his previous life. But your past never leaves you.
Richter has never been defined by a specific style and has used a variety of materials, techniques and methodologies during his career, like many young artists today. This represented a creative freedom for Richter who had spent more than a decade as a student and young apprentice in East Germany painting murals and making art within the narrow socialist confines of the German Democratic Republic. His academic training in Dresden did however, equip him with skills and technical facility that found expression later in still life paintings, portraits and landscapes.
3. Memory
The late writer, critic and essayist, John Berger once asked the question,
‘What served in place of the photograph; before the camera’s invention? The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more revealing answer might be: memory’.
Photographs have been central to the art of Gerhard Richter. One of the few things he took with him to West Germany was a family album of photographs – some of which became the basis for later paintings. After arriving in West Germany, Richter began to systematically collect photographs, clippings from magazines and books and eventually took many thousands of his own photographs. This accumulation of photographic and reproduced images became the basis for his vast life-long project called Atlas.
Richter’s Atlas includes an extraordinary range of imagery, from harrowing images of the Holocaust to tender images of his children. It was created at a time before digital photography became so common place — when photographs were understood to be a trace of something or some time. Like footprints, fossils, markings on a tree — traces of what has been. Digital technology has changed photography from something we once looked at and reflected upon to something we Send. Once they were an index of memory, now we distribute them in their millions, and forget them.
Watch our time-lapse as we install the ATLAS compendium comprising some 400 panels personally selected by the artist from thousands of clippings, photographs and source images.
4. Beauty
Gerhard Richter has stated that beauty is a ‘dangerous word’. He was thinking about how the Third Reich associated beauty with the notion of racial purity — which culminated in obscene evil and violence. He has also said that, ‘beauty is the opposite of destruction, disintegration and damage’. Today ‘beauty’ is a loaded term. It is often considered obsolete in relation to art. In some instances it is understood to be ‘discriminatory’. But the word is still used, often and sometimes carelessly. Beauty can be found in a song, a thankyou note from a friend, a reflection on still water. Beauty can still be dangerous and it often keeps company with sadness.
Richter finds beauty in nature — an exquisite orchid, the light on the side of...
