Basic Training for the Avant Guard

The lessons museum guards learn to keep from going insane at work are more creative than you might think.

Illustration by Demian Johnston for City Arts

Those of you who have been following my column  (Hi, Mom!) may have noticed that I write a great deal about things museum security guards witness — but little about actual security. While I can’t divulge sensitive security secrets, I can give you a glimpse of our rigorous security “training.”

Picture those commercials for U.S. Marines: young cadets crawling under barbed wire, jumping over things that are hard to jump over, driving around in tanks, leaping out of helicopters. Our training is nothing like that. It’s more along the lines of stretching a lot to keep our muscles from seizing up when we’re standing in one spot for three hours. Many guards don’t make it past the first week, unless they find a good pair of insoles.

Speaking of feet — it is crucial to keep the analytical part of the brain on its toes in the museum. What do you think goes through the mind of the guard at MOMA in New York, who is tasked with watching over Starry Night, yelling at every patron who crosses an imaginary three-foot barrier in front of the work? I imagine he scrutinizes every person who approaches, constantly looking for threats (or goofy outfits to laugh about with his colleagues later). And if his team is anything like mine, he has a whole roster of activities to keep them focused.

Thinking of new names for paintings is a great mind exercise. One guard — let’s call him Eric — suggested that Woman, Why Weepest Thou? which depicts Jesus resting his hand gently on the shoulder of a woman kneeling on a quaint forest path, should be renamed, Yo B**ch, Why You Trippin’? (Incidentally, on his application, under “Position Desired,” Eric wrote, “Avant Guard.” Perhaps we should have taken that as a warning.)

Another time, we used collective analysis to determine the greatest artist of the modern era. How? Using the classic bracket system based on the NCAA tournament, we assigned a rank and region to sixty-four artists, who then faced off with the intensity of Duke vs North Carolina. Victors of each match were decided by popular vote. After an upstart challenge by Cinderella-story Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso handily defeated him in the finals. Chihuly didn’t make the tournament — sorry to all the glass art fans out there (I hear he did well in the collegiate NIT-style tournament at the Tacoma Art Museum).

Finally, “profiling” is a very controversial yet vital tool in the industry. We spend a great deal of time studying faces, learning to notice and describe intricate details. This can be valuable for identifying art thieves to the cops. So to practice, we developed the “Portrait Challenge,” which is held in a dark, empty corner of the museum. You take a small picture of anybody (often a celebrity), about two by three inches, paste it in the upper-right-hand corner of a blank piece of paper, draw six empty boxes below it and then ask six participants to fill the squares with their own renditions of the picture. The portraitists produce a wide range of interpretations: a very sad Mr. T; a mannish, skeletal Madonna; even a really skinny Elton John, drawn by visiting artist Mark Ryden, who was kind enough to participate, as he had a side interest in learning the ins and outs of museum security.

The works were so intriguing that they were shown at the artist-run exhibition space Fat Tiger last summer. I hear that a second Portrait Challenge will be hosted by the art collective the Baby Seal Club, at 619 Western Ave. (May 7, 6:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.).

Attend and you, too, could find yourself stepping through the window that keeps museum security a secret world of creativity all its own.