Too Much of a Good Thing Makes a Bad Exhibit: The Saga of the Montana Hall at the Royal Library

The royal treasury collection in the Montana Hall at the Royal Library looks like someone with schizophrenia curated it. As you enter the room it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the lighting, kept intentionally dim for the sake of the timeworn documents arranged in a circle in a glass casing, stretching from floor to ceiling in the middle of the room. At first, your eyes pick up only the spotlighted Guttenberg bibles, ancient Chinese scrolls, notes of Soren Kierkagaard, and all the other precious manuscripts paying tribute to centuries of human thought and achievement around which the exhibit is based.  But as they adjust, you begin to notice flashes of color around the room, on the walls, ceilings, and even inside the glass casing itself. As your eyes fully adapt, the pop-art universe that permanently frames the exhibit, curated by Russian avant garde artist Andrey Bertenev, comes barreling into full view. Every flat surface in the space is plastered with chromatic kaleidoscope-faces, whimsical polka-dots, and every other pop-art collage trick in the book. In the center of the circle of manuscripts is none other than a life-size sculpture of a polar bear sniffing the crouch of a ceiling high cutout of a man donning whitey-tidies. The effect is undeniable. It is overwhelming, shocking, aggressive and raunchy. The glaring pairing of manuscripts and pop art aims to “forge links between the very oldest writings, books and manuscripts and the roaring modern information culture in which we find ourselves today.”  That, quite frankly, could not have been more obvious. It also, equally as frankly, could not have been more sloppily done.

Some say that art is only progressed and stimulated by pairings of unlikely things, be they genres, images etc… Surely, the framing of ancient texts in a cosmos of pop-art would qualify as unlikely. However, couplings should be smart, clever, and adroit. This exhibit was none of those things, and left me both over-stimulated and profoundly unsatisfied. To begin, the pop art itself was a callous amalgamation of images and piece meal chunks of Bertenev’s exhibits from around the world (for example, a full half of a wall is dedicated to a light collage from his 2010 “Drink My Voice”, and seems to be randomly implanted in a corner). But more, the segments themselves, pop art and manuscripts, require enormously contrasting cognitive processes from the viewer. On the one hand, manuscripts invite quiet contemplation, on the other, pop art demands loudness. The simultaneous and incongruous demand on the viewers mental space detracts from the experience of both segments of the exhibit.

Most of the collages on the walls are also very hard to view, given the dark environment, which forces the viewer to strain, and as such the colorful barrage of the pop art requires so much brain power from the viewer as to leave little to no room for the quiet contemplation of the considerably more understated pieces laying amongst it. The frenetic pop art overwhelms the space, squeezing the thousands of years of history embedded in the documents into tiny pulsing orbits, behind the glass, gagged by the wild environment, and out of the full reach of the viewer. As an exhibit which has the primary purpose of providing a space to showcase the treasures of the royal library to the public, this is an incredibly unfortunate outcome. Originally intending to view the exhibit for a few solitary moments, and to pay my respects to ancient documents in a dark room before heading to meet friends for a picnic, I instead found myself lost in a labyrinth of images and colors that I was not able to weave myself out of for close to an hour.  Of that hour, I spent a despairingly little amount of time actually engaged with what I had come to see. The exhibit in the Montana Hall at the Royal Library is not so much a display of the royal treasures, which invites contemplation of the future of information transfer through a frame of pop art, as it is an overindulgent exposition of the work of Andrey Bertenev with a few manuscripts haphazardly placed about.