Despite Ample Set of Clues, ‘Crime’ Was Misconstrued

In his review of “Scene of the Crime,” an exhibition I organized at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, Christopher Knight demonstrates that he has not done his homework as a detective (“There’s Evidence of Good Work Found at ‘Scene of the Crime,’ ” Calendar, July 29).

Knight complains that relatively few works in the show “make direct reference to criminal activity” and adds, “I don’t get the criminal angle in most of the show’s examples.”

The exhibition’s introductory wall text and the introduction to the exhibition catalog (and the essays therein) indicate that the show’s premise has little to do with actual crime but is concerned with types of contemporary art in which the viewer must assume a detective-like role.

Viewers needn’t be Sherlock Holmes to figure out the title “Scene of the Crime” is meant metaphorically, not literally. As the introductory wall text explains, the art in this show typically “alludes to absent dramas and subjects which the viewer is invited to reconstruct.”

Ultimately, it “aims to shed light on a type of looking that seems characteristic of our time: a skeptical, probing glance that we use whether routinely checking out a city street or watching the evening news.”

The exhibition hopes to remind us that, as the artist Barry Le Va said, “content is something that can’t be seen” --an observation, incidentally, which is also quoted in the introductory text panel.

Clearly, none of these considerations are literally linked to crime, yet Knight chose to review a “sensationalistic” show of his own making. His fundamental misreading led him to chide the exhibition for distorting the meaning of various artworks by framing them within the imaginary “criminal” context he invented; thus he sees the inclusion of Monica Majoli’s painting of a gay sadomasochistic sex scene as somehow implying that homosexuality is a “crime against nature.”

The wall text for this section of the exhibition and the discussion of Majoli’s art in the catalog presented her work in very different terms.

As curator, my assumption was that a reasonably curious viewer, on encountering a show with few works directly alluding to crime, might reexamine the title’s possible meanings. As a helpful clue, both text panels and catalog prominently feature German critic Walter Benjamin’s famous remark, “Is not every spot of our cities the scene of a crime?”--an observation made in response not to urban crime waves, but to Eugene Atget’s haunting photographs of empty Paris streets and the complex feelings and speculations these images provoke.

Knight committed a disservice not only to the work of those involved in the exhibition, but also to his readers, who presumably assume that a critic, having seen a show, knows more about its background and context than they do.