ART / CATHY CURTIS : A Paint-by-Number Guide : Seminar Trains Museum Docents as Animated Hosts While Underscoring Ironies of the Volunteer Role

What’s the difference between a museum docent and someone out for a one-night stand? Both try to create instant bonds with total strangers. But even while providing a “total experience,” the docent is always worrying: Was it was good for you?

That zinger comes courtesy of Inez Wolins, director of the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas and former curator of museum education at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. A strong, energetic woman who’d get a speeding ticket if talk was measured in miles per hour, Wolins is an expert on getting visitors to cozy up to the objects in museums in what she calls a “personally significant” way.

Her audience in Costa Mesa earlier this month at the Jane Pence Seminar on Docent Skills was a group of more than 100 Southern California women (and two or three men) who devote hours of unpaid labor as tour guides in 21 diverse museums. The event, sponsored by the Newport Harbor Art Museum, was named in memory of a longtime docent who died in 1989.

Friendly, mutually supportive, conscientious and obedient to the rigmarole of discussion sessions and work sheets, the docents sometimes reminded an outsider of over-age delegates to a Girl Scout Jamboree--not quite the image of femmes fatales Wolins jokingly proposed.

Yet the personal qualities held up for praise in the seminar do seem to have a lot to do with being female. Intuition, patience, flexibility and attentive personal service are behaviors women in our culture absorb from childhood. Even the ability to be relentlessly self-critical--a trait most of us learned all too well as teen-agers--helps in the eternal quest for better ways to teach.

All of this is fine up to a point (though I grit my teeth at the program’s pre-feminist emphasis on smiling). But the handmaidenly virtues of docent education sometimes appeared to overshadow the development of maverick solutions for getting visitors to relate to the objects in the galleries.

If docents were predominantly male, it’s likely the focus would be less hostess-like and more entrepreneurial: devising new ways to “hook” viewers.

Regardless of gender-related matters, I wondered why there wasn’t more emphasis on honing docents’ ability to perceive fanciful metaphorical connections (whether in works of art or in children’s remarks) and the theatrical fearlessness that transforms a reasonable adult into a nutty pied piper.

There were times during the presentation that I wondered whether a day spent practicing how to tap into right-brained thinking wouldn’t be a good corrective to the earnest enumeration of tips and pointers.

Still, for everyone who remembers docent “lectures”--monotone recitations clotted with dates and irrelevant biographical facts--it will be a relief to learn they are now history. Today’s docents are trained to ask questions that get viewers to relate directly to the objects, not to airy chunks of art history.

During her keynote speech, Wolins showed a videotape of seven docents speaking with groups of children or adults at the Archer B. Huntington Art Gallery at the University of Texas at Austin. It was a useful way of observing how different docent personalities and approaches work (or fizzle) with particular audiences.

One exuberant woman with an acting background got young children caught up in making a soundtrack for a painting of the American West (hoofbeats, whistling wind, the dying gasps of guys with arrows in their chests) and discussing aspects of the scene that were specifically native to Texas.

A docent with experience in classroom teaching led older children in a lively but thoughtful discussion of the different feelings associated with passing around a peace pipe or holding a gun.

Other docents seemed tentative or blandly conventional and oblivious to the interests and attitudes of kids today. Rather than leading the child to the art, these docents tried to drag the art to the child.

A woman who attempted to link teen-agers’ general experience of sports with a sculpture of two wrestlers might have done better to steer the conversation to something specific and pop culture-related, like watching wrestlers on TV. A docent trying to focus children’s attention on an abstract painting by Hans Hoffman tried to elicit pat, “correct” answers rather than encouraging free-floating color associations.

A male docent with a teen-age group began a discussion of a Philip Pearlstein painting of a sprawling nude couple by referring to the way the artist lopped off the sitters’ heads.

That is a key element of Pearlstein’s approach, but it might have been better to let the kids react first (with bravado or embarrassment or whatever) to the artist’s clinical depiction of naked flesh.

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One unintended byproduct of the daylong seminar was a list of ironies that emerged as defining aspects of docents’ position in museums.

As “mere” volunteers, their hard work may get them short shrift from busy, skeptical or indifferent staff members. Yet docents frequently are the only museum representatives who interact with visitors, other than the guards.

In my experience working at a museum in the Bay Area, staff members rarely spent much time in the galleries on the days the museum was open to the public. We probably could have learned a lot about viewers’ interests and opinions from the docent representative who attended staff meetings.

Unfortunately, the woman’s aggrieved, long-winded remarks and the associate director’s dismissive attitude were a lethal combination. When meetings adjourned, most of us scuttled rapidly out of her earshot.

Another irony is that docents, unlike curators, are not trained experts in the field of research the museum pursues. They glean their factual information from survey courses offered by the museum’s education department, publications and curators’ “walk-throughs” of temporary exhibitions.

And yet, while the curator may give a single public lecture about a show, the docents present it repeatedly, to a cumulatively larger audience.

On the positive side, docents may find it easier to speak plainly and anticipate visitors’ questions than experts steeped in academic jargon. Yet--as anyone knows who has stumbled trying to explain a complex subject--it takes time to feel comfortable enough with brand-new knowledge to be able to impart it to others. (Docents often say they’re just hitting their stride when a temporary exhibition closes.)

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Still another irony: Although the word volunteer suggests a person whose primary strengths are a positive attitude, the capacity for hard work and spare time, docents also must master daunting bodies of facts as well as sophisticated teaching skills.

The job requires broad-based but specific knowledge, the unlearning of myths and cliches and a clear grasp of the reasons why a particular show was organized.

A good docent also knows how to: attract and hold viewers’ attention, get them to participate in discussions, deal with disruptions and motivate viewers to move from one object to another (“like turning the page in a book,” one docent remarked).

Irony No. 4: Docents are encouraged by museum educators to tell visitors they are free to dislike objects in a show. But as museum spokespersons, docents must not reveal their own feelings.

In a 1988 letter Pence wrote to The Times (in response to an article about controversy over student tours of “Cal Arts: Skeptical Belief(s)” at Newport Harbor), she noted that docents “are not there to tell the public what we personally like or don’t like. There is a certain trust between docents and the exhibition curators that allows us to respect the museum’s selection of exhibitions.”

During the conference, one docent said that when one of her colleagues felt uncomfortable with a particular work, she either left it out of the tour or traded her tour slots with a docent who wasn’t troubled by the piece.

The optimum situation for a museum showing art likely to be controversial might be to nurture a special cadre of docents who feel comfortable--not just dutiful--discussing political and social issues and are willing to foster debates among viewers holding different opinions.

A museum educator in the videotape remarked at one point that docents need to prepare careful notes but leave them behind when giving a tour. “The best note card you can have is the (work of art),” the educator said. “It speaks to you.”

True enough.

The great challenge is to take viewers with you on a journey from the superficial awareness and polite norms of everyday life to the fanciful and unbridled content that gives much art its lasting appeal.