Installation 7: The Life of a Guard previous
At
2:57 in the afternoon the guards stood in position, shifted their weight
and looked at each other across the expanse of a gallery. It was almost
the end of the shift, time to go home or go on break or move to a new
gallery; a rare moment in the life of guarding when action was called
for. Mostly, guarding gave one a lot of time to think. So much time that
it was easy to enter into a stupor and stare at an African mask while
thinking about the past (Why was I such a loser in seventh grade?),
the future (When I sell that painting, I'm quitting this place)
and, occasionally, even the present (I could kill for a cigarette.
On break, I'm gonna smoke three).
Most of guarding at The Museum was about marking time. There was getting through the morning shift. The afternoon shift. The Thursday evening shift when The Museum was open late. Maybe a special event or two for rich people who wanted to drink too much champagne and reach out and touch sculpture. On the outside, time went by so much faster. There was never enough time to paint, sculpt, practice with a band, make a CD and try to get signed to a record deal. Outside, they ran to auditions or go-sees for modeling jobs and rode to galleries with portfolios balanced on the back of their bicycles. And then, before they knew it, it was time to guard again.
Being a guard was a lot like waiting on tables – there were a few people who did it as a vocation but most did it because it was something easy until they made it in another field. Maybe music. Mostly music. Like waiting tables, there were also those who did it because they weren't fit for anything else. They weren't musicians or artists, they were alcoholics or addicts or depressed. They wanted to guard and go home and do whatever in their apartments and this was fine. It worked out. It was difficult not to be a good guard as long as you showed up on time and stayed on your feet. “Stay standing and look stern,” used to be the extent of the orientation for guards back in the 1970s. Now there was a booklet and a training session and the uniforms were a little better, although for the most part the guards often looked like they were in an early Beatles tribute band.
It could be exhausting work to guard things that never moved. The greatest threats came in the form of fingers – sticky or sweaty, slim or gnarled, well-manicured or bitten – that reached out to touch things. This was how art became worn or, in some cases, ruined. This was also how criminals sometimes inspected things and made plans to carry them off. Be wary of fingers reaching out. The fingers grew tiresome. There were so many of them, day in and day out. And so sometimes the guards need to retreat underground. They went to the lowest level of the museum, walked down a long hallway with no doors, took a left and ended up in front of a heavy steel door. In order to gain admittance, a person had to stand in front of a one-way mirror, press a button on an intercom and wait to be asked to show their badge and state their name. Then the door would pop open and admit them to “The Cave,” the security nerve center for the museum.
The Cave was nothing more than a square room with cinderblock walls, one of which was covered with monitors. A different camera sent back its recorded vision to one of these monitors. Each monitor flickered through several scenes – the parking ramp, the front entrance, the lobby, every gallery – from several angles. There was someone posted in The Cave twenty-four hours a day.
Provisions were stored in The Cave. There were boxes of candy and cheap granola bars. There was a mini-fridge, scavenged from an alley in the spring when college students were moving. There was even a La-Z-Boy with a greasy pillow tucked into it, although no one would ever own up to napping in it during their night shift. There were also stacks of comics and newspapers and dog-eared copies of Field and Stream from the 1980s which, when the pressure of being underground without natural light or fresh air got to be too much, were combed through with a level of anticipation and longing usually reserved for porn. Most often, the guards sat on broken chairs at the back of The Cave, ate Nut Goodie bars and talked about playing guitar or painting with oils or tits.
If museum visitors noticed the cameras it certainly never stopped them from doing intimate things like adjusting their underwear when they were alone in a gallery. The most spectacular sightings from the cameras were logged in a notebook for other guards to read during their shift in The Cave or when they were supposed to be up in the galleries but were lingering too long over Twinkies and Mountain Dew.
July 27 – Kid in front of the Medieval armor picked his nose and rubbed it on the armor's shield.
August 5 – Guy down on the floor in front of “The Three Magi Leave Bethlehem” waving his legs around and laughing. Brent went over to tell him to stop and got kicked in the nuts.
January 27 – Couple having sex on Eames lounger. Didn't have the heart to dispatch anyone to break it up.
The Cave was also good for watching specific people, if you wanted to watch them unobserved. For example, a few weeks after she started working at The Museum, one of the guards known as The Phantom because he only worked in The Cave and never talked to anyone, started to watch Phoebe Persons when she came in to the desk each morning to retrieve her ID badge and left each night after dropping her badge off. She was frequently in a rush and carrying too many things. She often had to bend over her bag to find the badge or retrieve it from where it had fallen to the floor. Sometimes she would stop, right on camera, and sweep her hair back into a ponytail. At those moments, there in the dark room that tended to smell like an old man's sickroom, it seemed to The Phantom as if there was a breeze blowing. A sweet and promising breeze carrying with it the smell of perfume, chocolate chip cookies and carefully washed underwear.