This week I helped facilitate a leadership seminar for a group of visual merchandisers from my company. We employ one “designer” per store; about forty from our region attended. They are a hip and enthusiastic group who enjoy their jobs, in spite of working in what seems a constant frame of paradox.

Their job is to arrange or display a collection of product in a way that inspires a story and invokes a customer response, hopefully to buy. Look at this table setting! How romantic! How elegant! How spring! Food must taste better on these beautiful plates! Can you see candles casting sultry shadows on the walls; hear the clinking of glass toasting an achievement or engagement? All of this is ready for you to take home, just gather and we box! The more desire a designer can conjure for this alternate, but still familiar universe, the more apt the customer is to move from browsing to requesting everything shown: please, here is my credit card.

But in determining how beautifully to merchandise a display, there are dilemmas, risks to consider in the creative process. Make it too elaborate and the customer will be afraid to touch it. They will stand back and survey objectively, noticing the intricacy of cantilevered, propped layers more than what is being sold. They won’t want to get too close. What if it all falls over? What if I break something? If too complicated, a single purchase can destroy the visual intent leaving a display disrupted and messy. The next customer, and the next, see only empty spaces before they walk away. The worst is a boring display, flat like innocuous wall paper in a chain hotel. A customer barely glances, uninspired, wallet closed.

The most successful display is simple but irresistible, like a real home, only better. It invites the customer to reach out, pick up, sit down, plump, poke, pantomime use to the extent that they choose and buy, eventually eroding the display that enticed them in the first place. Such is the irony, the more effective the display, the less time it remains intact. The goal is to sell and we love the constant assembling and dismantling, yet there is ambivelence in exerting a creative effort day after day that is measured by how quickly it is depleted.

We decided as part of this two day seminar that we would take these designers to the Contemporary Art Museum. Because the logistics of herding so many people from admission to lunch to workshop is complicated, I had the opportunity to meet privately with one of the museum educators. We dispensed with the details of the visit quickly and she began telling me about the current collections. She was particularly excited to talk about the artist Rudolf Stingel.

She explained that when most people view art they engage in what she called the “museum dance.” They stand and stare for few seconds, lean over to read the sign, and then pop back up for another quick look before moving on. They do the same thing, for the same amount of time, stop after stop, rote observational behavior that belies any true connection with an individual piece. She told me Rudolf Stingel’s work is designed to stop the dance and draw the observer in, offering them a role in his creative dramas.

One installation is a wall to wall carpet of lurid orange that you can walk, sit or lie on, placing you in the center of things in a way that alters perception. The white walls begin to seem pink, yellow, orange, translucent; I felt as if I was falling or losing gravity. Like wearing orange spectacles in a crayon version of OZ, the simple act of standing on something so bright lingers behind the eyes far into the next gallery. 

Another exhibit covers the walls of a lofting atrium space. Composed of foil covering air filters, there is no rope barrier between the viewer and the pliable surface. From the exhibit guide: “it not only dazzles but can be touched and altered, thereby becoming a democratic artwork. A means of public dialogue that visitors can use to create or witness others in the act of creation, Untitled (2007) transforms a painting and the MCA into a communal, social space.” Moving up closer than usual, I examined receipts, business cards, to do lists, sketches, profanity, gouges, money, tape, advertisements, found objects that had been stuck and jabbed without order or beauty or profound cumulative meaning, yet addictively stimulating.

Other Stingel works were no less surprising, giant photographs that were really oil paintings. Styrofoam insulation manipulated into natural motifs so lifelike I could hear the ocean in the background. Eerie wallpaper that seems to sweat and writhe just beneath patterns of expected rationality. A statue of Buddha that holds the tools of the artist’s process, defying the exclusivity of imagination and the elevation of the artist from the rest; the Buddha seems to say, come on, anyone can do it.

Amidst her explanations and my subsequent discovery, I was struck by the obvious connection between my designers’ displays and Robert Stingel’s work. Both beckon, lure, and crave involvement from their viewer. Both are selling ideas about how the world is or ought to be. Both depend on common materials that when assembled in uncommon arrangements inspire and stimulate new directions. Both measure success by how many people engage in their vision. Yet, the comparason only goes so far. We stack wine glasses in a store front window and he hangs carved insulation on the walls of a vaulted gallery.

I introduced the seminar tour by describing the cover of last week’s New Yorker: two people standing in front of a large contemporary painting, looking not up, but down at the image captured in their digital camera, the art experience as filtered through a preferred lens. Even as I encouraged the designers to set aside their own lens and confront the artwork face to face, I inwardly acknowledged how imbedded my own point of view. Later, I stood before a white carpet Stingel had placed vertically on a wall. Noticing a handprint left by a previous participant, I pressed my own hand into the pile alongside. Standing back, I noticed how small my print appeared, like a child’s, perched on someone’s shoulders, reaching forward.