Counter Culture

Years ago, when I first learned what a flâneur is—that rapacious urban wanderer—I was struck by the thought that the female equivalent is not a fellow traveler, a gender-flipped idler whiling away her time in the streets, but something more constrictive—the “girl behind the counter,” to borrow Virginia Woolf’s phrase. She’s the shopgirl, the saleslady, the woman offering tickets or goods or information, always some kind of an exchange. Restricted to her place behind that counter or sitting at her desk, she, like the flâneur, is a 19th-century invention, born in the nascent world of the department store but soon enough translated into other workplaces, other contexts. She, too, is a public creature; her eyes smooth over the crowds that surround her, and her existence is almost wholly observant. However, though the male flâneur merges easily with passersby, the woman behind the counter becomes invisible among those same crowds for a different reason.

“The spectator is a prince who rejoices everywhere in his incognito,” Baudelaire crows in “The Painter of Modern Life,” his infamous 1863 essay delineating the new phenomenon of the flâneur. But I felt incognito, too, when for a span in my 20s, I worked behind a series of counters. There, hidden in plain sight, I spent my days looking. I was a spy, I was undercover, I took silent notes of the city that vibrated all around me, its side streets and systems, the crowds that passed through me. My sense of disguise differed from what Baudelaire described. It stemmed from the fact that no one deemed me of particular importance, no action I took was worthy of remarking on or noting on its own, my movements were not the gestures of an individual. Behind that counter, I was invisible because I existed to serve.

There were two counters, in fact. One was in a bookstore popular among Boston’s undergraduates, not so much for its selection of books as because of the attached café. The other counter, the one behind which I spent most of my time, was in a small Revolutionary War–era museum. It was a combination ticket booth-information desk-gift shop counter. There, I learned quickly that a museum is an ecosystem unto itself with specific hierarchies. A strange divide existed between the front staff and the rest of the museum employees, the tour guides and the curators and the education assistants, even though the museum was so small that in the busy summer months, this other half sometimes stood near the front counter and answered questions or held off the crowds while the rest of us hurriedly sold tickets to unscheduled tour groups. But that counter was a dividing line; the back staff never crossed it. To do so represented a transgression, as though the curators would have to admit to themselves something more commercial than they’d like about the relationship between money and history, money and art, money and the rarefied objects on display.

So, I stood there. It was not the worst job, and it was not the best. But from behind that counter, I watched the museum’s guests, tourists and city dwellers alike, and I took notes. Often, I felt like an enormous eyeball, all-seeing and all-knowing, even when I turned listless, the crowd’s eyes sliding over me, paradoxically rendering me invisible through the force of their gaze. It was as though they saw right through me. In the museum, I stood, and I thought. I mulled over many things. Money and information passed through me, my hands, my mouth, like a sieve. I thought a lot about what a museum really is, the wealth it cocoons, however beautiful or distinguished the acquisitions of that wealth might be. And I thought about my own role in perpetuating such wealth.

It was not unlike the feeling Robyn Schiff describes in one of the first poems in her new collection, Information Desk (Penguin, 2023), inspired by her time working at the information desk in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now a professor at Emory and the author of three previous collections, Schiff looks back to a different time in this book, to a moment of becoming. “I used to man the Information Desk in the center of the Great Hall // of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” she writes matter-of-factly in “Part 1.” (Many of the poems in this cycle appear under simple numbered headers; three others are invocations to, respectively, “The Jewel Wasp,” “The Oak Gall Wasp,” and “The Cuckoo Paper Wasp.”)

The rhythms of the museum, peculiar to itself, begin to take over the speaker and her poems. At the beginning of each day, “a guard unlocks a row of doors, crowds // enter, and I am information,

not so much behind as within the Desk,
a property of the fact
of the collection, and catechism
commences: Where’s the bathroom?

In these poems, Schiff’s speaker exists within and narrates from the background, from the pauses of the museum and its steady rhythms, the day-to-day flow of guests moving in and out. The person at the Information Desk—most often a woman —exists in a limbo between guests and staff, coming into daily contact with the public yet staying firmly in place, never following visitors, never joining them on their journeys further into the museum. (There exists a lineage of writers sitting behind museum counters; think of Frank O’Hara at the front desk of MoMA early in his career there.) No one pays attention to the person behind this counter, yet she sees them. She exists as the embodiment of the museum, a living avatar, dispensing advice to the outsiders who rely on her. Her identity fuses with her workplace: Schiff gestures at this when she writes, “I am information,” and of course the irony is that her position, vital as it is, comes with low pay and little respect.

Schiff’s speaker is all-seeing and pliant, recording her surroundings even as she is ignored or abused by those around her. (At one point, she alludes to being sexually harassed by “the man who hired me, and then by his intern.”) This omniscient quality is partly due to the very structure of a museum. Time collapses there; historical periods are compartmentalized into their own rooms, their own wings, and time travel is as easy as walking between display cases. So, too, does time stretch and transform around the book’s speaker. “At [the] center of the Information Desk,” Schiff writes, “I staff the eye of Time.” It is as though she’s always been there. Schiff’s autobiographical speaker transmits dispatches from the future, where she is now an artist in her own right. “It’s Christmastime in my / poem, but Prime Day in America,” she writes from her desk in this future, underscoring another recurrent worry in the collection: art and commerce and the fraught means of making a living through one’s art. By focusing on the Information Desk and her experiences working behind it, Schiff turns the oft-forgotten worker behind the counter into an opportunity to ask deeper questions about the historical relationship between creativity and economics.

The relationship proves impossible to escape. Most of the museum’s guests are unnamed, an anonymous crowd that asks the information desk endless repetitions of questions such as the aforementioned bathroom inquiry, though others venture into more political territory: “Why is there an entry fee? What is / a ‘suggestion?’ / Am I not a taxpayer?” Still others are well-known, themselves an embodiment of a historical moment or set of ideals: “John F. Kennedy // Jr. asked me late one afternoon, ‘What time is it?’” Of the latter, Schiff wryly notes, “He stood / there throbbing / like a metaphor.” For still others, the ties between capital and art are made even more manifestly obvious: the donors, the trustees, the “aged descendant” of the Princesse de Broglie who asked one day “for special permission to see” the portrait of “that ancestor / she’d been told she so resembled.”

Schiff explores the interconnectivity of all of these themes—time, money, and art—most fully in a series of meditations on Rembrandt and his process. From October 1995 to January 1996, the Met held an exhibition titled Rembrandt / Not Rembrandt, a four-month show that overlapped Schiff’s time working at the museum. As the title implies, the exhibition explored Rembrandt’s forgers. “I stood before each / painting,” Schiff writes, “eating half-shadow, umber, and ocher / every day for a month / of lunch hours trying to know” what was real and what was fake. But it is difficult to distinguish between a forgery and the real thing sometimes. The question spills over into life. The person seated behind the counter, trying to test her own knowledge, her own eye, during her lunch break—is she a fake, an imitation of a real guest or curator? What of the security guard who follows her into the galleries, harassing her, who later becomes a design assistant and secures her an exhibition poster—is his attempt at courtship a counterfeit, a perversion, of the real thing?

Even the paint Rembrandt used becomes—like the museum’s guests—a metaphor, indicative of the ways in which a museum turns everything in its path into an object to display, a gesture toward hidden meaning. Schiff notes that Rembrandt’s particular shade of black was known as “bone black” and prepared by “placing / bones in a crucible / and depriving them / of oxygen.”

Then you grind the char
into a baby-powder-fine
denial of soul until it’s pure matter

There’s a ghoulish quality to this description. In Schiff’s rendering of this process, Rembrandt’s paintings are representations of reality composed by their very properties of something mortal. They too are counterfeit in their way: mere imitations of life made from the literal bones of a (“Bovine; porcine; human?” asks Schiff) life and now, years later, sold for outlandish sums or hung, stagnant, in a museum. Schiff’s interest in the materiality of Rembrandt’s art provokes questions regarding the conditions in which it was created. What, exactly, is art’s responsibility once it’s put on display? And the person answering that question—what should they say?

There is quiet humor, alongside a whiff of defiance, in Information Desk’s subtitle: “An Epic.” An epic poem, of course, calls to mind the Greeks, the Romans, all those illustrious examples—The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, etc. The journey portrayed in Information Desk may initially appear to be more inward, but it’s no less transformative. In her quest to become an artist, the speaker traverses locales and years, meeting strange characters—museum patrons, fellow artists at a residency—along the way. Who says that the life of the woman behind the counter is not equally adventurous as an epic hero’s, constricted as it may be in its movement? “There is the girl behind the counter too—I would as soon have her true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon,” Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own (1929); here, Schiff gives that history.

“The smell of color will bother you,” Schiff quotes Rembrandt as warning guests to his studio, and in a book preoccupied with metaphor and with the exclusionary role that class, race, and gender played in making the modern museum, this becomes as good a metaphor as any. There is indeed something bothersome about the structure of the museum—its inflated self-importance—even as it incites awe. There are also recent debates concerning the colonial history of the Western museum and its propensity to “safeguard” the sacred objects of other cultures, in which the Met and other major institutions around the world have been implicated. Yet there remains something undeniably exciting about a visit to the museum. It’s an alternate dimension, a zone in which historical or aesthetic objects take on heightened sanctity, and where else in our everyday secular lives is that possible?

Earlier this year, I ventured from my apartment in Brooklyn to the Upper East Side, making the long subway trek—its own kind of pilgrimage—to the Met. Admission costs more now than it did when Schiff worked there, but the building remains grandiose, its sloping steps leading up to the entryway—a kind of raised eyebrow, skeptical of all those about to enter. It had been some time since I last visited, perhaps a year, for an exhibition dedicated to international surrealism. For this visit, though, I was less interested in the art.

I walked quickly up those flat steps. They’re infamous, at least to millennials, because they’re where fictional rich girls sat before class in the TV series Gossip Girl. In reality, the Met’s steps are more often filled with tourists. Once inside, I waited briefly before obtaining my ticket, turning my head to look toward the other ticket booths beside the one I stood at, the Information Desk, all those vases filled with flowers, perpetually kept fresh due to the largesse of a donor.

Who were those women and men behind their counters, helping me and my fellow museum-goers, their identities melting in accordance to their roles? Public-facing museum workers—those sitting behind the information desk or the guards patrolling the galleries—have different responsibilities than retail or restaurant workers; they ostensibly safeguard, and spend their days surrounded by, high culture. “Truth and lies and art / are twisty business,” Schiff writes toward the end of Information Desk; in a museum, the three often converge.

It has been more than a decade since I last worked at my own, comparatively smaller, museum counter, yet I still stiffen slightly when I buy a ticket or ask an informational question, made suddenly awkward by the rhythms of attention-keeping, of hiding one’s boredom for the sake of the person on the transaction’s other end. I bought my ticket, and before I ventured farther into the galleries, I looked back toward the woman who had helped me. She was braced for the day ahead—her fingers tapped out a rhythm on the counter, her mind wandered. I had caught her in an idle moment. Standing there, the woman behind the counter watched me. And I watched back.