Museum greets etiquette as an art

The debate that surrounds taking the last slice of cheese in a party has haunted countless guests that have not been properly trained in the art of etiquette.

Visitors today through Sunday at the UCLA Hammer Museum will learn to reduce these social anxieties.

The interactive project, “Greeting Committee,” by artist in residence Ana Prvacki will open discussion on etiquette in today’s world.

According to Prvacki, etiquette is valuable because it allows for a social fluidity that makes people feel harmonious and welcome.

“The techniques of social engagement are successful only when they are fully and sincerely welcoming to the other,” Prvacki said. “The formality is a contagious thing. They did research on bus drivers: If he smiles and opens the doors in a nice way or if the bus driver is not friendly, it affects the mood of the passengers for the rest of the day.”

“Greeting Committee” will include several instructors of etiquette from around the world for the audience to engage them in formal situations such as greetings, hand shaking, introductions and other daily forms of decorum. International welcoming traditions will also be expressed, such as the Slavic welcome greeting with slatko, a sweet jam that guests are encouraged to eat in order to enter sweetly into the home.

In the spirit of hospitality, the Hammer Museum will have free public admission throughout the event for those to engage in Prvacki’s project.

Allison Agsten, curator of public engagement and director of visitor services at the Hammer Museum, said that Prvacki was invited as an artist in residence particularly because of the engagement that her artwork has on the audience.

“Museums have held the stigma of being elitist or inaccessible, so this is a good way to engage visitors in a welcoming way,” Agsten said, “(Prvacki) takes into account welcoming and gestures of greeting which are important considerations.”

Prvacki said she felt highly inspired by Irina Aristarkhova’s article “Hospitality and the maternal” published in the Hypatia journal, Derrida’s “Of Hospitality,” Emily Post’s books, the comedy of manners and even “Borat.”

Books on etiquette will be available at the Hammer Museum for people to learn more.
“Like Borat, there is something very humane about the awkwardness and sort of clumsiness that sometimes takes place in the failure of keeping etiquette,” Prvacki said.

She also said that it is the genuine sincerity that makes the act hospitable, despite its apparent failure to assume social requirements.

Aristarkhova, assistant professor of women’s studies and visual art at Pennsylvania State University, discussed the project early on with Prvacki and shared her work on the aesthetics of hospitality.

She said that Prvacki’s work highlighted issues of race, gender and class as factors in the reception of etiquette.

She used the example that there was a time when men were expected to open the door for women.

“Now we open doors for everyone. It doesn’t matter whether it is a woman or a child or man behind you,” Aristarkhova said. “So it doesn’t become a gesture that makes someone feel like “˜the other,’ but it creates a sense of “˜us’ as a community.”

Among her other projects, Prvacki said she is concerned with consumer aesthetics in participatory pieces.

Her approaches allow people to re-examine their rituals of daily life and things that we are immediately surrounded by.

Mindfulness is a practice Prvacki said she hopes students will be made aware of as they engage in her situated acts of hospitality.

“These gestures are very meaningful,” Prvacki said. “Even the smallest gesture really touches people. … It reverberates.”