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The Hereford Screen: A Personal InteractionBy Christopher J GarciaThere are some moments when one comes into contact with a work of art. Ithappened to me a lot in the 1990s, while trying to justify a minor in Art History. I’d go tothe latest special exhibit at the MFA in Boston and find myself, for no good reason,welling up at the way they presented the last series that Lichtenstein had painted, or theseries of illustrations from Arab scientific manuscripts. I’d spent hours at all distancesfrom Pollack, Man Ray, Rothko, Motherwell, Nevelson, actually feeling something cutthrough me, hit an emotional point in myself that I seldom let flow up to the front. I oncefound myself nearly in hysterics in a room full of Hockney in a gallery in Providence.Something about Abstraction, divorce from representationalism, craft, that’s what reallygot to me. So why, when I visited England on my trip as the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fundrepresentative, was the thing that broke me down a piece of Victorian Iron Work?I had a section of my trip set aside for The Big London Musuems. There was theBritish Museum (planned for two days), The Science Museum (I had to see the BabbageEngine), the Natural History Museum and, far less important than the others, the V&A;the Victoria & Albert Museum. It’s a museum of Decorative Art and Design, with anemphasis on the later, it would seem. Maybe it was that I was visiting when the major artgalleries were being updated, but as I saw it, it was a museum of design: the ugly,functional stepsister of Art. I usually can’t even bring myself to capitalize it.I had done my bit of the Science Museum, observed both the originalreconstruction and the one that would soon be delivered to my museum, and it wasapproaching two o’clock. I walked out and entered the V&A, my iBook and London A-to-Z in my Further Confusion bookbag. It’s a building of hugeness. There’s no other wayto put it. It’s not quite as massive as the Natural History Museum, but it’s still impressive.Then again, all those big stone buildings that I came across in London felt like cathedrals built to convert heretic giants. You walk in and there are pieces, lovely pieces, pieces thatappear everywhere and seem to mean little. There’s a Chihuly glass piece hanging over an information desk. There are pieces that stand as introductions to coming galleries. Theentire layout is full of pieces of art and craft.The galleries are lovely, and some even border on overpowering. There are theCast Courts, huge galleries full of plaster casts of hundreds of massively significantworks that would never be able to move. There are giant pillars, cathedral doors, effigies,tombs, caskets and statues. It’s amazing, though it doesn’t feel like magic. There’s alovely hall full of Korean decorative arts, a wonderful room of Japanese kimono andother pieces of clothing, and a hall of musical instruments that moved me, but not morethan any other collection of objects. It was pretty much a really good museum, like theones that I hang out in around California, only better. There were some truly amazingobjects, the Gloucester Candlestick, a gesso-on-wood Jesus on an Ass, the ThomasBecket Casket and the Butler-Bowden Cope. It was all great, but it wasn’t life-changing.I headed up a set of stairs and down a hallway, going towards what I thought wasgoing to be the Islamic section when I came to a strange object. It was presented just infront of the wall, and when you approached it, it was from the side. I wasn’t sure what itwas, had no idea, but when I got to it, something happened.It was the Hereford Screen.
 
The Hereford Screen is not the kind of object that you hear people talk about asthe most significant of the V&A’s collection. There are many other sexier artifacts. Imean, it’s a screen from the UK, placed in a location where it’s actually kind of hard tocome across. It’s one of the objects with the best stories, though. It was built as a choir screen, a part of most Cathedrals of the pre-1700 period which separated the congregationfrom the clergy. The screen was first shown at the 1862 International Exhibition. It was amarvel, got massively positive reviews. I mean, it was an 8 ton piece of iron worn withelectroformed copper figures, which was a revolutionary process. They looked like theywere cast bronze, but they were produced at a fraction of the price. The size, thirty or sofeet high, was immense, something that would hit this unsuspecting Californian about146 years later. The screen was then installed at Hereford Cathedral, ironically enoughlocated in Hereford. The Screen served nobly for more than 100 years. The generalchange in the design and Cathedral interiors, coupled with the general distaste for Victoriana that the UK faced in many of the decades of the 20
th
Century. The screen wasdismantled and sold to the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery.There’s a legendary story around the Computer History Museum about acomputer called Johnniac. Johnniac was a computer from the RAND Corporation in the1950s, a Von Neumann machine that was given to the L.A. County Museum. Theycouldn’t afford to maintain it or display it, so they put it out in a parking lot. Museumshave to make choices. They can’t afford to keep everything, they can’t afford to keepevery object in Showroom condition. It’s just not possible, so choices are made. In thecase of Johnniac, one of the guys who had worked on it saw it, called up The Computer Museum, and it got sent there. There was no way the Herbert Museum could keep theHereford Screen up, and they certainly couldn’t fix it up, so they gave it to the Victoria &Albert Museum in 1983.The museum had it, but it wasn’t in great shape. In fact, it was in pieces. A huge project was put together to get it back into shape so they could make it into a showcaseobject. This led to the collection of money so that it could be restored and displayed.They figured that it could go onto the bridge that over-looked the entrance, which is aglorious place for it to be seen, in theory (though for much of the foyer, it’s blocked bythat Chihuly piece I mentioned. They did a survey to figure out the true needs and mademaps of how it properly fit together. They blasted it with Aluminium Oxide, got rid of the bad metal, added structural supports, the remaining pieces of paint were examined andthe piece refinished. The result was an £800,000 restoration project.And that moment, in 2008, when I came across it, if the goal had been to touch aheretic, then every shilling had been worth it.I came around and looked at it full from the front, pushed up against the railingthat over-looked the entrance. I was overwhelmed, but in a much different way than I had been when I came into the Cast Court. This was something completely different. It wasthe closest thing to a religious experience I can ever remember myself having with anyobject that had true religious connections. I was standing in front of a massive piece of iron work with Jesus prominently displayed, with passion flowers all over the place, and Iwas feeling something in my chest that I had never experienced when looking atanything. Honestly, the closest comparison I can come up to is that moment in TheGodfather where Appolonia first sees Michael and is struck with the Thunderbolt. I hadto stop and stare, set my computers down and walk back and forth with long pauses at
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