A university put sensors in the gallery benches for a study on how long people look at paintings. The bench in front of the big painting logs the longest look in the study. Nine hours. Every night. Somebody sits down at nine, when the building is empty, and gets up at six, and the study's own camera, which the university put over the painting, shows an empty bench and the painting looking, the researcher said, looked at.
I am the gallery manager at a museum that has one painting people come for, and the bench in front of it has a sensor in it that I did not ask for.
The study.
A university wanted to know how long people look at paintings. They put pressure sensors in the benches and a small camera above each painting pointed at the bench, and the sensors log when somebody sits and when they stand, and the camera records the face looking, and it was all consented and all approved and it has been running for a year.
The bench in front of the big painting logs somebody sitting at nine at night and standing at six in the morning.
The painting.
A large oil, a landscape with a river and a house, painted in the 1880s by a man from the town who went away and was famous and came back, and it is the one thing in the museum that is on the postcards. It is in a gallery of its own with one bench, and the bench is at the distance the painter is supposed to have said was right.
The sensor in the bench logs a weight from nine to six. About sixty kilos. Still. The small shifts of a person sitting for a long time, once every twenty minutes or so, and otherwise still.
The camera above the painting, pointed at the bench, shows the bench empty. The researcher, a young woman, watched the footage with me and said, after a while, that the bench looked sat on. She could not say what she meant. She said the empty bench at nine looked different from the empty bench at seven, and it does, and I cannot say what I mean either.
What has been checked.
The sensor, by the university, who replaced it and then took it out and put it back in a different bench, and the different bench logged nine to six.
The gallery, at nine, by me. I sat on the bench. The sensor read my weight and then it read my weight and sixty, and I was on one end of the bench, and the sixty was on the other, and I sat there with it for an hour, looking at the painting, because that is what the bench is for and I did not know what else to do.
At about ten the sixty shifted, the small shift, and I felt the bench move under me, the way a bench moves when the person on the other end changes how they are sitting, and I said, it's good, isn't it, because you would, and the sixty was still, and I went home.
Who.
I asked the archive. The painter came back to the town at the end of his life and gave the painting to the museum, and the archive has the letter, and the letter says he would like it hung where it could be seen from a bench at a certain distance, because that was the distance at which it was right, and that he hoped to sit on the bench himself, and the archive says he did, most days, for the last two years, from opening to closing, and the attendants had to ask him to leave at the end of the day, and he had not liked that.
He does not have to leave now. He comes at nine when the building is empty and he sits until six and nobody asks him.
What is done about it.
The study has the bench as an outlier and the researcher has been told by her supervisor to exclude it and she has not, and I do not think she will, and her thesis is going to have a chapter in it that she has not told the supervisor about.
What I do.
I run the galleries.
I moved the bench. Not far. It had been put back a foot after a refurbishment, years ago, to give the cleaners room, and I had the letter, and I measured from the letter, and I moved it a foot forward, to the distance he asked for.
The sensor logs nine to six as it did. But the small shifts, every twenty minutes, have stopped. The sixty sits still now for nine hours, entirely still, the way a person sits when the thing in front of them is exactly right, and the researcher's camera, which cannot see him, has, since the bench moved, a change in it that she has measured and cannot account for, which is that the painting is very slightly brighter on the footage from nine to six than it is in the day, as if it were being looked at by the light it was painted in.