The Cloisters, between Pilgrimage and Tourism

This was a miniature conference paper I gave this week. I was trying to locate the Cloisters, as both a museum and a medieval (contemporary) construction, relative to traditions of pilgrimage and tourism.

In the modern age of tourism, museums have achieved landmark status. For one who sees “everything as a sign of itself,” [1] museums are convenient concentrations of cultural artifacts employed to typify the conditions under which they were made. Fortunately for New York tourists and tour organizations, the majority of these museums are concentrated in upper-middle Manhattan. City Sites NY, a popular tour bus franchise, advertises that both their “All Around Town” and “Uptown Tour Bus” tours include visits to the Museum Mile [2], and is therefore a must. The visibility of these museums contributes to their high visitor traffic, and perpetuates their canonization in the New York tourist experience.

Excluded from these franchised museum loops is the Cloisters. This is in part due to its distance from central Manhattan: it is 5.6 miles north of its parent museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose inclusion on bus tours is almost guaranteed. The Cloisters’ absence from the museum canon may also have to do with its specialization in medieval art: its narrow focus appeals to a necessarily smaller audience. Thus, obscure enough in location and content to have eluded the double-decker’s radius of interest, the Cloisters occupies a different category of destinations working along and at odds with touristic practice.

In addition to being out of the way, the Cloisters presents other formal elements that exclude its complete participation in tourism. The museum is located on the top of a modest hill in the center of four acres of parkland in Fort Tryton Park. The road to the entrance is cobbled, winding, and drastically narrower than the adjacent roads. The entrance is marked by a single small door followed by a tiny foyer. This latter room serves both as the entrance and exit, and is also the only available site for groups to congregate. Its diminutive size is designed to anticipate small numbers and lower volumes of visitors. Indeed, their website says that the staff reserve the right to turn away groups to avoid overcrowding. [3] The museum is thus situated and constructed to frustrate a model of tourism based on rapid viewing and visits en masse.

While excluding certain touristic presence, the Cloisters still employ semiotics in a way that anticipates tourism. The current building, completed in 1935, is described on their website as rendered in “a simplified, paraphrased medieval style.” [4] It was conceived by its first curator in “the sprit of the Gothic.” [5] The building itself is crafted in a generic monastic form rather than being modeled on a specific historical monument. The tower, galleries, and quad are deployed as recognizable signs of monastic-ness. The Cloisters are thus a semiotic project converting a time period into a sign system.

These constructions are not meant to be read critically as signs, but rather as authenticators of the museum’s content. When the Cloisters were first conceived in 1925, the Metropolitan Museum’s bulletin describes it as a site that “stimulates the imagination and creates a receptive mood for enjoyment,” [6] where “medieval art is not so much on exhibition as it is at home.” [7] The text suggests that the building is the natural container for the art within, and can vividly evoke the medieval ages in the present time. The Cloisters’ website today still reads that it “provide[s] as inviting a place for rest, contemplation, and conversation as they did for their original monastic population.” [8] The museum building and its objects authenticate one another, and jointly attempt to offer an immersive experience in their constructed authenticity. The writing and presentation assume that the visitor seeks a medieval reality.

The Cloisters’ conflicted participation in tourism reverberates again in its relationship with the literal economy of tourism. The admission fees are recommended but not compulsory, though the ticket price is set on the high end at $20 per adult. Furthermore, both the admissions desk and the website strongly encourage visitors to pay the full price. [9] This passive-aggressive solicitation demonstrates a desire to bypass commercialization, while suffering an inability to be completely independent from it. The availability of a souvenir shop tells the same story. The online floor plan does not clearly indicate the presence of the in-house store tucked behind the admissions desk. In contrast, a store is readily acknowledged off-premise as a tab on the Metropolitan’s online shop, and as a compartment of its physical shop in Manhattan. The Cloisters claims some distance from commodity culture without full independence from the economy of souvenirs.

The museum thus oscillates towards and away from touristic practice in a partial embrace. Nested within this conflicted self-presentation are similar partial gestures towards traditions of pilgrimage.

Venturing far north of Manhattan via the laborious and claustrophobic means of the A Train to emerge in a grassy clearing recalls the wonder and relief of pilgrims upon approach of their destinations. The Cloisters doubly resonates with pilgrimage practice because it engages medieval subject matter. It contains the ruins of at least four sites that medieval pilgrims would have visited, as well as objects that have sacred status. The museum thus not only houses historical relics, but acts as a reliquary to the architectural fragments of holy spaces. Both objects and ruins thus become culturally sacred, and are doubly auratic.

The organization of the museum’s interior space also mimics the practice it aims to put on display. The rooms are laid out in a circular route and in chronological order beginning with the Romanesque and ending with the Late Gothic. The orientation indicates a single, structured way to navigate along a historicized narrative punctuated with reconstructed miniature cathedrals; this recalls prescribed pilgrimage routes like those of Egeria that followed Biblical narratives.

Yet, the Cloisters does not fully command pilgrimage practice either. In contrast to Egeria’s three year journey, the Cloisters collapse the geographical and temporal distance between sites. The museum is a partial approximation of pilgrimage in the form of a heterotopic and heterochronic space. In the absence of these kinds of distance as breaks, the experience of walking through is of a steady barrage of destinations and visual overexposure.

The Cloisters finally reads as a pastiche of the medieval that tries to negotiate with two modes of travel. It hovers between the habits of each without fully identifying with either, just as it hovers indeterminably between times and places.