Installation 4: The Cave (you may want to read Installation 3 )

To get to The Cave, guards would go down to the lowest level of the museum, punch a code into a keypad to unlock a steel door (the code was always 5150-- programmed in 1986 by someone who loved Van Halen's new album) and walk down a long hallway with no doors until they came to a an intersection of hallways. Here they would take a left, then a right and walk down another hallway. This one had many doors along it, all of them painted the same color as the walls (beige) and which could have contained anything behind them (were they storage closets? control rooms for strange electronic devices? Offices? Interrogation rooms?) and finally arrived at a doorway that led to a tunnel to the parking ramp. This door was locked and in order to pass through it, one would have to stand looking into a one-way mirror, press a button on an intercom and wait to be asked to show their badge and state their name. Behind this mirror lay “The Cave,” the security nerve center for the museum.

The Cave was nothing more than a square room with cinderblock walls, one of which was covered with monitors. Each camera in the museum sent back its recorded vision to one of these monitors. Each monitor flickered back and forth between several scenes, as there was an abundance of cameras. There were cameras dedicated to the periphery of the building and those mounted in the parking ramp and several in each of the galleries. The observation never ended; indeed there was someone in The Cave every hour of every day.

To make the job of watching more palatable, provisions had been brought in. There were several broken down executive chairs. There were boxes of candy bars and packages of Twinkies. There was a mini-fridge, scavenged from an alley, in which soda and food brought from home in paper sacks could be kept. There was even a La-Z-Boy with a greasy pillow tucked into it, although no one would ever own up to napping in it during their shift. There were stacks of comics and newspapers and People magazines. There were even several dog-eared copies of Field and Stream, from roughly 1988 to 1992, and when the pressure of being underground without natural light or fresh air got to be too great, these magazines were brought out and combed through with a level of anticipation and longing usually reserved for porn.

The Cave was occupied during the day by Gary Schefft, a guard at the museum since 1978. Other guards took turns coming down throughout the day to see if Gary needed a bathroom, smoke or lunch break and they'd stay longer than they needed to, drawn in by the black and white images of school groups trouping through the Chinese galleries or of a woman in the Impressionist gallery stopping to adjust her underwear. No one ever thought anyone was watching but the truth was that someone was watching all the time, and the most spectacular sightings were logged in a notebook with a bent cover. The notebook had no title, bore no one's name and began on the first page without preamble:

July 27 - Kid in the front of the Medieval armor picked his nose and rubbed it on the armor's shield.

August 5 - Guy down on the floor in front of “The Three Magi Leave Bethlehem” waving his legs around and laughing. Brent went over to talk to him and got kicked in the nuts.

January 27 - Couple having sex on the Eames lounger. Don't have the heart to break it up.

The Cave was the place the guards, tired from standing with hands clasped behind their back, let their hair down. It was exhausting work, guarding things that never moved. The greatest threats came in the form of fingers - sticky or sweaty, slim or gnarled, well-manicured or bitten - that reached out to touch things. This was how things got ruined, the guards learned in their training. This was also how criminals inspected things and made their plans to cart them off. Be wary of fingers reaching out. The fingers grew tiresome. There were so many of them, day in and day out. And so the guards retreated underground, to a broken chair by the monitors, where they could watch from a distance, eat Nut Goodie bars, and talk about tits or bowling or playing guitar.

And sometimes they came to watch certain people. Some of the guards started to watch Phoebe Persons as she came in the morning and picked up her ID badge or left in the evening and dropped the badge off. She was always in a rush and carrying too many things. She would drop a sweater or her keys would slip from her grasp. Only one guard worked the desk at a time; it wasn't feasible for several of them to be there to hand out the ID or take it back, so they watched from The Cave. Sometimes she would have to bend over her bag to search for the ID. Other times she would stop, right there on camera, and sweep her hair back into a ponytail. At those moments, there in the dark room that tended to smell like an old man's sickroom, it seemed as if there was a breeze blowing. A sweet and promising breeze carrying with it the smell of perfume, of carefully washed underwear and chocolate chip cookies.