Pop Culture on the Rocks: Lost Guggenheims, Fallen Showgirls and the Liberace Museum

The last time I visited the Liberace Museum, an older woman invited me to try on a giant, patchwork coat. Providing the requisite opportunity for participation the way almost all American museums now do, this coat allowed visitors to feel the added weight Liberace experienced while parading across the stage in one of his elaborate garments.  The woman overseeing the coat was a museum volunteer and clearly a lifelong Liberace fan.  As I tried on the 40 lb garment and posed for the camera, she let us know the coat’s cacophony of shimmering  fabrics were handmade by another volunteer and consisted of fragments from the ensembles of former showgirls.

The room in which I tried on the coat was the highlight of the museum: the costume gallery. Spread across two buildings in a strip mall on east Tropicana Avenue, the Liberace Museum showcased five primary collections; biographical photographs, a handful of vehicles, and a melange of pianos were displayed in the building nearest Tropicana Avenue, while the space on the other side of the parking lot housed the costume collection and selections of Liberace’s Baroque home furniture.

Costume gallery, Liberace Museum, 2008

This week, the Liberace Museum closed indefinitely. While many news sources have reported on this closure since its announcement in early September, I suspect few people under the age of fifty actually visited the physical space.  Dave Hickey’s seminal essay “A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz” in 1997 book Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy provided incentive to visit and reconsider the value of Liberace to American society’s acceptance of the gay community. Likewise, Lady Gaga’s popularity and overt derivations from the piano star’s approach to celebrity suggest Liberace remains relevant to contemporary audiences (see Eric Felten’s “Lady Gaga and Liberace: Separated at Birth?”). Yet, the two instances I visited suggested there was not an enormous body of Las Vegas visitors clamoring to get into the modest space so far east on Tropicana Avenue that the museum ran free, hourly shuttles to and from the hotels on the Strip.  The one occasion I took the shuttle back to the Strip (as opposed to taking a $30 cab ride or renting a car; public transportation is reportedly not for tourists) the only other party enjoying the footage of Liberace performances shown on the shuttle’s TV was a group of three from Australia visiting Las Vegas for a week.

Liberace Museum, 2008

In general, Americans do not visit Las Vegas for the form of culture found in museums. Some have suggested that the closing of the Liberace Museum might be attributed to its isolated location, away from the tourist areas of the city. While the free shuttle was one solution to this concern, the closure of museums throughout Sin City over the past decade demonstrates that its site was not the only reason for the Liberace Museum’s demise.

In some ways, museums seem a natural fit for Las Vegas between of the constant flow of people in and out of the city and the high concentration of resident performers, architects, designers and other creative individuals required to support the entertainment excess for which Vegas it is known. Considering how the shopping, dining, sexual opportunities, spectacle and general branding as a place where one can do anything without regret play a significant role in Las Vegas “culture,” it is easy to forget that gaming is the single reason for the city’s position as a destination in America.  Gambling makes all other things Las Vegas is known for possible, and ultimately, all roads in the city’s tourist districts lead to (and are paid for by) gaming.  This situation creates an interesting relationship with culture, particularly because Las Vegas has spent so many decades creating a culture around gambling that makes it appealing to a mass audience, as opposed to only those who consider themselves “gamblers.” Contemporary popular culture is essential in Las Vegas’s ability to sell itself, and hence the city is designed to reflect the most present of moments in American consciousness.

In the 1990s Sin City capitalized on the public desires for “edutainment” and family friendly activities through the addition of cultural amenities to casinos.  A few remnants of this era still exist, including the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art and the Mandalay Bay’s American Zoo and Aquariums Association accredited Shark Reef. The Venetian Casino opened two museums affiliated with the Guggenheim and designed by Rem Koolhaas in 2001: the Guggenheim Las Vegas and the Guggenheim Hermitage.  The Guggenheim Las Vegas exhibited only The Art of the Motorcycle before its closure in  2002. The Guggenheim Hermitage lasted until 2008, showing works from the collection of its namesake Russian institution and the New York affiliate by big-name modern painters, such as Picasso, Lichtenstein, Mondrian and Kandinsky, among others.

Guggenheim Hermitage, Venetian Resort Casino, 2001, image from rex-ny.com

When the Guggenheims opened in the Venetian, they made sense in terms of the casino’s theme through their adherence to the American perception of Italy as a place for high culture and artistic mastery. Yet the permanence and preservation that  define museums are antitheses to the way visitors approach Las Vegas, as a place without a past, consequences or a future that is definitive; anything can happen with a roll of the dice. Likewise, museums defined by history struggle to find a place in the community (both tourist community and residential community) of such a place; here, “Las Vegas history” is merely a theme equated to the “French Riviera,” “Old West” and “Tropical Islands” represented within the casinos .

The role of Las Vegas’s history is made clear on the Zeigfield Stage in the Bally’s Casino, where Jubilee! continues as last remaining showgirl production on The Strip.  Similar to the fate of its museums, Las Vegas has seen a dramatic loss in the showgirl productions that once dominated the city, beginning most prominently with the closing of the Stardust’s famed productions in 1999 and the end of the Tropicana’s Folies Bergère in 2009. 

Jubilee! perseveres in an almost parodic production that includes an original “Titanic” number that borders on the absurd; when I attended a performance earlier this year I found myself surrounded almost entirely by tourists from Asia.  The vintage styling of the rhinestone costumes, pronounced smiles and homemade backdrops now appear more like the “living history” component of a historical museum than a contemporary performance. If the inclusion of former showgirl outfits in the participatory coat at the Liberace Museum isn’t evidence enough, the showgirl production’s relationship to museums is made even more pronounced by the opportunity to take a formal tour of the Jubilee!’s wardrobe and sets on select days of the week.

Jubilee!, Bally's Casino, image from nytimes.com

As a physical manifestation of popular culture and mainstream American interests, Las Vegas is known to exist in a state of constant flux. Even the community-based Las Vegas Art Museum shut its doors in 2009; hence while Liberace’s legacy may have suggested the museum he built would have an endless audience in Las Vegas, the city in which his career was cemented, a part of me was not surprised when the announcement came that it too would disappear. Las Vegas is not nostalgic, only temporal.  Popular culture does not remember; if it did, at least a portion of the hoards of Lady Gaga fans that visit Las Vegas annually could be expected to flock to Liberace’s pianos and costumes as a means for better appreciating their favorite star.  Instead, I suspect a very small minority of the Little Monsters even know who Mr. Showman was.

Ultimately, the outcry of the press regarding the Liberace Museum’s closure has been surprisingly pronounced for an institution that received relatively little notice when it was doing anything but closing. While there is a natural inclination blame the Las Vegas environment for its lack of recognition of the past, that would be the easy way out. Las Vegas, as a money-driven city, feeds from mainstream trends and culture.  In the case of the Liberace Museum’s closure, the question to ask is the following: what it is that prevented us, the Americans who created what Las Vegas has become, from remembering to visit, or simply remembering at all.

Julien’s Cabinet of Wonder

Julien’s Auctions hosted their “Music Icons” and “Hollywood Legends” summer sales at the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino, Las Vegas from June 24-27.

“A bloody piece of wood, a stuffed beaver, an elephant’s tusk, a siren’s hand, and a painting by Dürer–not an untypical trove. Nor is it untypical for the provenance of many of what we today consider Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces to wend their way back through hodgepodge collections such as these.”(119)

Excerpt from Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler, New York, NY: Vintage Books/Random House, Inc., 1995.

Michael Jackson Commissioned Sofa, for his home in Kent, England.

Cereal with Jackson 5 prize; Michael Jackson hot cocoa, other items.

Gene Roddenberry's dining room

Johnny Cash's signed guitar; Michael Jackson Commissioned Floating Console Table

Anna Nicole Smith's belongings

Prop from Jurassic Park

Marilyn Monroe's therapy couch

Visual Extras: Rachel Whiteread and SOIL in Residence

In “The 2010 Film Issue” of The Believer, Alex Rose writes on the bonus disc phenomenon and the impact of its philosophy on contemporary culture. The bonus disc is the information excess and readily available obscurity necessary to sell films to the mainstream in a digital age: the behind-the-scenes explanations, outtakes, extended interviews and director’s commentary. Rose argues that many of the pleasures of experiencing these once unattainable features are lost in the present level of media saturation:

“Call it the paradox of accessibility: as more and more shadowy items are brought to light, the allure of their obscurity and uniqueness is compromised.” (Alex Rose, “Bonus Disc Fever,” The Believer March/April 2010)

The bonus feature seems as though it should elicit a sense wonder because it represents something we have never seen; it has the potential to be the filmic equivalent of the stuffed dodo, the hidden crawl space, the original, handwritten manuscript.  Yet, as Rose concludes, typically DVD extras do not equal any of these; rather, most are ancillary distractions from the original film.

There are both successful and unsuccessful “extras” in the visual arts as well. In light of Rose’s essay, Rachel Whiteread Drawings at the Hammer Museum struck me as the behind-the-scenes category of bonus materials, largely due to the exhibition text’s likening of the drawings to the artist’s diary. The galleries were neatly separated by fixture or furniture element: one room for floors, one room for light switches and door knobs, one room for the mattress. Within each space the featured element was represented by one sculpture, the remainder of the room filled with drawings of the same form that utilized graph paper, correction fluid and other materials referencing the drafting process. Yet, the drawings appeared almost flawless, the perfection of the handwriting and preciseness of the painted whiteout avoiding any question of whether they represented discarded versions of Whiteread’s sculptural works; the drawings appeared to be independent works on paper, not the sketches or drafts one would expect to find in a diary.

Rachel Whiteread. Correction fluid, ink and watercolor on graph paper. 17 7/8 x 12 in. (45.6 x 30.4 cm). Private Collection. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Image from hammer.ucla.edu

As the exhibition text noted, the drawings were, in fact, produced independently of the sculptures. There is nothing wrong or unusual about an artist creating two related bodies of work simultaneously.  However, the almost-perfect drawings on view at the Hammer offered limited insight into Whiteread’s creative practice and conceptual frameworks, and I had hoped to find a revealing of process through the prominent artist’s lesser known works.  The drawings had their own beautiful qualities, but when displayed beside the artist’s sculptures, they appeared insubstantial rather than supportive or in rich dialogue with the better, three-dimensional works. Much like the lackluster DVD extra, the drawings also did not provide the uniqueness or obscurity I was seeking.

It was easy enough to meander through room after room, admiring the drawings as beautiful objects,  but suddenly, at the end of the exhibition resided several vitrines of collaged postcards and curious objects for which the preceding galleries provided little expectation. After the relative monotony of drawings and sculptures formatted almost identically within the previous rooms, the messy magazine cutouts and obscure remnants of ordinary life (shoe horns, dollhouse furniture, glass orbs and so much more) were unexpected, feeling like extras among this exhibition of extras, except the vitrine contents were what I had searched for the entire time. Here, among the manipulated photographs of houses and various collections of glass bottles and plaster jaw molds, one could start to reconsider the concepts, ideas and forms that came together to create the sculptures for which the artist is best known. The obscure contents of the collages and vitrine objects do not add up cleanly to create the sampling of works highlighted in the remainder of the galleries; this is precisely why these objects were fascinating.

Rachel Whiteread. Vitrine Objects. Dimensions and Media variable. Private Collection. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Mike Bruce. Image from hammer.ucla.edu

Weeks after seeing Rachel Whiteread Drawings, my encounter with SOIL in Residence brought Rose’s article to mind again, except this exhibition struck me more as the “extended scenes” bonus feature. Expanding beyond the confines of the main SOIL space, SOIL in Residence is located in the large, luxurious Suite 288 of the Seattle Design Center. The SOIL gallery in Pioneer Square is fairly standard for the neighborhood: a narrow, white cube with a small backspace, only slightly larger than the size of a single apartment in Seattle. It typically features one or two individual artists or small group shows. In contrast, SOIL in Residence includes the works of all twenty-four artists from the collective.   The exhibition occupies 11,000 square feet of a showcase space in the Design Center, the “gallery” complete with commercial fixtures such as mirrors mounted to the walls, design sample drawers, and assorted windows details scattered throughout the massive room.

SOIL in Residence installation view, Pacific Design Center; photo by Joey Veltkamp

There is something to be said for the limitations imposed by a small space, particularly in terms of focus, presentation and selectivity; SOIL’s main space is effective in all of these regards. Yet, the “extended version” on view at the Design Center provides a different understanding of SOIL itself.  DVD extras often have an arbitrary quality when viewed in light of the final film, hence their omittance in the first place. However, knowing that a scene was ultimately cut from a feature does not discourage our interest; the prospect of the unseen provokes curiosity and intrigue. The DVD extra fails when it does not fulfill the promise of adding something new to our perspective of the film without distracting from the completeness of the original cut.

SOIL in Residence does not merely succeed as an extra because it is a solid exhibition of its members’ works that compliments the original SOIL. The way these works of art are installed in the strange showcase creates a synergy that could not be found in a gallery or any other conventional art setting. Nicholas Nyland’s Mother admires its own vibrancy through a mirrored wall as its details and complexities are highlighted through the inversion of its shape. The bed portion of Jennifer Zwick’s Bed Dress speaks directly with the fixtures of its surroundings, the luminous fabric accented by the home-friendly lighting levels designed to push furniture sales through this space.

The Design Center as a contemporary art space is obscure and unique, but the installation of SOIL in Residence would make one think otherwise; it is tempting to believe the exhibition was someone’s genius idea years in the making, rather than the product of available space during a moment of economic free fall.  It is, in this sense, the elusive ideal extra: an offshoot of an original, yet perfectly satisfying as an independent experience.

Bifocal 7: Back to the Future and Modernist Space

“Empty space becomes both fertile and intimidating in modernist special effects, like an extension of Wagner’s blackened gulf between audience and the lit stage at Bayreuth. The blank and unobstructed suggest absence as presence. This exposure was an invitation to add more special effects. After World War II, these modernist spaces were filled very quickly. They were scripted to meet the consumer side of entertainment that continued to grow. Finally they became very busy scripts indeed, particularly after 1955.”

Excerpt from From the Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects by Norman Klein, New York: The New Press, 2004. Print.

Video: Back to the Future Part II (Robert Zemeckis, 1989).

Con Leche and Coca-Cola: Abstracting the Olympic Experience

Various groupings of Diet Coke bottles march through urban streets and alleys in Jordan Wolfson’s Con Leche, a 20-minute video piece. The bottles are filled with milk and exist as animations in a filmed reality.  In addition to the sound of marching feet in unison, the audio track is comprised of two voices: a woman reading found texts about social concerns including race, religion and sexuality, and the artist, directing the woman on logistical concerns such as the volume and tonality of her voice.  If nothing else, Con Leche is very absurd.

Jordan Wolfson, "Con Leche” (2009), Courtesy of Jordan Wolfson and Johann König, Berlin.

Con Leche is part of An Invitation to Infiltration, an exhibition in flux at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery, curated by Eric Frederickson and on view through the end of February as part of the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad. Naturally, I viewed the exhibition while in town for the Olympics. Earlier the same day, I wandered over to the Olympic Superstore, the largest of a small group of locations available in the city for the rest of the world to purchase official Olympic merchandise. Outside the Olympic Superstore was a massive line that wrapped around half of the department store building housing the space. Those waiting were being let into the building in groups of approximately 30 people every 20 minutes. Almost everyone else in line was Canadian, as evidenced by the mass of red, white and black sweaters, hats, jackets and mittens everyone was already wearing.  When the rope barriers were lifted and the doors opened, the line marched forward as the Superstore came within reach.  Once inside, three things immediately became apparent: the long wait made most people more inclined to shop in excess, promotional items from prominent sponsor Coca-Cola were being sold as “official” Olympic souvenirs, and restrictions in buying Olympic merchandise at this store only were likely a result of Visa’s need to control points of purchase as “the only card accepted at the Olympic games.”

Visa advertisement. Image from Photo District News.com

There are inevitably processions everywhere in Vancouver; there are lines for an unobstructed view of the flame, the competitions and the admission-free Vancouver Art Gallery. Outside the art museum in Robson Square, Olympic patrons meander between a zip line, concert venue and ice rink. In the middle of this, the Vancouver Art Gallery constructed an “outdoor drop-in theater” for the presentation of works from over 50 international artists in CUE: Artists’ Videos. The selection of the videos is exciting, with an Olympic-esque, all-star lineup ranging from Gary Hill’s Attention (2005) to Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79) and Su-Mei Tse’s L’echo (2003).

Yet the appearance of video pieces on the giant screen, complete with amplified sound, in the middle of the plaza was surprisingly subdued. Although there were people everywhere, almost no one was captivated enough by the screen to stop and watch, a rare effect in the media age. Although I was in Robson Square specifically to see these videos, I still found it difficult to engage while standing among the tourists, wandering around, indulging in the sunniest of Vancouver days; the videos, dropped in the center of this city with the Olympics on almost every other screen in vicinity, somehow could not win their merited attention. Instead of providing a cultural contrast against the endless sports, the videos became part of the Olympic spectacle.

CUE Artists’ Videos, Vancouver Art Gallery, Robson Square

In many ways, Con Leche was a very conventional art experience in contrast to the Vancouver Art Gallery screen. Tucked in the back of the Contemporary Art Gallery, Fredericksen describes its relation to the exhibition:

“Jordan Wolfson’s Con Leche is presented in a formal screening environment, separated from the rest of the show. Denying the curatorial attempt to force juxtapositions within this group, Wolfson’s video addresses the show’s theme through its content rather than through its formal engagement.”

While Con Leche certainly engages with the exhibition’s theme effectively, in contrast to the CUE videos, its spatial separation from the Olympics creates a  relationship with the Games that does not become lost in the overall spectacle taking place in Vancouver. More individuals will encounter the Vancouver Art Gallery’s video display, but there is question as to how deeply the works are experienced as one element within the larger chaos of Robson Square. The content of Con Leche, while only one video, also has immediate relevance to the experience of being a spectator at the Olympics. After spending a day in the primary traffic zones of the Olympics (Robson Square, the Superstore and the plaza containing the cauldron), the marching Coca-Cola bottles of Wolfson’s piece evoked the red, black and white-clad masses walking the streets.  In addition to people, this section of downtown Vancouver was also covered in sponsorship presence, ranging form a Samsung- covered building to the Superstore shopping bags with Visa slogan, “go world.”

Jordan Wolfson, "Con Leche” (2009), Courtesy of Jordan Wolfson and Johann König, Berlin.

The visual parallel between Wolfson’s video and the scene in Vancouver is not a reflection on the Canadian crowd specifically, but rather a demonstration of how a single video of marching Diet Coke bottles abstracted the Olympic environment into one of colors, logos and other absurd symbols. After watching CUE, one was still in Robson Square, wondering when the next hockey game started; after watching Con Leche, Con Leche was effectively, and affectively, everywhere.

Bifocal 5: Dreams Come True and NBC

“There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy. It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft.”

Excerpt from “After the Massachusetts Massacre” by Frank Rich, New York Times 23 Jan 2010. Web.

Image: The Princess and the Frog (still), 2009. Image from New Orleans Museum of Art website.

Bifocal 4: Fisher Body and WALL-E

“At once avant and pop, horrendously bleak and cheerfully cute, WALL-E is the quintessential twenty-first-century motion picture. Celebrating (or embalming) an obsolete technology, it’s the 2001 of 2008–a postphotographic film set in a posthuman universe.”

Excerpt from “21st Century Cinema: Death and Resurrection in the Desert of the (New) Real” by J. Hoberman, Artforum International Dec. 2009: 210-29. Print.

Image: Scott Hocking,  Ziggurat—East, Summer, Fisher Body Plant #21, 2008, Archival digital print. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Ferndale, MI.

The IKEA Parody

It is nearly impossible to access a kunsthalle in Scandinavia in late August, particularly before 12 pm.  I learned this quickly while traveling there as of late.  Art spaces are also not always in the most accessible locations. In Helsinki, a former cable factory/Nokia headquarters called Kaapelitehdas is inhabited by various disciplines of artists  “from morning to night”, but navigating public transportation in Finnish while traveling on a tight schedule was a challenge I could not overcome.  Summer hours, changed locations, and late opening times prevented my seeing Magasin 3, Bonnierskonsthall, Charlottenborg, Gl Strand and Nikolaj. I eventually made my way to Liljevalchs in Stockholm and was thrilled to find it open. And then I realized the focus of the one major exhibition I was about to see: IKEA AT LILJEVALCHS.

IKEA AT LILJEVALCHS exhibition poster,  designed by Mattias Frodlund, image from Liljevalchs

IKEA is an important business for Sweden. It is largely the reason many contemporary Americans own affordable furniture of a Scandinavian aesthetic and are aware of the lingonberry’s existence.  My preconceived  associations of the chain with disposable college wares made the realization that I was about to walk into an exhibition about the history of IKEA somewhat of a disappointment.

The show at Liljevalchs was what one might expect an IKEA exhibition to be based on shopping in the store.  The first gallery was a “marketplace” that contained a cafe with cheap pastries. There were children’s toys and play zones. Blue and yellow arrows on the floor directed visitors to the next gallery, which contained images of IKEA catalogs from the beginning of its existence in 1950.  There was a tornado-shaped sculpture of black ÖGLA cafe chairs that evoked the whirlwind of guitars in Trimpin’s If VI Was IX: Roots and Branches at the Experience Music Project, as well as some of the elements of multiples in Lead Pencil Studio’s Retail/Commercial.  Another gallery featured spotlights on various designers over the corporation’s history, similar to the IKEA 2010 catalog I recently received in the mail highlighting specific designers under the heading “Great design comes from open minds and a tight budget.”

IKEA AT LILJEVALCHS (installation shot), image by kj.vogelius

One of the more intriguing spaces in the exhibition focused on IKEA’s brief experimentation with questions of authenticity and reproduction in the 1990s: the “Gustavian” series of furniture from 1995. During this project made at the request of the Swedish National Heritage Board, IKEA designers were invited to select specific objects from the Medevi Brunn historic site and recreate the works using inexpensive materials, to be sold in IKEA stores as a means for raising awareness and money for the original collection.  The new items were  stamped with the term “ORIGINAL COPY” and now, according to the exhibition text, fetch high prices at auctions around the world.

“The Gustativan Room,” IKEA AT LILJEVALCHS, image from Liljevalchs.

Through this exercise in re-creation, IKEA separated the museum object from its originality; the Gustiavian pieces once only available at the Medevi Brunn historical site became common in homes across Sweden and the world. Yet, the use (and monetary) value of the “authentic” object was also impacted through this action, creating the Gustavian line’s unusual status as “original copies” of museum-worthy designs.  The intertwining  of authenticity,  commodity and utility within these pieces of furniture illustrates the parallel nature of the IKEA store and the museum.

Inside IKEA, one can touch, use, purchase and consume.  Inside the museum, one can watch and experience. Yet IKEA and the museum overlap in myriad ways. IKEA AT LILJEVALCHS is provocative through its success in seamlessly merging the two, to the point where one is forced to question whether the entire exhibition is a moment of shopping or one of high art.   When I found myself following the arrows on the floor as though I were navigating an IKEA store in search of a bookcase or kitchen wares, I thought more about the Jewish Museum Berlin’s structure than I did about shopping.  The Jewish Museum’s floors are covered in a line of red arrows because the layout of the installations within Libeskind’s twisting mass would otherwise be extremely difficult to follow.

IKEA arrow; image by Prof Michael Stoll

Although there is reason to believe stores such as IKEA are created to be confusing so as to encourage more time spent in the store (and ultimately more shopping), it may not be surprising that one of the largest and earliest IKEA buildings was modeled after Wright’s Guggenheim building in New York.  IKEA’s diorama-like displays of fully assembled rooms within their stores also bear striking resemblances to the rows of taxidermy settings that line institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History.  Ultimately, stores strive to keep their customers from leaving while museums aim to create a comfortable learning environment. Somehow, these goals both lead to similar structures and spaces.

IKEA showroom/diorama, image from Josh.ev9.org

Diorama at the American Museum of Natural History, image by Dom Dada

Most noticable in the IKEA AT LILEJEVALCHS exhibition was the absence of criticality directed towards the IKEA corporation.  The text and displays completely ignore the negative aspects of the company, such as the disposable decorative arts and design culture IKEA has created in a way the world has not seen before. While it is easy to say that an exhibition about a single corporation would never be allowed to happen in a US museum (which may or may not be true), the history of museums demonstrates a similarly edited exhibition structure in the museum enviroment.  In Museology courses, we referred to the Smithsonian’s 1994 Enola Gay controversy as “the dead horse” because it was a constant topic of discussion in relation to the persistent lack of critical discourse in contemporary American exhibitions.  Like the retail entity that avoids controversial subject matter in advertisements in their stores, museums in America often take the quiet route on exhibitions, avoiding some of the most relevant political and social issues in the process.

As the exhibition of IKEA began to seem more and more like a parody of contemporary American museums, part of me wished that Liljevalchs had included empty shopping carts for visitors to push between the galleries as a means for heightening the similarities. Then again, bringing the store and the museum together too closely can be disheartening; if the events leading to the current state of the economy are any indication, shopping is not a challenge, nor a meaningful experience for the public. In this respect, it behooves the museum to step outside its comfort zone and introduce truly challenging exhibitions that go beyond the banality that plagues the passive presentation of experiences.

The Auction as Wunderkammern: Michael Jackson, Nan Goldin, and Liberace

Michael Jackson’s entire life was published in seven auction catalogs, five of which are available for free public viewing on the internet.  The objects up for bidding are organized into simple disciplines: garden statuary, outdoor furniture, decorative arts, antiques, paintings, amusements, arcade games, “Disneyana”, career memorabilia.  Individual lots offer a surprising range of objects: framed Asian textiles, an Indiana Jones pinball machine,  a “Billie Jean” fedora, an American Music Award for “We Are the World,” patio furniture, “Original artwork by Macaulay Culkin,” a mutoscope from 1910, and life-size wax figures of Jackson himself.

Julien’s Auction catalogue for the Collection of Michael Jackson.  Image: Shaan Kokin/Julien’s Auctions; from The Guardian.

In Paris, Nan Goldin put her own trove of curiosities up for sale (via MAN and Modern Art Obsession).  Her dildo is the most talked-about object of the more modest 25 lots (Jackson’s auction includes over 1,000), but Goldin’s collection also presents a fascinating range of objects; ciabachrome prints by the artist, taxidermy pigeons, nineteenth century European medallions, and  intricate pieces of twentieth century Dutch furniture are among the most noteworthy.

“Deux Pigeons Naturalises”, from Nan Goldin auction, image from Christies.

Browsing through the digital pages of the auction catalogs, I was struck immediately by the rawness of these collections.  Although Jackson’s auction is grouped categorically, for the most part the objects are presented in a haphazard way.  A fairly classical piece of American furniture entitled “Victorian Cheval Mirror” is one page away from the very 90s-stylized (and strange) Playmates for a Lonely Child painting by David Nordahl.

Although formal curation plays a role in many personal collections, most still represent the dynamic nature of the human personality; objects likely to be considered a judgment lapse if found in a museum will still be collected by an individual, for reasons such as ample funds to purchase frivolously and the desire to express identity through objects.  Institutional collections, on the other hand, are expected to represent a specific mission and cannot be purchased ”on a whim.”

Celebrity collections such as Jackson’s and Goldin’s have an interesting appeal when put up for auction because their display is commodity-driven: we see them as a full collection that has not been edited for a specific audience or integrity (although it seems plausible in Jackson’s case the collection was edited for PR purposes).  In this absence of curation during a time when “curating” is highly valued (I recently saw a box of various eyeshadow colors that attributed the combination to a “curator”), the online auction catalogs of Michael Jackson and Nan Goldin can evoke the classic wunderkammern, or curiosity cabinet, from which museums originated.

Lawrence Weschler reconsiders the concept of wonder in his book on the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder.  When discussing curiosity cabinets with Director Emeritus of the Getty John Walsh, Weschler notes Walsh’s response:

“… in the earlier collections [wunderkammern], you had the wonders of God spread out there cheek-by-jowl with the wonders of man, both presented as aspects of the same thing, which is to say the Wonder of God.’” (61)

Although there is much to be learned through thoughtful juxtapositions and displays of objects, there are also certain truths revealed when seemingly unlike but equally fascinating objects end up together within a single space.  One of the best museums to experience this effect is the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas.  Although Liberace famously plotted his museum’s existence for the later portion of his career, going through the organization’s two sites (both within the same strip mall) was similar to perusing the auctions of Jackson and Goldin.  All three collections contain overly elaborate furniture scattered among representations of their respective careers and personally distinct objects.  Seeing Jackson’s extreme use of rhinestones and crystals in his performance clothing beside his candelabras, ornate pianos, self-designed limousines and unusual decorative pieces was particularly reminiscent of walking through Liberace’s belongings.

Jacket from Michael Jackson’s Victory Tour (1984), Image: photograph by Shaan Kokin/Julien’s Auctions; from The Guardian.

Although going through such collections may initially seem more comparable to reading Us Weekly than experiencing a meaningful mediation on wonder, Dave Hickey found substantial insight into American culture and authenticity through Liberace’s objects:

“Everything that Liberace created or caused to be created as a function of his shows or of his showmanship (his costumes, his cars, his jewelery, his candelabra, his pianos) shines with a crisp, pop authority.  Everything created as a consequence of his endeavor (like the mega-rhinestone) exudes a high-dollar egalitarian permission–while everything he purchased out of his rising slum-kid appetite for “Old World” charm and ancien regime legitimacy (everything “real,” in other words) looks unabashedly phoney. (“A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz”, Air Guitar 53)

The Liberace Museum in Las Vegas, NV.

Michael Jackson and Liberace are certainly distinct in terms of how they have impacted popular culture and mainstream America.  Furthermore, many consider Jackson to be the last true megastar of popular music before digital formats changed mass music consumption dramatically.  I find myself wondering what would be revealed about Michael Jackson’s America were his collection to remain as it was at Julien’s Auctions when it arrived in the 10 semi trucks: an unlabeled, unsorted feast for the curious.

Use, Part 1: Retail/Commercial

Lead Pencil Studio’s Retail/Commercial installation is full of useless items.  There are rows of plastic hangers without clothes, a pile of size rings separated from their hangers, illuminated empty jewelery cases, and decorative display stones without merchandise (see review of opening night by Jen Graves in The Stranger).  The entire installation is housed in a vacated Italian suit store, which is also void of practical use during a tanking economy.

Kant created explicit boundaries between art and use in his exploration of beauty in The Critique of Judgement, posing sculpture (useless) against architecture (useful):

“To plastic, the first kind of beautiful formative art, belong to sculpture and architecture.  The first presents corporeally concepts of things, as they might have existed in nature (though as beautiful art it has regard to aesthetical purposiveness). The second is the art of presenting concepts of things that are possible only through art and whose form has for its determining ground, not nature, but an arbitrary purpose, with the view of presenting them with aesthetical purposiveness. In the latter the chief point is a certain use of the artistic object, by which condition of the aesthetical ideals are limited.  In the former the main design is the mere expression of aesthetical ideas. (166-67)

Many works of art (including works of architecture) can be considered “useful”, like the hangers and display stones in Retail/Commercial. Kant’s definition of art as necessarily useless is valuable in understanding works of art because it provokes us to consider what the aesthetic qualities of a work of art are and how they function within the work as compared to how they function in the world.  Although the Italian suit store is useful in the world, the artists transformed it into an installation of collected and assembled objects that were already physically useless in real world and are now also separated from their intended uses within the artistic space; the box of size rings is an assembled sculpture, but then, so is the entire space.  Retail/Commercial evokes the fascination within the viewer who browses these estranged and consequently charged objects, in part, by integrating the useless (sculpture) and the useful (architecture).

To be continued in “Use, Part 2: Emergency Response Studio by Paul Villinski.”