Obscuring the Wunderkammern: Figurehead in the Peabody Essex Museum

Installation artist Charles Sandison has coated the Peabody Essex Museum‘s East India Marine Hall in a dark, drifting sheath of digitized ship logs and journals .  Titled Figurehead, the enlarged strings of writings travel across the historical space’s walls, objects and visitors in disjointed paths that correspond with the weather of Salem, MA, via algorithms and data pulled from the internet. After adjusting to the visual overload of the installation in the same way one’s eyes adapt to a darkened room, the finer details began to emerge; the museum’s founding collection is also in this room, the paintings, figureheads and other artifacts absorbing the projected strands of text.  Physically overwritten by the ship captains’ perfected script and darkened to the point that many objects were unrecognizable, the East India Marine Society collection was transformed by Sandison’s installation into something distant and phantasmal that hovered above the otherwise conventional museum.

FreePort [no. 001]: Figurehead, Charles Sandison, East India Marine Hall, Peabody Essex Museum. Image from metrowestdailynews.com.

The Peabody Essex is the oldest museum in the United States currently in operation.  As its complicated name might suggest, the institution has gone through various mergings and additions since it opened to the public in 1825 as the East India Marine Society Hall. The namesake East India Marine Society of Salem, Massachusetts was a group of individuals who “…navigated the seas beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, as masters or supercargoes of vessels belong[ing] to to Salem,” as was outlined by the Society’s 1870 bylaws.  This group of sea travelers convened in order to share information about exploration of what they referred to as the East Indies; part of this mission included sharing the objects accumulated during their travels as the public collection that ultimately became the museum. It was though this effort that Society members created a particular asset: an authentic, American wunderkammern.

“East India Marine Hall and General View,” H.P. Ives, 1859-1885, stereoscope, image from New York Public Library.

The image of the original Peabody Essex, alongside that of Charles Wilson Peale’s collection, comprises what popular culture has taught us us envision when we hear the phrase, “curiosity cabinet:” a wide assortment of aged cases and shelves filled with items that now would fall into specific museum genres, including natural history objects, historical artifacts and fine art. Most curiosity cabinets resulted from a particular aristocrat’s personal holdings of taxidermy, decorative objects and man-made wonders. Yet with roots in a collaborative founding rather than an individual’s point of view, the brand of wonder found in the East India Marine Society cabinet was also collective; as objects gathered by a group of entrepreneurs traveling trade routes in the 18th century there was a uniquely American aspect to this artifact compilation.

Charles Sandison’s Figurehead interacts with this original wunderkammern by projecting directly on top of its objects; figureheads from the Society’s ships absorb the glowing text most prominently but it also infiltrates the case containing a deteriorating, taxidermied penguin and floats across the paintings and busts of nineteenth century gentlemen.  Figurehead obscures all objects in the East India Marine Hall to the point that it is hard to even know for certain what one has seen while visiting this room; the pervading sense uncertainty characteristic of foreign environments has been created within one of the country’s most American spaces.

FreePort [no. 001]: Figurehead, Charles Sandison, East India Marine Hall, Peabody Essex Museum. Image from the Peabody Essex Museum.

While visiting the installation, other visitors I encountered in the space found the experience entirely frustrating; labels for the objects were impossible to find in the darkened room, as was often the case for the objects themselves.  The only readily available context was the reference to life at sea provided through the projected nautical jargon of the ship logs; the East India Marine Hall had been transformed into a place that could only be understood by viewing the objects extremely closely and deciphering the collection through the perceptions allowed by the conditions of the room. In this regard, Figurehead is  itself a total representation of the wonder to be found on an exploration.  While this affect is created by a media-based experience, it is also one that cannot be communicated through digital media alone; physically being in the East India Marine Hall is required.

Immediately outside the East India Marine Hall, the streets of Salem are flooded with commercial mini-museums, capitalizing primarily on the Salem Witch Trials and other clichéd urban legends connected to the region. These places are intended to appear wunderkammern-like without owning any objects that would be found in a true curiosity cabinet. One such place is the 40 Whacks Museum, which focuses on murderer Lizzie Borden and houses collections of skulls and hatchets, among other things.  The space is branded to look more or less like a wunderkammern, with aged props, elements of the grotesque among the collection and traditional cases much like those in the East India Marine Hall. Yet essentially all objects in the museum are reproductions, replicas and creative interpretations of historical objects, conceived of and arranged for the purpose of selling Lizzie Borden merchandise to tourists.

The 40 Whacks Museum, Salem, MA

Commercial museums like the 40 Whacks attempt to conform to the image pop culture has created for curiosity cabinets in order to capitalize on the public’s affinity for wonder. In contrast, Charles Sandison’s Figurehead is a contemporary version of a wunderkammern. Unlike commercial imitations, the artist has rethought the wunderkammern in terms of both the history of this concept and the Peabody Essex museum’s own history.  In this regard, Sandison distilled the essence a curiosity cabinet: the uniqueness of the individual museum in which it resides. Figurehead’s true medium was the historical context of the Peabody Essex Museum reconfigured into a representation that bridges the digital and physical roles museums now play. Poignantly, the relationship between physical and digital information is one museums still struggle to negotiate and fully understand; Figurehead‘s successful merging of the dichotomy suggests there is still something to be learned from the wunderkammern, even for the institutions built upon its foundation.

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.

Rooftop Spectacle and a Soft Breeze: Big Bambú at the Met

Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop is a colossal bamboo sculpture by Doug and Mike Starn installed on top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 31 that visitors can ascend while on a tour.  I initially thought it was surprising for a giant sculpture by two contemporary artists primarily known for their photography to take center stage at the Met, a museum not often associated with risky contemporary art. But I found it even more unexpected that an institution as grand and mainstream as this was offering an opportunity for the public to climb on a sculpture held together exclusively by climbing rope, hovering over the Manhattan skyline.  Museums are usually hypersensitive to the safety of their visitors (and the affiliated liabilities); a tour that requires signing a waiver struck me as a highly atypical museum experience and one I was determined to encounter first-hand.

From the beginning it was clear that climbing Big Bambú would be a serious undertaking.  Fourty tickets to the guided tours are released two times per day from the Met’s education center, once at 9:30 am for morning tours and again at 12:00 pm for afternoon tours. When I arrived at the museum around 12:20 pm on a Friday afternoon, a line of 40 people had already formed.  After waiting at the end for about ten minutes, I was informed that I was the last person to be going on a tour that day and that I needed to arrive back in this space at 3:15 pm, sharp.

At 3:15 pm, the pre-tour process indeed began. Members of the group of twenty waiting to ascend Big Bambú were approached individually, asked to sign the waiver, which, among other considerations, reminded us that temperatures could be very high and that we “will not have immediate access to water or shade on the tour.” As I read through the paperwork, I was reminded of the warnings and disclosures often presented before embarking on a “thrill” activity of some kind; flying on a zip line through the canopy in Mexico, riding a mechanical bull on the University of Colorado campus, attempting the flying trapeze in the Sonoma Valley were several experiences that came to mind.

After everything was signed, the tour group was brought to a small locker room. Mimicking rollercoaster procedures, we were asked to leave all loose belongings: cameras, purses, hats. We were even told to find  a secure place to fasten our tiny, aluminum admission buttons.  As I waited for the other tour attendees to relinquish their things, I had time to wonder about the adrenaline aspects of the forthcoming experience: Was I naively calm? Would this be the equivalent of a museum thrill ride?

Big Bambú installation view, May 2010 Photo by Doug and Mike Starn © 2010 Mike and Doug Starn / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, image from Metropolitan Museum of Art/flickr

At last brought up a flight of stairs to the top of the Metropolitan, we were met with Big Bambú. Constructed from a mass of bamboo stalks and branches sculpted by the artists and a team of rock climbers, the work is splayed across the entirety of the museum’s roof garden. Mangled knots of red and blue climbing rope binds the sculpture’s joints (the artists have used the terms “organism” and “arteries” to describe the work), contorting the bamboo pieces into the shape of a cresting wave. At the time of my visit, the structure peaked at 30 feet above the surface of the roof, but the artists and climbers will continue building and altering Big Bambú for the duration of the exhibition, ultimately bringing it to a peak of 50 feet. Despite being at the lowest scale of its form, there was a looming quality to Big Bambú, its scale daunting and unbalanced shape precarious.

Doug + Mike Starn, "Big Bambu: You Can't, You Don't and You Won't Stop," 2010, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The roof was an easy location for this sculpture.  A chaotic structure had been placed on top of an orderly institution. The obvious juxtapositions of the organic materials of the work set against the trees below the museum in Central Park also introduced opportunities to consider the dynamics of human creation and natural existence. But beyond these concerns, Big Bambú also bears a relationship to the human fascination with the rooftop as a site for spectacle. Although ascending a tall structure is itself an affair among TV towers and the remaining world’s fair projects, the thrill can be amplified by erecting another experience on top of the tall building.   The Stratosphere in Las Vegas is topped by several rides that simulate falling and hanging, thus inducing the highest level of thrill possible; Chicago’s Willis (formerly Sears) Tower recently added “The Ledge,”  a glass cube offering visitors a more death-defying view of the city through the structure’s floor.  The elaborate waiver and waiting process of touring Big Bambú made experience of this artwork seem comparable to other thrill experiences seem inevitable, but everything changed when the tour entered the sculpture.

The Stratosphere Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada

Once inside the structure, New York’s 90+ degree weather dissipated;  in its place we were offered shade and a light breeze. The path began with a steep incline and series of handmade steps, abruptly elevating the tour to Big Bambú’s 30 foot peak. Yet this ascension was entirely without spectacle; within the golden stalks and dried leaves, we were fully encased by the art, the group appearing comfortably secure and without concern for the height at which we were taking in a panoramic view of Manhattan.  In contrast to the “3 second rule” theory that museum visitors spend less than three seconds with each work of art they encounter , the tour attendees engaged with this work of art effortlessly. They touched (this was allowed) the branches, noted the aural aspects, asked questions about the Starns and their past work,  and lingered naturally on a small bench embedded in a pocket of the structure with a particularly luscious view. The effect was simple enjoyment; in the Starns’ space, no one feared the contemporary art.

In direct antithesis to the waivers, warnings and procedures, Big Bambú’s success was its lightness of being. Thrill experiences are often most enjoyed when they have finished; in contrast, the Starns’ piece is best experienced in all of its immediate presence, taking in the experience as-is.  Although those with specific interests in contemporary art consistently appreciate opportunities to become immersed in it, the general public are typically difficult to convince. In the instance of Big Bambú, spectacle may draw people in, but once inside, you can’t, you don’t and you won’t stop, because you don’t want to.

A Post-Precarious Disquieting

When asked to reflect on the art of the first ten years of the millenium, Hal Foster focused on the precarious: works that created meaning from the uncertain circumstances of their time. The five artistic moments he identifies as exemplary are Robert Gober’s 2005 installation at Matthew Marks Gallery; John Kessler’s The Palace at 4 am at P.S.1; Mark Wallinger’s State Britain, Tate Britain; Isa Genzken’s installation at Sckulptur Projeckte Munster 2007; and Paul Chan’s “The 7 Lights” at the New Museum.  Foster summarizes his notion of this precarious:

“…what I want to underscore in the word is already present in the OED: ‘Precarious: from the Latin precarius, obtained by entreaty, depending on the favor of another, hence uncertain, precarious, from precem, prayer.’ This implies that this state of insecurity is not natural but constructed–a political condition produced by a power on whose favor we depend and which we can only petition. To act out the precarious, then, is not only to evoke its perilous and privative effects but also to intimate how and why they are produced–and thus to to implicate the authority that imposes this antisocial contract of ‘revocable tolerance.’” (“Precarious,” Artforum December 2009)

Although the concept of precariousness Foster reflects on is applicable to a range of historical moments, the definition of the term is so dependent upon time that it is reasonable to assume the works he identifies were most impactful because of the time of their respective existences.

While both the historical and artistic moments of this essay are now over, the Portland Art Museum’s Disquieted seized a similarly poignant point in time to reflect on the precariousness of the 00s from a more distanced point of view.  Upon entering Disquieted, one cannot help but take a moment of silence.  The three lightly illuminated, colossal heads of Jaume Plensa’s installation In the Midst of Dreams appear to silently meditate among a garden of marble stones.  The muted lighting, the shuttered eyes of the figures and the gentle uncanniness of the scene all contribute to an initial inclination to linger with this piece, effectively setting the tone for the movement through the rest of the exhibition.

Jaume Plensa. In the Midst of Dreams. 2009. Installation of polyester resin, fiberglass, stainless steel, marble pebbles, and light. Galerie Lelong, New York. Image from artnet.com

A typical museum experience often creates a sense that one must move quickly and efficiently through the  galleries in order to absorb everything before the museum fatigue sets in and the building closes.  Beginning with Plensa’s heads, however, the pressure to move on and “see it all” was alleviated.   Bill Viola’s The Quintent of the Astonished in the next set of galleries physically slows time for the viewer, appropriating the composition and lighting characteristic of Baroque paintings into to a slow motion action sequence. Simultaneously speaking to the mental and cinematic processes of experiencing reaction, the video leaves the viewer in a state of questioning anticipation, waiting for information and resolution without hope of finding either.

Bill Viola, The Quintet of the Astonished, 2000. Colour video rear projection on screen mounted on wall in dark room. Projected image size: 140 x 240 cm. Bill Viola Studio, Long Beach, CA © Bill Viola.

Jean Tingley’s installation Facility evokes a similar experience of waiting and watching. Tucked in a dark corner at the end of a short hallway, a guard asks visitors to enter the space but to avoid touching “the model.”  Occurring before those about to enter even know what they are about to encounter, this introduction to the piece creates a heightened level of awareness as one proceeds into the dark space. The immediate response is to try to comprehend what can and cannot be done in this room and determine how easily something might be touched or stepped on; after this moment of confusion, our eyes adjust and are met with a small white model of a prison surrounded by a square of light and shadows.  It is only after spending time with the work that the viewer can realize time is, in fact, required for this experience.  Slowly it becomes evident that the shadow of the model building is moving as though there were a dim form of the sun rising and setting.  As Facility fades in and out of the room over the course of about five minutes, it appears simultaneously natural and dream-like, leaving the viewer to observe the cycle mechanically repeating itself.

Towards the end of Disquieted, Shirin Neshat’s Possessed is screened in a room in the center of another gallery, the sounds of the video audible throughout the last several spaces of the exhibition. Like Facility, a sense of repetition surfaces, in this instance through the disjointed sounds of Possessed’s soundtrack. When I walked into the gallery, the screen depicted a woman wandering the walled streets of a desert city alone.  The dramatic sounds and the desperate expression on her face suggest a sense of an undeterminable trauma similar to the perceived drama behind the individuals in Viola’s The Quintet of the Astonished.  Although Neshat’s video has a form of climax as the woman enters a crowded square and causes a set of diverging reactions among the other individuals shown, the piece again ends with a lack of resolve.  As indicated by the title, the woman’s thoughts and actions are not easily deciphered, and yet there is something about her the viewer feels inclined to understand.

Shirin Neshat. Possessed (Production still). 2001. ©Shirin Neshat. Photo by Larry Barns, courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Image from Art Papers.org

Several weeks prior to my viewing of Disquieted, I read a quotation from the exhibition’s curator Bruce Guenther in Art Daily:

“The experience is post-retinal—you take it with you and it becomes a part of your next conversation. These works provoke feelings that may be lying beneath the surface or below a person’s façade of contentment. The emotional reaction sneaks up on you, perhaps even moving you from laughter to tears.”

I considered Guenther’s suggestion as I entered and as I exited the show.  I then continued coming back to it every time I reflected on this exhibition for the past two weeks as I worked to conceptualize this posting and agreed that his assessment could not be more true. While many works in Disquieted relate to the temporal concepts Hal Foster identified as part of precariousness, the works at PAM had their own command over time and reflection that is more uniquely suited for the present moment. The changes in leadership and attitudes that have arisen in the aftermath of Foster’s precariousness have brought Americans to our current state of transition, a period when consideration of the past ten years (and beyond) can potentially be of the most use as we move towards an era anew.

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.

The Heartland Machine and Other Concepts from the Future

Parked inside in a small gallery of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art is a Heartland Machine. Heartland Machine is a mobile sculpture that began as a speedboat.  Conceived by Detroit-based Design 99, over a period of ten days the boat was dragged around the mid-west and interacted with independent arts organizations based in Minneapolis, Detroit, Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago.  The final sculpture included videos, printed materials, metal signs and other objects from the boat’s journey, assembled inside the Smart Museum.  In addition to the work’s title, cartoon-esque speeding lines affixed to the back of the vehicle evoke the animated trail left behind Doc Brown’s famed time machine as it disappears in Back to the Future.  The notable difference is, in place of a flux capacitor, Heartland Machine is fueled by artistic fusion across communities.

Design 99, Heartland Machine, 2009, mixed media installation including audiovisual equipment, fiberglass boat, found materials, silkscreened posters designed by Nina Bianchi and printed by Tim Eads; ephemera and video (color, sound) supplied by regional independent cultural infrastructures. Courtesy of the artists. Image from the Smart Museum.

Heartland Machine is part of the Smart Museum’s (whose Adaptation traveled to the Henry Art Gallery last year) group exhibition Heartland, a collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum that focuses on artists working from and responding to the center of the United States.  The simple concept behind Heartland is what makes it poignant. The “region” of this exhibition was based on the course of the Mississippi River as a geographical guiding force; in the exhibition catalog, the curatorial team describe the area as “…heart drawn on a map of the United States with its point in New Orleans, extending up to Minneapolis in the northwest and Detroit in the northeast” (Esche, Niemann and Smith 12). This selection, based on the curators’ series of road trips across America from 2007-2009  bypassed the traditional “Midwest”  or “Bible Belt” definitions of region, suggesting the arbitrariness of such boundaries in this context.

Regional exhibitions are commonplace, but in the field of contemporary art, rural America in particular can be something of a persona non grata. Although they may have migrated from elsewhere, many of this country’s well-known artists are based on the coasts, with limited exceptions for the larger (Chicago, Minneapolis) or particularly arts-friendly (Santa Fe) cities. The middle of the country is more often seen as a place to escape rather than a focal point for creative inquiry.

In the Chicago Reader’s recommendation of Heartland, Noah Berlatsky writes,

“I’m particularly looking forward to seeing the installation by Carnal Torpor, a KC art collective that makes klutzy, burpy grindcore music when they’re not creating collages indebted equally to Pushead and Day of the Dead ofrendas. The group…has an aesthetic I appreciate not so much because it’s weird as because it seems familiar and right. But then, I live here.” (Chicago Reader, “Fall Arts Guide 2009“)

Carnal Torpor’s installation Purifications of the CalmDome is comprised of a white, plastic pod approximately ten feet high, similar in shape to a deformed soccer ball with overlapping circular patterns inscribed in its surface.  Viewers can remove their shoes and enter the structure through a small hole in the back.  Once inside, the space becomes isolating, the smallest of sounds shut out, the only light coming from the entry hole and a small, silent television near the top of the dome.

Left: Cody Critcheloe, BOY, 2009. Right: Carnal Topor, Purifications of the CalmDome, 2009. Courtesy of the artists. Installation view at the Smart Museum of Art. Image from the Smart Museum

I did not want to like Purifications of the CalmDome.  Its proliferation of the desire to escape from one environment into another seemed too easy. Yet whenever I try to conceptualize Heartland, I keep coming back to the experience of climbing into the dome. As a former resident of the midwest, something about this piece articulated my determination to escape that part of the country at my first opportunity.  Stepping inside the installation feels like a direct connection to the mind of the artist, or maybe to anyone frustrated with the monotony and absence of personality in places like the suburb in which I grew up (Naperville, IL).  There is not much to be found inside Purifications of the CalmDome, but there is a sense that the interior is at least distinct from the exterior, if nothing else.  As Berlatsky suggested, Purifications of the CalmDome was highly familiar and exactly right.

Carnal Topor, Purifications of the CalmDome, 2009, Mixed media installation including architectural elements, electronics, paint, soundproofing materials, and video. Image from the Smart Museum.

The northernmost and southernmost boundaries of Heartland are Detroit and New Orleans.  The connections between these two damaged cities are readily seen within the photographs by two artists in the exhibition. Slovenian artist-architect Marjetica Potrc portrays scenes of the Lower 9th Ward against the backdrop of New Orleans’s vacant businesses; Scott Hocking documents series of pyramid structures within Detroit’s Fisher Body Plant building  as they crumble into their surroundings over time.  Seeing these works in the context of Heartland, an exhibition largely focused on the communities of their region, begged the question of why a relevant exhibition like this was not selected to be on view in place of the highly controversial Dreams Come True: Art of the Classic Fairy Tales from the Walt Disney Studio at NOMA.

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

Questions of finances and ethics aside, one of the most unfortunate aspects of Dreams Come True is its irrelevance to a city struggling to rebuild itself. As a museum limited on staff and resources, the easy solution may appear to be the all-inclusive Disney exhibition that comes at no financial cost to the institution.  Yet it still comes at the expense of staff time, gallery space and marketing efforts, among other resources.  In place of Dreams Come True, NOMA could have found an alternative solution more similar to Heartland, smaller in scale but providing more content and ideas that are meaningful to the city rather than artifacts from Disney productions associated with with the false promises and imitations of life that led to the term “Disneyfication”; it is difficult to imagine the opportunities for dialogue princess movies bring to a city striving to create a sense of community.

The corporately-created exhibition is particularly disconcerting in a time when the focus should be on recognizing the importance of local culture and creativity to the city of New Orleans.  Although not everything in Heartland is equally provocative, the resonance of particular works suggest the show’s more community-based model is successful and something that should be considered more often in place of the impersonal (and often irrelevant) traveling blockbuster exhibitions so common in museum practice.  In this regard, Design 99′s Heartland Machine may be seen as a mode of thought, rather than a mere device, sent to us from the future.

Bifocal 2: Avatar and Superlatives

“You go to Las Vegas precisely because you want to be overwhelmed by an excessive visual ordeal. We define and describe spectacle by the use of superlatives, and Wynn tells you on his taped message that his paintings are the ‘most expensive’ and ‘the best.’ The Guggenheim’s advertising offers the viewer no less.”

Excerpt from In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle by William L. Fox, Reno/Las Vegas: University of Las Vegas Press, 2005. Print.

Image: Still from Avatar. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Fox. Image from silive.com

Not Safe for Museums (Seeing Things One at a Time)

A recreation of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sky Above Clouds IV was painted on a concrete wall outside of my 4th grade classroom. At some point I had learned it was a work of art, but that concept was meaningless until I went to the Art Institute with my parents on my birthday.  We came across the painting while going down one of the museum’s grand staircases.  Mounted high above my head,  I could not see its brush strokes, imperfections or other indications of “realness.” Nonetheless, it was clearly more exciting than the school mural.  I remember wanting to stay because there seemed to be something to figure out about this painting. But, we had to move on because we were standing in the middle of the museum’s stairs.

Georgia O’Keeffe. Sky Above Clouds IV. 1965. Oil on canvas. 8 x 24 ft. Image from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I was not taught how to look at art as much as how to make it until taking a Humanities course in high school, during which we studied art’s masterpieces by flipping between and comparing images in E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art at record speed; there was too much art history to be had for a high school class divided into equal parts between visual art, music and literature, but we did what we could.

I studied Ingres’s Une Odalisque during a college Humanities survey course, but I was not prepared for the way such a work could bring a person to pause.  Visiting the Louvre as an American citizen is typically expected to be a pace-driven experience, as one tries to consume as much art as possible in a single day. The chateau’s daunting, 4-wing layout and shopping list of masterpieces-to-be-seen in the map discourage any sort of intimate experience one might want to have with singular works of art.  Une Odalisque was a painting I happened upon while wandering through the rooms of French Neoclassical paintings.  The preciseness of the technique was so much more stunning and the blue so much more bold than I had expected, I felt like I could stay with this single painting until the institution closed and be content.  But for reasons I can no longer remember, we felt compelled to keep on, the art marathon track guiding us away from any impromptu lingering.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Une Odalisque. 1814.  Image from Musee du Louvre.

In The Story of Art, Gombrich offers warnings against the meandering experience:

“People who have acquired some knowledge of art history are sometimes in danger of falling into a…trap. When they see a work of art they do not stay to look at it, but rather search their memory for the appropriate label. They may have heard that Rembrandt was famous for his chiaroscuro…so they nod wisely when they see a Rembrandt, mumble ‘wonderful chiaroscuro,’ and wander on to the next picture.” (Gombrich 34)

Museums are highly conducive to the empty wandering Gombrich describes; Michael Kimmelman recently discussed the phenomenon  and attributed the problem to a desire for self-improvement. His claim that there is pressure to see everything is certainly true. “Everything” could be everything in the museum, everything in an exhibition, everything famous.

“Everything” never means one work of art.  Yet, a painting as rich as Une Odalisque commands a stop, an opportunity for the viewer’s full attention. I disagree with Kimmelman  in that I think a thorough trip to the museum can be meaningful when objects are viewed more quickly but still thoughtfully and as a whole.  However, there are also works of art that need to be seen entirely on their own, without a “white cube,” placement on a time line or the underlying desire to see anything else.

Charlie White’s 1957 is a work I want to return to see on its own.  The photograph is part of This Old, Weird America, an exhibition currently on view at the Frye (see exhibition reviews by Regina Hackett and Jen Graves) comprised of an interesting, and often unexpected,  grouping of artists. However, 1957 is so fascinating I am tempted to come back to see this photograph only.  A composition of filmic and allegorical images combines with a level of attention to period details seemingly comparable to Mad Men to open a space for considering how the past is created in the mind, amid the fictional representations to which we cling.  Although the intrigue of 1957 can be enhanced by the works around it, the experience of seeing it independently is entirely different.

Charlie White. 1957. 2006. C-print photograph. Image from CCF Artist Gallery.

Sky Above Clouds IV and Une Odalisuqe were early occasions in which  I felt compelled to focus on only on one thing and did not.   Since my experience at the Louvre, I have had several opportunities to go into a museum and see only one thing. The evening I arrived in New Orleans to see Prospect.1*, I could only find one work of art to see, as all of the venues were already closed. Alexandre Arrechea’s Mississippi Bucket was listed as being in the Plaza of Good Fortune at Harrah’s Casino, which seemed like a place that would be open all night.

Alexandre Arrechea. Mississippi Bucket. 2008. Plaza of Good Fortune, Harrah’s Casino, Prospect.1 New Orleans.

Predictably, the Plaza of Good Fortune was difficult to find. The Harrah’s tower dominated the modest New Orleans waterfront, but determining the location of a particular plaza housing a work of art was challenging. After walking through an underground tunnel towards the inside of the casino, I made my  way towards the first human in sight.  When I asked about the Plaza of Good Fortune, she directed me back outside.  After wandering the perimeter of Harrah’s for 20 minutes, searching for something to indicate the plaza I needed (Symbols of luck? Pennies falling from the sky?), I happened to look down to see a sprawling, trough-like sculpture made from wood.  After spending so long in search of the Plaza of Good Fortune, I kept reconsidering this empty, quiet bed of tributaries and what good fortune actually meant to them.

Since this encounter with Mississippi Bucket, I went to SFMOMA to see only Olivo Barbieri’s site specific_LAS VEGAS 05, I went to the Henry to see only Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation’s The Rape of the Sabine Women, and I wandered through the labyrinth of the EMP to find Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean jacket and white glove.  All of these works are highly memorable to me in a way that even standout work in an exhibition is not. One of the reasons for this difference is the individually viewed work of art becomes an experience rather than one object among many.

Creating an “experience” is something museums constantly strive for, and yet the “museum visit” can become so formulaic (get ticket, enter galleries, see special exhibition, see permanent collection, depart) that remembering even a hand-full of works can be challenging by the end of the day. Interacting with a work of art involves both the artwork and the viewer; when a single work is seen alone, the entire context of seeing becomes part of the work.

Although admission fees, large-scale marketing campaigns and highlighted maps may suggest otherwise, seeing one work of art should not be considered a luxury reserved for the admission-less museums in England or the masterpieces of painting in France. The viewing process always under our control, and it is our responsibility to see accordingly.

*For the purposes of this essay, the biennial experience’s qualities of maximum art consumption and presence as a large-scale exhibition make it comparable to the museum experience.

These Objects are Loved

“Vortexhibition Polyphonica” is an intimidating exhibition title.  A vortex is a swirling mass, coming from the Latin vertere, meaning “to turn.”  A polyphony is a vocal texture derived from multiple independent voices.  How this could be applied to an exhibition was perplexing.  It sounded like it could be a psychedelic journey of sorts (at least metaphorically), or a perhaps just a concept impossible to grasp.  My biggest concern was this title sounded impersonal, something an exhibition of a museum’s collection should never be.

E.V. Day. Cherry Bomb Vortex (detail). 2002. Red sequin dress with monofilament and turnbuckles and stainless steel base. Image from E.V.Day.net

But, I went to the Henry, wandering into the galleries knowing only that Vortexhibition Polyphonica (V.P.) is a collection-based show in which objects will change periodically. When entering, I used the large, cascading staircase overlooking the space.  From above, the exhibition was noticeably interdisciplinary and immediately felt robust: photographs, paintings, dresses, an historical rug and red stilettos were among the curious objects filling the Stroum Gallery’s vast landscape.

At the bottom of the stairs, I was expecting exhibition text; instead, I immediately was drawn to a curtained video gallery and encountered Gary Hill, emphatically throwing his body against the wall.  Pained, disjointed sentences physically combine with an intense strobe effect (both a filmed strobe in the video and a physical light the room of the installation), heightening the impact of the repeated collisions in Wall Piece. The work can be seen as a direct confrontation and dissolution between the artist and myriad forces: the creative process, language, the mind, the physical being.  All the while, the altercation is displayed prominently on the wall for us to see.

Gary Hill. Wall Piece. 2000. Single-channel, video/sound installation with strobe light, 2 min. 17 sec.

In a video created by SFMOMA , Hill discusses the active role of the viewer in Wall Piece because of the nature of the images in the video as what he describes as “verbs.”  While this idea is certainly essential to experiencing this particular work, it is also an idea that V.P. as a whole appears very conscious of, in the best of ways.

Modern Art Notes recently examined questions related to permanent/semi-permanent collection displays in contemporary art museums.  Collections-based, temporary exhibitions are similarly complicated in that a museum’s permanent collection is more than a series of objects; there is also a community of people who are invested in the objects, often in a highly emotional regard.

In essay “Collecting: Body and Soul,” Susan Pearce notes,

“A number of studies carried out in America unite to demonstrate how significant possessions are to the self-image… and interestingly, these [studies] tend to suggest that the critical factor is the extent to which we believe we possess or are possessed by an object: control, one way or another, is what makes an object become more a part of the self.” (Museums, Objects, and Collections 55)

Although a museum’s collection is not a possession of the public in the traditional sense, individuals can feel a certain sense of ownership and intimacy with the objects as resources within their communities.  As Pearce suggests, the feeling of ownership can include a desire for control. Vortexhibition Polyphonica excels in its reverence for the relationship between a museum’s collection and its community by incorporating interesting shifts away the standard format of an exhibition during its “polyphonic” moments, which come through the exhibition text as much as they come through the works on view.

Curator Sara Krajewski’s voice is acknowledged in the text she wrote through the use of bylines, which has become standard practice in many institutions as of late. However, Krajewski also incorporates the subjective “I” in a way more forthright than most wall text I have seen.  This approach highlights the way exhibition text in general is written from someone’s point of view rather than from “the institution,” with a greater call for active viewing among visitors as they consider and compare their own perspectives.  The subjective statements also emphasize the more emotive aspects of art, including a curators’ close relationship with the organization’s permanent collection, which can be put at a distance by the “institutional voice” of standard text.

The rest of the polyphony stems from a letter from the donor of one of the objects, graduate student writings, external scholars’ responses and re-used exhibition texts (some with notation of the original author) comprising the majority of the extended labels.  Some of the writings are factual and lengthy while others display their objects’ histories in such a way that the texts seem to become part of the works rather than merely a form of presentation.  Even the physical way these objects inhabit the Henry’s building and its multiple entrances to the Stroum Gallery (center staircase, cascading staircase and elevator) is represented: the introductory text invites viewers to begin from any location, ultimately enabling them to take ownership of the process of interacting with the art.

This summer I visited a collections-based exhibition at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art featuring new acquisitions that happened to be seminal works from the last seventy years of art history. I expect to remember seeing some of those works for most of my life.  However, I do not anticipate remembering the exhibition: a white cube display of objects that relate to one another in terms of an institutional mission, as told through an institutional voice.  The art was impactful, but Louisiana itself kept a traditional role as the distanced keeper of this art. There is nothing wrong with this. However, there is a particular value in creating a dynamic presentation of a permanent collection in a way that contextualizes works of art within a greater dialogue of timely perspectives.  Exhibitions like Vortexhibition Polyphonica facilitate the rethinking of objects that are already loved by creating a “verb” experience and inviting the viewer into the conversation.

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.