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.

The Revolution Begins with a Trash Can

Exhibiting art created for city streets in a museum setting is a difficult undertaking. The interior of an institution can often be one of the farthest environments from an “urban landscape.” As gated experiences with limited hours, museums are tightly controlled in regards to everything from lighting and security to object placement and user experience. In contrast, art designed for the streets, following completion by its creator, is typically left at the mercy of its surroundings, at which point it may be added to, mangled or simply disappear.  The city street also adds a level of cultural context that a white-walled gallery is hard pressed to replicate, particularly when an opening or other event involving a chaotic mass of people is not taking place in the building.  Absence of control adds an element of risk to art, and without the risk, urban art can instantaneously be sucked lifeless.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego took on the challenge of exhibiting urban art through Viva La Revolución: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape, a group show of work by 20 international street artists.  Predictably, the MCASD attempted to mediate the dissonance between the urban environment and the museum enclosure by commissioning a number of works to exist outside of the exhibition in the gallery spaces, on the streets of San Diego. During the three days I visited the city, the only mural of the nine installed I had the opportunity to experience was a colossal, red societal critique pasted across the side of an Urban Outfitters by Shepard Fairey. The wheatpaste mural was comprised of layers of the iconic images (Angela Davis portraits, images of singular eyes) and social commentary (“OBEY CONSUME REPEAT”) typical of the artist’s work.

“Hillcrest Mural” by Shepard Fairey, 2010, image from sdurbain.com

In many ways Fairey’s Hillcrest mural is most interesting because of its siting on the exterior wall of an Urban Outfitters: “renegade” art on the side of the commercially mainstream clothing store. It is unlikely that a chain retail store would allow spontaneous street art to remain on the side of its building, were it not sanctioned by a museum exhibition. It is also widely known that this particular store sells mass-produced garments and home wares made to appear as though they are second-hand items and elements of genuine nostalgia, bringing out the somewhat deceptive quality of street art created for a museum exhibition. The commissions may be of the utmost quality but the conditions under which they were created are distinct from actual urban works: budgeted, somewhat protected (Fairey’s Hillcrest mural has been tagged and restored on multiple occasions since the exhibition’s opening) and with sites legally procured.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the MCASD’s inclusion of a city-wide element in this exhibition. It is more expected than innovative in the sense that museums have been noticeably more active about creating installations beyond their buildings as a regular practice, particularly in southern California this year; for instance, this past spring, UCLA’s Fowler museum sent Nick Cave’s sound suits out into the world through semi-unexpected “invasions” on campus and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture disseminated 21 artist-created billboards throughout greater L.A. Should the MCASD have not commissioned the street art projects for Viva La Revolución, there would have almost certainly been a noticeable absence in the exhibition and a missed opportunity to bring art into a community that had so much impact on the development of the medium as “higher” art.

But, the success of Viva La Revolución I found most noteworthy was the effectiveness of the street art exhibition in the gallery spaces. The MCASD downtown location housing the exhibition was previously luggage storage for the adjacent Santa Fe train depot. The building’s details already somewhat urban in their styling due to this prior use, upon entering the space there was a sense that this is the place for a street art show.  Yet the indoor version of Viva La Revolución was something of a quiet revolution, its fate determined by an unassuming trash can in a corner. Titled Busted Plume, artist David Ellis’s piece initially seemed  to be a mere container for brightly colored pieces of garbage that appeared too clean and without weathering, much like Fairey’s pristine mural outside Urban Outfitters. But momentarily, one, then multiple items in the can created a structured rhythm amongst themselves.

The clanking was as clean as the garbage itself. Ultimately a composition by Roberto Carlos Lange, the sharpest sounds had the assuredness of a symphonic staccato; as the garbage can crescendoed into its strongest controlled cacophony, the small work’s presence suddenly was in control of the entire gallery space. This was a significant feat, considering how most other works in the room were gargantuan. Swoon’s tower of abandoned furniture and ethereal figures towered over the gallery, nearly reaching the beams of the space’s lofted ceiling while Akay’s mass of graffiti tools occupied the length of the wall adjacent to Ellis’s trash can. But through its aural domination, Busted Plume maintained the largest presence, even as the sound faded into the periphery around corners or behind glass doors.

"Viva La Revolucion" installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego downtown

The decision to tuck Busted Plume into the most prominent gallery of Viva La Revolución was a bold choice.  Many museum visitors resist what they fear to be disruptions of the traditionally tranquil museum experience. While those attending an exhibition of street art may be expected to have a higher level of tolerance, a curatorial trust in Ellis’s piece as a centralizing force was clearly necessary; in the end this was absolutely the right decision.  The wastebasket brings the absence of control over visual experiences from the urban environment to the otherwise highly controlled museum experience, thus introducing a definitive element of street art into the gallery. Although Shepard Fairey’s mural had the name recognition and star power as a spotlight piece physically on the street, the essence of street art was to be found most successfully in the galleries of Viva La Revolución, where a wastebasket subtly demonstrates how the world works.

Through the Disney Portal: Jellyfish and Oil

The experience of the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride at Orlando’s Walt Disney World is one burned permanently into my memory, despite having taken the fantastical journey only once. I recall the ornate, army green Nautilus, with its glaring fish eye windows, approaching slowly in the chlorinated lagoon. We were loaded aboard and seated on in a row of movie-style seats running the length of the half-submerged sub, each passenger assigned the smallest of porthole windows, providing an intimate viewing experience of the man-made, undersea world.  The booming narration of Captain Nemo, accompanied by organ notes for emphasis, began the journey, as sprays of bubbles blew past the windows, signifying the our sinking to greatest of depths.

I recall recognizing the bubbles as a special effect, having just spent an hour in line, watching the submarines circulating through the lagoon without ever going below the surface. Once the bubbles cleared  and plastic marine life was in view, I suspect every kid on the ship over the age of five knew that we were “pretending,” that none of what we were seeing were actual animals. Yet the theatrics of the ship, the tiny viewing hole, the voice of Captain Nemo himself guiding our viewing, provided all of the spectacle necessary to convince the 40 people aboard the Nautilus that everything through the window was extraordinary and full of wonder; there were things here that everyone wanted to see. The ride was discontinued in 1994 but has been memorialized on YouTube by devoted individuals who filmed the experience in full so that the artificial ocean could not be completely lost over time.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have an affinity for the Henry Art Gallery’s use of the elevator as a video installation location. As a freight elevator, entering its surprisingly large space evokes a sense of transport to elsewhere. During my most recent experience in the elevator, the grand silver doors opened to reveal a rectangular portal into the ocean of Kiki Smith’s Jewel, a video depicting a bloom of jellyfish floating hypnotically in tangled masses.  As the elevator shut and started moving in a slow descent, my memory of the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea journey was triggered. Bubbles did not flood the screen but the isolated video within this vehicle brought attention to the wonder of the cnidarian in a way similar to the viewing of the Disney attraction’s underwater theatrical experience. In the elevator, there is only the viewer and the crystal jellyfish, the creatures’ forms and anatomies glowing with luminescence.

Typically, I suspect that entering the elevator and experiencing Jewel would lead to consideration of how the video relates to the other works by the artist in the larger exhibition at the Henry. However, in this instance, in the midst of having a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea moment of nostalgia, my mind kept wandering back to the question of what this video would look like if everything was drenched in oil; jellyfish were noted as one of the first casualties of the spill that has become central to the US collective consciousness over the past 40+ days. This past week, more images of the effected Gulf of Mexico sea life have emerged, but for the first month of the catastrophe, visual renditions had been limited to the aerial photos of orange streaks across the Gulf’s surface, which were ultimately more aesthetic than harrowing. While shock is far from the only way to convey information, since the oil spill began there had been an underlying sense that the visual impact of the disaster was being withheld. Consequently, I began seeking it elsewhere. In this context, Smith’s jellyfish appeared more surveillance-like, demonstrating the calm version of the ocean that no longer exists, playing on repeat, now more similar to the pleasantly artificial lagoon of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea than the disturbing reality reflected on the 24/7 surveillance camera of the spilling oil.

Jewels is not inherently about oil or environmental devastation. Yet I couldn’t avoid seeing it in these terms because of the oil spill’s physical drenching of the collective consciousness. It is a disaster that has caused a unique level of universal helplessness among the government, the Gulf coast residents and the American public.  Experiencing the images seems to provide the opportunity to interact with the situation on some level, albeit a superficial one; since the release of more graphic depictions of oil-soaked marine life, the proliferation of photographs across art and media online resources demonstrates a common desire to view and expose what had been discussed extensively but not seen until this point.  The images are now becoming something of a spectacle themselves, but there is some sense to this, considering how the American desire for excess and spectacle is ultimately linked to the consumption of oil. People have an innate desire to see what cannot be seen, including both the pleasantries of a constructed attraction’s excessive spectacle, as well as the very real consequences of living the excessive and spectacle-filled lifestyle reflected in the magical world of Disney.

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.

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.

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.

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