Performance/Visual Arts

I visited the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston this past weekend on a class assignment; in my accompanying paper I came off as highly critical of this museum which I felt suffered from the Bilbao Effect. The Bilbao effect is essentially the phenomenon that ensued after Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum debuted in Bilbao Spain. The building, made of swirling titanium panels, inspired many copy cat designs that seemed to scream “look at me!” Now obviously I’m not a complete aesthetic puritan or else I wouldn’t care about art at all, but I felt like the ICA was pretty spectacular looking in the worst sense. This could have been influenced by the crappy weather and desolate industrial looking surroundings, but I was looking for something a bit more nuanced and subtle.

The building is centered on Boston’s South Harbor– at this point it’s surrounded by torn up parking lots and buildings in the midst of construction. The structure itself employs what is called a “fold over form”; from the side it appears to fold back on itself and create layers or floors. The main (read: most complex and shiny) part of the building faces the harbor. Here is where I found the main entrance which was not at the top of the grand staircase (which is really stadium seating for looking out at the water), but tucked just to the left. Under the staircase and right next to the front door is the gift shop whose walls of glass let you peek inside and survey all the things you’re meant to buy before you’ve even entered the building.

The most striking thing about the building besides it’s placement right on the water (although definitely related) was the little room you see in the above picture. This space seemed as though it had been lowered down from the underside of the building’s cantilevered roof. It looked almost like an attic door that many people have cut out of their ceilings. From within this space you get the sensation that you are suspended above the water. The computer center, which it holds, is overshadowed by this watery view.

After talking about the building with a few people who know much more than I do about architecture I discovered that I was pretty alone in my dissatisfaction with Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s 2006 building. One person described the architects as their “heroes” while another deemed the building “awesome.” I thought this building seemed average in it’s spectacle—if you’re going to make a building that is interesting to inhabit and look at I much prefer the architects’ Blur building, which is essentially an inhabitable cloud.

The point is, I feel like many times people (myself included) determine that an object or work of art is good because the object has been generally accepted as such. Without any knowledge of the building’s reputation, I was critical of it, and weak as I am, reconsidered once someone who knew more than me expressed confidence in and admirartion of the building. What this says about me or the academic world of art, I can’t say. It did get me thinking about the ways in which we look at architecture and how essentially anyone can be a critic of an inhabitable space. We seem to intuit a critical response because we are bodily creatures and we can more easily feel our bodies confused or disturbed than we can intellectualize a painting of which we feel we must know the cultural and historical context of. Painting unlike architecture, becomes illuminated more easily by information—architecture has a more direct relation to our senses.Knowing this, I think it’s important that we take advantage of our innate ability to critique the spaces we inhabit. My challenge then to you (and me) is to begin to think about the places that shelter us and decide whether they can be useful, beautiful or even poetic. Given all the complaints I’ve ever heard about our own Frost Library, I know you have it in you!

This weekend on a visit to the Guggenheim I had the pleasure of seeing the multimedia installation exhibit of Cai Guo Qiang titled I Want to Believe.  Before I even attempt to describe these immense works, it might be best to give some background on the artist and the museum itself as a way of envisioning them. The artist  was born in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. As the son of a historian and painter he studied at the Shanghai Drama Institute and began his career working in gunpowder as a means of exploring the idea of recorded explosion. Though Guo-Qiang works in a variety of mediums including gunpowder, yak skin, steel, found object sculpture, plexi-glass and clay, his works frequently attempt to capture the crest of the wave of motion of any given event. That being said his works are not so much about destruction as they are about the moment of destruction as a way of seeing recreation and being. I know this all sounds a little vague, but hopefully you’ll soon know what I mean.

The Guggenheim Museum, in case you’ve never been (and this was, I hate to admit it, my first time here) was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Any general architecture text you might read on the subject will tell you about how the curved lives of the museums facade combat the regimented order of the architecture within New York’s grid system, they’ll probably also mention that though Wright was a modern architect he referenced the classical past (jn this case the Pantheon) in the interior circular skylight. The interior is composed of spiraling layers around the perimiter and an open atrium that stretches the expanse of the the building’s height. Frankly, I found the place to be nauseating. The low banisters and constant spiraling had me pretty woozy by the exhibits end,  not to mention it looks pretty terrible on the outside since equipment used for renovation obscures the building.

Image from Allposters.com                                                                    Image from flickr.com

The building is so well respected in fact, that most would consider what Cai Guo Qiang has done to it’s interior to be a defacement. He has, in fact, taken the museum over completely. As I said before much of Guo-Qiang’s work is a mix of sculpture– in this case the sculptures are made of cars, faux taxidermied animals, yak skin and wood. Each project deals with the artist’s interest in history, chinese mythology, animals and generally, his hope to see “conflict and transformation [as] interdependent conditions of life.” The first thing a visitor sees upon entering the museum is Inopportune: Stage One, a work comprised of 9 full sized- real cars suspended from the buildings ceiling spiraling down, with LED lights exploding from within them.  If you don’t happen to look up when you initially walk in you may actually miss the fact that a full sized car is hovering over your head. It looks something like this

Now, I’m not sure if this particular work is pure spectacle; I think in a way, it does operate in the hopes that people will be wowed by the sheer mechanics of the installation as well as the size and use of electronic light, but i don’t think that it is any reason to discount it in this case. It seems much of the artist’s work is in fact a matter of events of distraction. His performance art pieces often involve what appear to be fireworks exploding in artful patterns, which he captures in his gunpoweder paintings in which the paper remembers the explosion that happened above it as the gunpowder leaves traces of being lit.

Here and in his other pieces, he succeeds in materializing that moment of explosion (in this case a car descending from the buildings ceiling and exploding on the way down) as a way of capturing dynamism and sustaining the the viewer’s attention in a timeless moment.

The remainder of the exhibition was comprised mostly of faux taxidermied animals that were incredibly life-like arranged in groupings.Besides tigers pierced with hundreds of arrows, hurled in mid- air, he arranged approximatley 150 wolves around the perimeter of one level of the museum, a work titled Head On. As the viewer walks up perhaps only one or two wolves walk beside him, soon the pack grows larger as they begin to claw at the air and rise up above the ground. What seems like a stampede finally crashes into a glass pane and contorts falling violently back to the ground. That sounds pretty unbelievable, and it was. The life like quality of the sculptures and the sucessful illusion of motion (the wolves don’t in fact move, we do– further and further up the museum’s levels) made the work border on creepy– but entirely effective. The work seemed to me to be about the idea of a crash and of mindless and seemingly subtle volition that in fact is quite dangerous. Though the this piece has been installed in several other museums, I can’t imagine that it worked as well in a space other than the Guggenheim in which the floors gently spiral up as you approach the buildings highest level.

                                                                                             Image from http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2143/1525219172_e549889e5c.jpg

Beyond that most of what I remember of the museum had to do with the construction  of a canal out of fiberglass in which visitors could ride in a yak skin boat down while looking up at Guo- Qiang’s suspended works above. This part was the most actually interactive though I thought the idea that the works featured in this gallery space acted as a retrospective and that the viewer was riding down the metaphorical canal of the artist’s work was pretty kitschy, however fun it may have been. Though it did confirm my idea that Guo Qiang’s pieces work best when they posit the viewer as the locomotive force behind their success. In both Inopportune: Stage One and Head On the relationship of the piece to the viewer’s body dictates it’s success and motion entirely. Beyond the fact that the Guggenheim might never look like this again, I can genuinely say that Guo-Qiang’s work is unlike anything I’ve ever seen and I recommend it highly to anyone if you happen to be in New York between now and May 28th which is when the show closes. I’ll warn you though– the combination of the museum’s spiraling levels and the work of Guo Qiang that appears as though it could collapse or come to life at any moment is not for the weak of heart.

A lazy Saturday not long ago, my friends and I ventured over to the Eric Carle Museum at Hampshire College in South Amherst. Essentially, the Museum houses the work of artists who illustrate the beloved books of our childhoods. Eric Carle, the museum’s namesake and founder illustrated (most famously) the The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See. As I learned while at the museum, Carle created his unique images by collaging tissue papers he textured and colored with paint. Displays of his work and process speckled the the minimalist museum. The wide open geometric interior spaces and outdoor gravel gardens had a calming effect and despite the fact that this is touted as a museum for families, it was as eerily quiet as any other museum.

After walking in to the museum’s lobby my friends and I were directed to 3 main gallery spaces. These rooms are mainly filled with prints, paintings, collages and drawings from a collection entitled Selections from the Art of Eric Carle: Bears and Beyond  as well as from Toot and Re-Toot: The Return of Hardie Gramatky’s Little Toot. I mainly gravitated toward the exhibition on Eric Carle’s work since I’d scarcely ever heard of Little Toot. It was nice to see his original “sketches” and how his unique creative process was invented. There were several displays for kids showing his process and the different stages one of his collages goes through as well as how many versions one character undergoes. Interestingly, the exhibit featured some of Eric Carle’s most recent art that was not used to illustrate any book. He created miniature sculptures and collages out of the materials he uses in his studio. There were abstract shapes made out of cardboard onto which he blotted paint while processing his familiar tissue paper, there were brushes crusted with paint arranged in artful patterns and used palettes still laden with thick paint from past projects. These utilitarian objects were transformed into artful compositions in Carle’s hands. These works introduced an interesting question that had been running through my mind while perusing the exhibition: Could these objects be considered art? Perhaps I was at first constrained by some elitist notion of high art,  but could these images (both Eric Carle’s newer work and his illustrations for picture books) which are highly reproducible and traditionally only appreciated by the under 10 crowd be seen as art? Well, it seems putting them in a museum designated them as such, and I have to admit that after gleaning some insight into the process of their creation there was definitely art at work.

There were two other surprises yet to come while on this adventure. The next gallery space was devoted to Seeking a State of Grace: The Art of Arnold Lobel. If the name doesn’t ring a bell perhaps The Adventures of Frog and Toad might. This series of books featuring a frog and toad that bake cookies, garden and swim all while wearing trousers and vests was my absolute favorite as a child. Forget the under 10 crowd, as soon as I saw the original drawings and paintings for these books, I’d fallen again for these slimy creatures. If I’d had any doubt about whether children’s books were indeed a medium for art, Lobel’s work dispelled them. It seems Lobels stories and illustrations also caught the eye of Broadway; I learned that A Year with Frog and Toad was adapted as a musical and went on to win three Tony Awards. I’m not sure I can see this transition going very smoothly as I’m so attached to Lobel’s particular two dimensional world, but I think it’s a testament to the stories’ success that they were adapted for the stage. It’s not fair to say that this portion of the museum would be everyone else’s favorite as well, since it’s clear Lobel’s stories of flying kites, cleaning house and having friends (apparently inspired by summers on Cape Cod) were a distinct part of my childhood but if you haven’t yet discovered Frog and Toad, it’s never too late. The galleries’ benches have baskets of Lobel’s book in case you missed out as a kid. I re-read these familiar stories and realized that if the purpose of art is to have an affect on someone, of any kind, then Lobel succeeded; memories of reading voraciously as a child came back vividly to me, the words and images had not lost their resonance.

After visiting the library of children’s books we went to the art room, where everyday a creative activity is planned for museum visitors. On the day I visited, my friends and I were able to paint with watercolors in a well lit room with low tables alongside kids and adults alike. I could see how the experience of practicing art acted as a foil to the hour or so spent looking at art; this seemed to me to be a highly effective aspect of the museum. So, if you’re looking for a place to take a date, eat lunch, or spend a few hours off the Amherst Campus, I’d recommend the Eric Carle Museum for anyone interested in art, comics, children’s books or just nice ambience. Though there was truly limited gallery space, the offerings were the best of their kind. Not to mention the gift shop alone is a great place to pick up knick knacks or to reminisce and buy books you once loved. Happy Museum Going!

For more information check out the museum’s website here:http://www.picturebookart.org/ 

The Museum’s Hours are:10 am – 4 pm Tuesday through Friday 10 am – 5 pm Saturday 12 – 5 pm Sunday  and admission is $5 with a student ID.   

     I suppose I should begin by introducing myself: I’m Colombina, a sophomore here at Amherst from Austin, TX. I’m an Art history major and for the sake of my well being and this blog itself, I try to inundate myself with as much art as possible. I’m interested especially in theories of art and architecture and the social history of art. My hope is that this blog works as means to let people on campus know about events related to art and performances, as well as what I think about the art world in the pioneer valley and beyond. Please feel free to respond, argue and questions my articles to your hearts content, I’ll be glad to get back to you. Welcome to the Visual and Performance Arts blog. 

       I’ve prolonged writing this entry so that I could first attend the Rappaport lecture in Contemporary Art by Eve Sussman. Eve Sussman is a well known video artist working today out of Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared in museums and theatres in Turkey, Greece, Spain, Croatia, the U.K. as well as in the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. Though she has completed projects in 8 mm film that explore the idea of surveillance, at the lecture in question she showed her work on what are called tableaux vivants. She described an interest in the quartered screen, closed circuit videos that show surveillance footage from grocery stores, gas stations and train and bus terminals. The idea is that when looking at these screens one can see many moments in real time all at once. Sussman installed 12 of  her own closed circuit surveillance cameras in a train station in Istanbul. The cameras were positioned in various locations within the station while the images were projected onto a space created within the station itself. The screens showing the footage from each of the cameras were set between screens onto which words of a story Sussman created were projected.  As the world outside of the cameras changed, different images aligned with the words at any given point in time. The images and narrative synthesized as a product of the viewer’s own imagining. The idea being that the main character as introduced by the text could be whoever happened to be in front of the camera at that time; the viewer is given text and an image and inevitably links the two together. This project also dealt with the fact that a person who witnesses the space onto which these images and words are projected was presumably outside of the station beforehand, thus their image could have been projected into the space moments before the arrived in front of it. This conflation of viewer and viewed seemed to me to be one of the most interesting aspects of Sussman’s work, not to mention she aptly incorporated the idea of a “surveillance gaze” in her later tableaux vivants.

Traditionally a tableau vivant is a precursor to performance art; the term describes a group of people in costumes, positions and settings similar or identical to a painting or imagined portrait. Typically, the performers do not move or speak and are meant to resemble a painting as much as possible. Sussman introduced her own interest in this form of performance in a short 8 mm film about a person trying to steal the well known Velaszquez painting, Las Meninas from the Prado in Madrid entitled 89 Seconds at Alcázar. Though we don’t actually see the person with the painting in hand, we know for sure that they remain captivated by it’s image, as we look from their perspective at the painting itself. The painting (below) depicts a self portrait of Velasquez on the left as he paints a portrait of the royal Spanish court.

The painting is perhaps most well known for it’s illusionistic portrayal of the king and queen in the back of the composition. They are rendered as a reflection which suggests that if the scene were real they would be positioned in the viewer’s space. Inspired by this illusionism, Sussman created a tableau of her own. She built an identical set, and hired actors dressed in identical costumes to act as the characters in the painting. She constructed a narrative around the painting itself and let the actors delve into the psychology of each historical figure. She then filmed the interactions between the characters as they moved about the set as well as photographed them  at the exact moment their positions matched those of their counterparts in the painting itself.

Sussman repeated this process with Jacques Louis David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women. The myth of the Sabine women essentially goes like this : Romulus founded Rome only to discover that the city itself was inhabited mostly by men. In order to populate the city the Roman army went to the neighboring town of Sabine and captured women that would become the wives and mothers of the future Roman empire. The men of the Sabine town attacked Rome in an attempt to reclaim their women, however these women adapted to their lives as Romans and formed bonds with the Roman people. They were in a sense no longer Sabine women and explained this to their former families. The story, however misogynistic, is essentially a redemptory tale of how these women as wives and mothers ended a conflict between the two cities. Sussman reinterpreted the story as a five act musical-video set in the 1960’s. The film has no dialogue but does employ an original score and chorus of 800 voices. After doing research on the fashion, politics and social and cultural undercurrents of the time she took as inspiration a Bobby Kennedy photograph in which he appears with about 15 other men in white shirts and ties, for the costume for the male characters in the film and looked at riot footage as inspiration for the choreography. Though I experienced less of this film than of 89 Seconds at Alcázar, I found this work to be less successful and less in keeping with the ideas of surveillance as explored in Sussman’s earlier work. No doubt, both projects were huge and costly endeavors and I applaud the artist’s effort to revive and recontextualize these works of art. It’s not often Amherst students are able to meet with an artists as successful and well known as Sussman; she has a lot of support and many resources in her arsenal and I look forward to seeing what she does next.

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