February 15, 2001
Issue No.14
archive

Table of Contents
Inside Space: Experiments in Redefining Rooms
MIT List Visual Arts Center
January 27 to April 8

Inside Space: Experiments in Redefining Rooms
MIT List Visual Arts Center
January 27 to April 8

It is a policy of the Boston based Arts Media magazine that reviewers preview exhibitions in the artist’s studio or from some examples in the back room of the gallery. The purpose is to have the review coincide with the exhibition. This surely makes sense as a timely and concurrent review will serve the artist and gallery better than the "archival" review that may appear in most art magazines as much as several months after the close of the exhibition. By then the review is just history.

There was a lively discussion of the pros and cons of this preview policy during a recent panel discussion that I hosted, "Critical Condition." One argument against this policy is that the critic is not seeing the work in the context of the exhibition, and hence, at its full advantage. Further debate raised the issue of the significance of the museum or gallery installation, taking on a significance equal to the actual work on view. For many curators and gallerists, the exhibition itself is their creation. One artist argued, during the panel discussion, that the work always looks best in the studio and that after the exhibition is never again seen in that context.

These issues so thoroughly permeate the thinking process of contemporary art that it has spawned the entire genre of installation and site specific art: Works that are created on a temporary basis for a particular space or location.

One key example of this debate involved the proposal during a widely reported court case, several years ago, to relocate the large outdoor sculpture, Tilted Arc, by Richard Serra. The artist rejected such a solution. He argued that Tilted Arc in a corn field or a bucolic sculpture park, would not have the same edgy context as in its urban location that provoked the daily annoyance of having to navigate around it.

Artists of the Post-modern era have given a lot of creative time and energy to deriving ways to reconfigure the ubiquitous white cube gallery with its clean, often modular walls and tungsten track light. The white cube is the art world equivalent of the black box of theater. Try to imagine working in some other space. For example, the tyrannical spiral of the Frank Lloyd Wright designed, Guggenheim Museum, the peculiar spaces of Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim, or the dreadful, Graham Gund designed interior of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art.

These spaces can be the killing fields for artists and curators. Or, they may courageously triumph against such formidable odds. It was positively brilliant how Robert Wilson used a long spiral scrim to create a closure of the Guggenheim for his Armani installation. His creation transformed the didactic Wright designed space into a chic catwalk and intimate spiral salon. Similarly, Olafur Elliason cleverly melded Gund’s silly nooks and crannies into a seamless whole with a enormous platform pond fit precisely into a demonically designed floor plan. That ICA space has never looked better.

This new exhibition, Inside Space: Experiments in Redefining Rooms, curated by Bill Arning for the MIT List Visual Arts Center, assembles several individual artists and partners who represent a confluence between the concepts of contemporary art and architecture. It is the first MIT exhibition for Arning, the former director of New York’s White Columns, and an independent curator, critic and essayist. He has justly earned a reputation for having made more studio visits than any other living curator. Also, he has traveled widely so it is not surprising that several of the artists in this exhibition have been shown internationally but have never been seen in Boston.

For this first MIT show he was encouraged to, "Think Big." In his catalogue introduction, Arning states that, "It is by far the most ambitious curatorial project I have attempted." Indeed, he worked with the artists flat out, round the clock, for several weeks to literally build the pieces. Also, actual installation shots were used in the catalogue which was rushed into production in time to meet an opening night delivery. Pulling this off with limited staff and budget was simply miraculous. Surely nobody matches Arning on the level of commitment and energy.

The results of this project, however, proved to be somewhat daunting. While the catalogue essays by Arning and Joel Sanders were perfectly clear and erudite, and there was a real continuity in the works on view, the purely visual aspects of the exhibition were not richly satisfying. The works, and the exhibition, overall, were more thought provoking than engaging to look at. On the other hand, minimalism and conceptual art have long established the primacy of the mind over the eye. For me, however, being more Dionysian than Apollonian, this paradox and irony has represented an ongoing epic struggle.

Then there are unsettling grapplings with just what one is looking at. Is this art or architecture? Arning addresses this by stating, "When artists play with architecture, they do so as amateurs- an already compromised position, and a wonderfully promising and fecund one- as amateurs always have less to lose. True practitioners and theoreticians may complain that those who merely dabble without the requirement of functionality and needing to please clients cannot make real architecture, as the glories of that art are based on making something profound within those constrictions."

Thanks Bill, I’m glad you said that. It seems to take some of the pressure off the viewer and reviewer. This is, after all, just art, not architecture, which is like serious and stuff and has to stand up and not fall down, and be functional, and all grown up and stuff, where people like live and work and play and do things. So this is about that but not quite that. Kindah like it but not actually it and stuff. Whew. Glad I got that off my chest. So, now we can just relax and take a tour of the show itself and just like talk and stuff.

Actually, we are in the show even before we are in the show. Starting in the lobby, with an Oona Stern piece, Welcome (MIT). You may actually miss it. Or just walk over it and never notice. Her piece is an area of shaved carpet that extends from the reception desk, through the glass doors, out into the lobby space. It is a mirror image of the foyer space, with even a cut out indicating (after you read the catalogue) the floor plan of the reception desk. The beige rug has been shaved and grooved to simulate wooden flooring.

Once inside a hard left takes us into the first gallery and a chest high, oddly configured, construction by Monica Bonvicini, Turning Walls, comprised of a range of different possible materials. It’s the kind of display one would expect at Home Depot for the benefit of the home builder intent on enclosing an outdoor space. This proved to be a rather whimsical variation of the theme of closure and it was rather delightful to discover its disparate elements.

Moving along to, Descending Gallery/Powerless Structures, by the Danish and Norwegian partners now living in Berlin, Elmgreen & Dragset, there was the sudden impact of an absolutely deranged and disoriented room with oddly angled walls and a rakishly sloping floor at the end of which were a toppled over desk and chair. Perhaps this is the aftermath of an earthquake or just the product of a heat oppressed brain shaken and rattled by the strum and drang of modern life. All donner und blitzen, the pyschedelic art of the Far North. Strobe light dancing for now people.

With a few twists and turns one arrived at a series of rooms comprising, Untitled (After Kenneth Noland) by Henrick Olesen. The first room contained a black and white photo mural based on the Noland designs for the List atrium. This theme continued in the next gallery with a series of smaller photos taken during the time when Noland worked on the project. On the opposite wall was a door. Blocked. Frankly, I am clueless about this work. Turning to the catalogue, Arning isn't’t much help, "Olesen’s ongoing project looks at the disenfranchised, the poor, the queer and their relationship to built world." Huh.

The room by Teresita Fernandez, Supernovas, consisted of several wide rimmed, raised cylinders encircling stacked layers of moiré circles. These were displayed under a white scrim ceiling that blocked the track light and created a sense of an abstract sky above. Perhaps this was all meant to put us into some kind of Milky Way. Spacey.

The final room, Opened Up Surfaces (Variation of Movement in Art), by Juan Maidigan and Dolores Zinny, involved turning the corners of the space into curved closets. Viewers were seen poking their heads into these dark closets finding absolutely nothing inside. Of course the closet has become a potent metaphor and signifier in contemporary discourse about what is concealed and not discussed. And we talk about outing. Again with a grounding in ideas of what should or should not remain closeted. I just liked the subtle manner in which is softened or rounded the hard edges of the room. We live and die in 90 degree angles. Our lives are ruled by corners.

Of course the Spanish architect Gaudi thought differently. But that’s another essay. Or, perhaps just a prequel to this one.

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