Entry #4: Museum of Contemporary Art, Visited on 4/5/2011

Today I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art, where I saw an exhibition called "I'm Nothing Without You: Art and Its Audience." As the hallway wall explains, the show "explores the continually evolving relationship between artwork and audience," with art from "artists who have increasingly sought new ways to engage with the viewer." The art was divided into two rooms: touchable and untouchable. Together, the "works reflect--and in many cases, anticipated--a more widespread cultural shift toward an increasingly participatory social sphere." Museum visitors could touch, crawl, or walk on the art--or did it only become art when they acted upon it in some way? These were the questions the exhibit raised.

Here I will describe one room, the touchable work. 

The art in this room of the gallery could be touched and acted upon (for the most part), and this touchability helped in "creating opportunities for--or suggesting the possibility of--undefined social interactions, conversations, or collective experiences." Being able to touch and listen to and sit on artwork made me feel a little bit like a kid on a field trip. This was a good feeling, yes, but sometimes I felt a bit embarrassed to crawl into a giant clam shell and listen to ocean sounds with other people around. I think it was partly because I've been so conditioned to think museum=no touching, but partly because I can't experience a piece of art uninhibited when there are guards and families and couples all watching. Having this slight discomfort coupled with a childlike enthusiasm and curiosity for the objects around made the work in the exhibit all the more poignant. For example, the piece called Cornered at the room's entrance reiterated my inability to escape surveillance, even if that surveillance is non-judgmental and protective (in the case of a guard). Good Separation in Soft Blue, on the other hand, fed my desire to escape from the pressures of trying to see everything and understand it, appreciate it, and admire its concept between the shoulders of art-appreciating strangers. I could plop myself down on a mat and escape to sounds, if only for a moment before I realized I was still a participator. The exhibit was all about evoking these dark and light feelings of freedom and imprisonment, nonconformity and conformity, separation/isolation and togetherness. Some of my favorite works:

Good Separation in Soft Blue by
Charles Long, 1995

Cell phones, iPods, and I pads allow us to be near to other people without being near to them, and to be far from other people without being far from them. We can forgo interaction with our immediate surroundings. Just last night in God of Carnage, a wife yelled at her husband for his constant cell phone use--for his apparent belief that "anywhere else is more important than here." We hear this message again and again; we are scolded and made to feel guilty.

Long's Good Separation in Soft Blue manages to point out the tension between our proximity and isolation without putting a  value judgment on it. The piece encourages viewers to sit down on a mat and listen to the music, interacting only with the biomorphic blue headphone holder. But sitting down on the mat and touching that blue figure felt very personal and intimate. The fact that I wasn't speaking to the other people on the mat didn't seem to really matter, because we were all sharing the same experience of listening to the same music and reflecting in the same small square of space. I felt like I was with them in some way. And that blue Dr. Seussian figure made me feel like some small creature, or some small part of ourselves, had also chosen to lie down on that mat and curl up with music and psuedo-solitude. The little blue thing managed to be simultaneously robust and delicate. The larger sphere ended in a thin blue vein connected to the smaller sphere, making that smaller sphere appear like a tiny head, or a piece of fruit about to fall from its vine. It felt alive and vulnerable--any hands could move it, twist it, pull it--and handling made me more aware of all the essential humanity that is still present even when we are using nonhuman technological objects. Long, then, achieves his objective in a very effective and affective piece.

Some visitors started talking to each other, ignoring the art objects. I wonder how often this happens, whether the artist would like it, and whether it just takes a certain level of proximity to make actually talking less awkward than casually ignoring. (I felt weird about not talking to people while were so close to them, but then, I'm this close to strangers all the time without talking. And I did like the music that we were presumably sharing.)

Man Dealing the Four Elements
by Robert Heinecken, 1998

This cutout by Robert Heinecken aims to make us more aware of our position as consumers. Heinecken was "fascinated by the photograph as a cultural object," and in his life-size cutouts of celebrity figures, he satirizes lowbrow culture. In this cutout of Kramer from Seinfeld, Kramer "[flashes] images of the four elements ... as if he is selling stolen watches, implying that virtually anything is up for sale in our consumerist culture." He drives home the point that we are constantly, inescapably bombarded with material things. It still seems, though, like there are certain things that should remain quietly revered and untouched by capitalism--things like nature or the elements--so the fact that Kramer is literally selling me the sky makes me feel at once humored by the ridiculousness of the sculpture but also made uneasy by the ridiculousness of the power of advertising and consumer culture to take over our lives.

The cutout also brought to mind the naivete of the typical American consumer. We see a celebrity holding a product and we immediately choose to believe that, yes, Justin Bieber actually uses Proactiv Acne Solutions! Apparently, fame really can sell us anything.

Villa Deponie by Dan Peterman, 2002

Villa Deponie also aims to make consumers aware of their consumption. It is a house made of lightweight garbage scraps. It was made for an outdoor festival in an Italian town "where a major landfill has been built into a nearby mountain ... lined with the same carpet-like material used in this work." The choice of material really makes this work. It "reverses the usual flow of waste material from home to landfill," suggesting that if the huge amounts of waste we create were more immediately visible to us--not shoved into a landfill we could simply forget or ignore--we might be more responsible for our consumption. We might try to break the cycle of buying and discarding and buying again, try to become better stewards of the earth. Maybe.

Adrian Piper's Cornered (1988) features the artist in a video aimed at the viewer where she self-identifies as black but then questions whether she could "pass" as white. On the wall on either side of the television are birth certificates, one identifying the artist's father as white and the other identifying him as black. Chairs are lined up in a triangle leading very aggressively up to the screen. The table is described as "barricade-like ... suggest[ing] a gesture of defense," but in my mind it seemed less like something the artist might have put up and more like something the viewer might have knocked down while "cornering" the artist. Piper explained that "at some psychological level everything we experience gets stored and affects the way we experience the world in the future," and I think that revelation is one that can be both frightening and irritating. No one likes to think of herself as a number, another drone that has been checked off as black or white, identified only as belonging to a certain number of finite, pre-made categories. But we are all cornered in that way, no matter how special we think we are; we are all recorded and accounted for and it is nearly impossible to rebel from that.