Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)

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Flinging the Museum Guide Far Outside the Doctrinal Window / Larry M. Taylor

Losing the Instructions at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska. September 06, 2003 -- December 19, 2003.

<1> It may very well be easier to learn rather than to unlearn. Modes of learning quickly become habit forming; habits tend to become deeply ingrained and die hard. In the visual art world the roles that curator and viewer play can become routine and effectively cloud one's aesthetic vision like so much residue on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Reorienting the viewer's visual experience and taming the curator's heavy hand are among the aims of Barbara Kendrick and Timothy van Laar in Losing the Instructions, a two person installation at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska. The problem that these artists address is that in the art world the adventure of looking has come under attack: various art historiographical "isms," "movements," and otherwise arbitrary designations and labelings have caused a rift between the museum-goer and the art. Both modernism and postmodernism have in many ways trumped art with an overly academic, preprogrammed script that condescendingly informs an assumingly incapable audience as to what is good, bad, important and, worst of all, just what the viewer should see and how they should see it. In Losing the Instructions, though, Kendrick and Van Laar have effectively hijacked the museum and taken the curator hostage: they each act autonomously as both artist and curator while utilizing their own art and the permanent collection of the Sheldon Art Gallery.

<2> Upon entering the gallery one finds a most peculiar situation, principally defined by what is lacking. There are no explanatory wall text panels, no descriptive data (merely titles) and even the name of the exhibition is relegated to the back wall -- whereas the artists' names appear more prominently on a central wall. It becomes apparent that the all-too-usual and authoritative voice of the curator is curiously Missing in Action. Instead the viewer finds himself initially somewhat disoriented: whose work is whose? How am I to proceed through the gallery? What am I "supposed" to think about the work given the absence of the standard textual information? These are all questions that remain initially unresolved, a fact that has the potential to be quite unsettling. This tension, however, instigates a heightened state of curiosity -- a prompting to ask questions rather than merely receive correct answers. And in place of quick resolution -- instead of accepting dogma from on high -- the viewer must circle the gallery at least a few times in order to get a handle on just how the work ought to be conceptualized. Instead of a passive receiver of information, the viewer is engaged as a highly activated questioner and discerner of aesthetic relationships.

<3> Among the most striking elements upon entering the gallery is a commanding wooden podium, isolated and centered in the room. Though not precisely an art object it distinctly heralds a visual message. It quietly yet convincingly implores that a new visual doctrine be heard. While for quite some time now the standard launching pad for art has (ironically) been textual -- explanatory wall panels, public lectures, magazine write ups and art history book justifications, to name a few -- here, in what must be a giant leap, word is dethroned by image: the podium holds a book opened to a page showing Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia I engraving (1514).

<4> Placed atop the opposite page is a sketch drawing by Van Laar based on Dürer's print. Given this sketched prototype the viewer then realizes the visual homily that results: three surrounding installations have been crafted as meditations upon Melencolia I; they are entitled Time, Direction and Measure. Of course it is fitting that Van Laar should compose in threes as Melencolia itself is commonly seen as forming a triune relationship with two other Dürer prints, Knight, Death and Devil (1513) and St. Jerome in His Study (1514). Van Laar, though, emphasizes repetition here in order to "break down any simple one-to-one correspondence of the print to the objects," to guard against "a simple re-inscribing or translating." This potential danger has clearly and creatively been averted. Interestingly, Melencolia I is a print that has haunted him for years, one which he recognizes as "a meditation on artistic creativity . . . a complex allegory concerning the work and temperament of artists." He cites Panofsky's interpretation of Melencolia as "the failed integration of theory and practice [which] results in gloom, impotence, and spiritual tragedy." Thus there are multiple levels to the notion of reorienting the gallery experience.

<5> In designing these installations Van Laar has relied solely upon the permanent collection of the Sheldon Art Gallery. In what makes for a rather striking presentation he literally recreates Melencolia utilizing other art objects. It is as though a ghost of the Renaissance has traversed the void and reincarnates here via modern and contemporary art objects. Van Laar's tripartite ensemble acts as one part creation and one part reverential simulacrum.

<6> The installation that holds the most direct Melencolia resemblance, Measure, features a Winslow Homer print, Eight Bells (c. 1887), which correlates to the bell at the top right of Dürer's print. It certainly doesn't hurt that both Dürer's central figure and one of Homer's men each hold dividers. John McCracken's Gray Plank (1973) acts as the ladder from the Melencolia background while William Wegman's Light/Dark (1993), serves to reconfigure the dog at the left of the original. Sylvia Mangold's Six Inches Four Ways (1976) finds itself recast as Dürer's "magic square" and Picasso's terra cotta Plate (n.d.) suddenly becomes a sphere. While his ceramic work may indeed be a dime a dozen, it still seems blasphemy to place a Modern Master so close to the gallery floor. Maurice Sterne's bronze Seated Figure (1932) completes the ensemble as the central, contemplative figure. It corresponds to the principle female in Dürer's engraving, which is commonly seen as the personification of melancholy. It is helpful to recall Panofsky's precise words here: "Melancholia. . . is what may be called super-awake; her fixed stare is one of intent though fruitless searching. She is inactive not because she is too lazy to work but because work has become meaningless to her; her energy is paralyzed not by sleep but by thought" [1].

<7> So, to what does this all add up? In the all-star ensemble of Measure, the viewer witnesses what an artist would see on the average journey to the art museum: artists, both Kendrick and Van Laar assert, do not view artwork in terms of arbitrary (read: "textual") groupings but rather in terms of an ongoing visual language -- one that is not so rigidly bound by temporal or stylistic designation. Art builds upon and reinvests itself, with ever more possibility and potential, unbound and unscathed by fanatical historicities and narrow idolizations.

<8> If any one of the three installations approximates a clear-cut message, though, it is Time. In this grouping the Sheldon's permanent collection is invoked not to show a grand scheme of evolutionary progress, but rather a somewhat sorry -- or even haunting -- devolution. Albert Blakelock's Moonlight (undated) ominously sets the tone for a downward visual spiral of artwork arranged, no less, in descending chronology. A Chris Burden lithograph forms part of the middle section and the grouping ends with a brightly colored Christo oil barrel and Eddie Dominguez's comparatively diminutive, oily-looking and fossil-like glazed ceramic head. Rather than the usual, triumphal banter typically associated with "the future," this aesthetic timeline ends in clearly stated, sad, if even insignificant entropy.

<9> The trio is completed by Direction, an interesting subject for meditation given the observer's initial need for it. Here again standard notions of artistic hierarchy are drastically undermined: a Jeff Koons toy dog and a Man Ray iron are installed at knee-level. Furthermore, as in the other installations, ordinary categories of artistic style are obliterated in order to formulate an entirely fresh ensemble of not-necessarily-congruent parts: this singular installation somehow manages to pull off the very close juxtaposition of pop artist and dada diva with minimalist patriarchs Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt, as well as and the photography of Harold Edgerton and Berenice Abbott.

<10> Just what kind of "direction" are we being asked to consider? It seems that the idea departs from the literal notion of locale -- evinced by Abbott's Henry Street, Looking West From Market Street, Manhattan (1935) -- only to contemplate a more metaphorical, artistic direction: here the rainbow in Dürer's Melencolia is reinstated in time as a minimalist light sculpture -- a florescent red and yellow Flavin (untitled, 1964). Direction is thus contemplated not merely for notions of proximity and illusionistic depth, but also in terms of untapped aesthetic possibility. So placed, the light sculpture's flickering luminosity seems to both recall an earlier contemplation and act as new illumination to a newer generation. The achievement of Direction, like its counterparts is thus highly fresh and yet still remarkably timeless.

<11> It is here, though, that one has to stop and wonder about the positive uses of more conventional modes of historiography: for example, Direction is given much more meaning when the viewer knows that Abbott sheared off her hair immediately after high school graduation in symbolic break from the stifling conventions of mid-America. (Later at the Midwestern university she attended she would be mistaken for a New York cosmopolite). Nevertheless, Van Laar's accomplishment should not rest on such technicality. In one fell swoop he has retranslated a Renaissance titan, breathed new life into tired modernisms, revived a hanging collection and offered thoughtful insight on his own time. And all of that without so much as creating one new art object. Furthermore, to encounter the ghost of Dürer in living color and in three real dimensions is rather beyond words.

<12> It can be difficult to discern just where Van Laar's work ends and Barbara Kendrick's begins. This is not unintentional. Just as two artists necessarily collaborate but do not entirely share one vision, so the artists' work is here kept separate-yet-proximate. Kendrick's work occupies two interior rooms, the first of which, I used to be Snow White, but I Drifted, takes inspiration from a Lee Friedlander silver print, Hotel Room, Portland, Maine (1962). Hung just outside the installation it shows Mae West before a mirror and television set in a rather seedy motel room; the image prepares one for what will be seen inside. Rather than the traditional pure and youthful Snow White, Kendrick's installation probes an aged and weathered version of the storybook character. Taking one of the most iconic images from the original tale, Kendrick drew each of the seven dwarfs' hats on her hand and then translated them to the walls (painted black) with white chalk. However, the chalkboard-like result should not be thought of as a final artistic product: problems of reproduction and process have been complicated by photos of the dwarf hand drawings mounted on an outside wall. The centerpiece of the room is a mirror encased in a bright white frame sculpted of foam wood. The comical effect is a border which simultaneously resembles flaky snow and sagging pale flesh -- it suggests a denatured and defrocked Snow White, no longer the fairest of all. The bottom of the frame forms a bureau-like shelf that holds a video monitor that replays the act of Kendrick's drawing the seven dwarves on her hands. This video only compounds the notions of process and duration. Meanwhile, the audio pipes out "Whistle While You Work" -- not sung, of course, but whistled. The viewer is entranced into the room by the video installation (if not by the incessant dwarf whistling). Thus one is not initially aware of the self-confrontation that can result from standing before a large and silly mirror while contemplating themes of age and beauty. While countless other gallery installations have been guilty of either ridiculous pedantry or gross stimulatory excess, Kendrick succeeds as one who entices and veils, masquerading truth behind aesthetic complexity and experiential humor.

<13> In the room just opposite of Snow White, Kendrick's Shoot, Wag, Wave, Drink takes its impetus from a number of images that call the relationship between animal and human into question. One of these is a disquieting Rosalind Solomon photograph of a young woman breastfeeding a lamb. Somehow the image simultaneously appears as both disturbingly disgusting and lovingly nurturing. It is opposite a Harold Edgerton silver gelatin print of a milk drop and Solomon Butcher's Shooting Ducks, which depicts a hunter in a boat shooting at ducks that were actually drawn onto the negative. While Snow White may have drifted, this grouping represents fairy tales gone entirely -- indeed, frighteningly -- awry. Here, too, Kendrick emphasizes the background; it is again a two-dimensional background. She designed the wallpaper pattern for the room which includes a reproduction of Shooting Ducks at center, off-set by an image of the Jeff Koons Balloon Dog. Above this is an image from a postcard showing Nancy Reagan waving to admirers from a balcony while sandwiched between two figures dressed in giant rabbit costumes who wave in sync along with her. Kendrick points out that the oversize bunnies would appear as just plain silly were she not a First Lady and they not potential Secret Servicemen. This wall pattern is then bordered with a lassoed Wild West lacing crafted out of human hair, an element common to her art. The design realizes the artist's conception of "subversive decoration" -- something that "seems benign, pretty, [or] cute, but carries seeds of the opposite."

<14> The centerpiece for this room is likewise sculptural -- a ceramic fountain composed in alternating rings of human and animal tongues. A substance not unlike milk pours out from the center dripping droplets from animal to human to animal tongue and back again. Kendrick would have us confront our often overlooked and strangely bizarre (if not, upon examination, uncomfortable) relationship with other species. More impressive, though, is her cool-yet-hysterical observation of the ability of popular and postmodern culture to quickly, frightfully and seamlessly degenerate. The amalgamation of postwar political figure, rugged American individualism, Wild West fantasy and cultural Disneyland acts as altogether too accurate a testimony -- one which is ultimately made grotesquely silly by a debased sculptural depiction of humanity's odd interdependence with animal.

<15> The work of the two artists converge in the far corner. Van Laar has a series of paintings that were initiated by an interest in postcards. You might say these are reproductions of postcards, which are themselves reproductions of signature Sheldon pieces -- works by Edward Hopper and Robert Henri, among others. Certainly Van Laar's paintings exacerbate the problematic ideas of copy and original. What is novel (or taboo) is how they do it: they occupy the sacred space potentially taken up by the original. In contrast, Kendrick's take on this corner space might be thought of as "transitional." One of her images depicts milk spurting out from a human mouth, the lips of which have been highly glossed with red lipstick. Nearby is a topographical map showing a strange desert landscape dotted with dwarf hoods. In such scenes connections between Snow White and Wild West, representation and adaptation amazingly begin to be forged. Furthermore, she skillfully attains her goal of using the fairy tale "in the way a jazz musician uses a 'standard' melody."

<16> Gallery reinstallations have certainly been done before, but never quite like this. Perhaps the most well-known instance was when Fred Wilson reinstalled the collection at the Maryland Historical Society (1992-93), juxtaposing items of high Southern gentility with the cold hard facts of slavery. The Sheldon exhibition differs from previous models in numerous and important ways. It does not undertake the kind of heavy-laden sociological message attempted by Wilson. While his point may have been powerful, it also went well beyond the realms of visual art. In contrast, Kendrick and Van Laar have managed to keenly focus on the art, the viewer and visual experience. They have resisted the temptation to use art as a pedagogical tool that merely illustrates. These artists have successfully created an environment where the viewer can freely contemplate and arrive at their own conclusions. Not only radically reinstalling the gallery they have also transformed the nature of the gallery experience -- creating a situation where the viewer sees art not from the exclusive lens of art history or any other discipline but through their own visual encounter. And Kendrick and Van Laar have done this while creatively and effectively incorporating their own art as well. Moreover, unlike prior museum rearrangements, for this show the artists were not hired as curators; rather they have acted as "hybrid artist-curators," as Sheldon curator Dan Siedell has referred to them. While the artists might modestly resist such acclamation, what has transpired here certainly displays a high degree of artistic experimentation and talent. It is a quite refreshing take on the exhibition-as-usual. The beneficiary, though, is really the viewer, who can here approach art more freely -- unhampered by the black and white of what the authorial voice insists upon. Quite possibly, in the absence of narration viewers can forge artistic pathways of their own.

Notes

[1] Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, 4th ed. (Princeton University Press, 1955), 160. [^]

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