Kunsthaus Graz: A Meditation on Wall Labels

The gallery space of Kunsthaus Graz is infamous for a variety of reasons–its color, its unusual architecture, its capacity to accommodate contemporary art in its versatile spaces. What struck me was a small choice in presentation which ended up making the world of a difference in viewing the art. The information typically found on the wall-label is enlarged and applied directly to the floor a few meters away from the work.

While this seems insubstantial, there is actually something very thoughtful in this. It begins with the question of what a wall label does and is supposed to do in a museum space. Simply put, it identifies the work so that the viewer knows what he is looking at. Said in a slightly more complicated way, it locates work within its historical and autobiographical (relative to the artist) moment. It gives the viewer the vocabulary to refer to the work in a succinct way, rather than through description (for example, “The Sunflowers by Van Gogh” as opposed to “the yellowish painting with sunflowers and the really big vase in the center”). In fact, the label and the work become equal presentations of the same thing, which Joseph Kosuth observed as early as 1965 in the famous piece, “One and Three Chairs.” William Anastasi thematized in a series of works, like “Label” below.

In the Kunsthaus, the label retains its informative authority, but designates itself to a separate plane than that of the work on the wall–a separation of that which places the object, from the space of the object. This permits the viewer to distinguish the experience of observing the work from that of obtaining its factual context, which become inextricable when the label and work are seen together. It also allows a viewer to crop the insitutionality out of his own line of vision of he so chooses. After all, the significance of the label was born with art history, not in the artist’s studio.

Finally, I found myself more aware of an object’s space because of the floor labels. It reminds us that paintings occupy space in the third dimension. I also find it nice to be able to look down and see my own body extend towards the art’s text on the floor. It makes me think of the act of looking as a physical activity, and more aware of a work’s physical threshold.

Kunsthaus Graz
Lendkai 1
8020 Graz, Austria

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Utopia at the Peggy Guggenheim, Venice

I recently visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection‘s temporary exhibition called “Utopia Matters,” an exploration of the search for an ideal life through objects. The succession of intimate rooms featured everything from Neo-Raphaelite painting, to Tiffany glass windows, to Bauhaus tapestries. I not only agree with the idea of the show, I feel that its premise needs to be more commonplace. The study of art history is the study of articulating abstraction through material. We live with the legacy of inscribing significance in the objects we interact with.

The show’s specific relevance, and its ability to resonate and impress, comes from the fact that it is a show of example. It is not nostalgic of the movements and their individual success or failure to realize their utopias. Rather, it suggests that a chair has the ability to embody an idealized life, that we can brush against utopia through objects and earthliness. It suggests that no object is too lowly to carry the weight of an idea. The pursuit of an ideal is the pursuit of material creation. The catalogue suggested that the show was meant to give hope in these grey times, and I feel it has done just that.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Dorsoduro 701
I-30123 Venezia

Through July 25, 2010

See a virtual tour.

A (belated re-)Visit to Art Basel

In the week that has passed since I’ve visited Basel, I’ve mulled over the question of what would make this fair the opposite of what Thornton would call a “well-thought-out museum show.” After all this time, I can think of distinctions, though nothing to warrant the need to seek the refuge of a museum. It is easy to point out that at Art Basel each room represents a different institution and thus has an overall incoherence, unlike the museum. I could also say that the atmosphere is charged with commercialism, unlike the museum. One look inside would also note the substantial lack of explanation in the form of labels or educational tools (like books, audioguides, public tours), unlike the museum. Yet each of these surface differences obscures a deeper similarity between the two forms of display.

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Sarah Thornton’s Art Basel

In preparation for my visit to Art Basel, I want to look at Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World, and its mention. Her treatment of Art Basel is consistent with her treatment of all of her subjects, emphasizing the singularity and totality of each component in the art world. There is a neat and self-assuming wholeness to her exploration, beginning at the title (she makes her art world in seven days, God makes his world in seven days), down to the chapters (THE Auction, THE Magazine, THE Biennale). Someone else (I think Paddy Johnson) has said this already—what she describes is not THE art world, but AN art world. The book is an attempt to itemize and make routine these days, suggesting that they stand in for each of many, and necessarily leaves out other (harder to define) nooks in the art world. What, for example, about a gallerist’s day in the gallery? An art historian’s day? Or (equally relevant at this point) an art blogger’s day? Her focus also over-emphasizes the art market and the well-established, which then become analogous to the art world. (Takashi Murakami’s studio operations cannot stand for the experiences of an artist living in a collective, sharing a 20 square-foot room with three others.)

She devotes one of her seven day-long explorations to Art Basel, which she calls “The Fair,” connoting simultaneously the uniqueness and quintessentiality that its reputation carries. The word “fair” conjures two meanings: of display, and of sale. The second disproportionately obscures the first in Thorton’s chapter—most of the buying happens on the single day before the fair opens to the public for the week. Art Basel is described, in fact, as almost everything but a display of art. Its focus is on the politics, the commercial consequences, the competition, the etiquette, and the central players.

Knowing that most of this will be inaccessible to my visit, I found her reaction to the fair something I could see for myself. What interested me the most was her closing statement, that afterwards one “crave[s] nothing more than a well-thought-out museum show.” I am surprised she ended on a controversial and loaded statement. What does it mean to identify a well-thought-out museum show as its opposite? My goal tomorrow is to find an answer to that question.

Art Basel from a previous year

The Life Cycle of Street Art and Graffiti

I just an article titled “Banksy Mural Threatened With Destruction Moved”
off of Clancco, an art law and news blog. Though the article was short, the title conveys the sentiment behind the municipal duty to preserve art, contributed to in no small part by museums and historic institutions. With cultural artifacts and historical objects, the moral certitude of preservation becomes hazy and debatable, but in the case of street art and graffiti, the preservation works against the ephemerality at the basis of the art.

In street art and graffiti, the conditions of its creation define its content, much like performance and installation art. It is necessarily site specific and has a life span. Unlike more traditionally studio-created work, street art and graffiti are impermanent and their contexts cannot be managed. This art is an homage to the process of creation in opposition to rampaging object fetish, and to the individual life of the art after its creation and beyond the control of the creator. When I worked with Gawker Artists last summer, I had the chance to meet the street artist Billi Kid, who put this in perspective for me. Regarding his work, he says to “Take a close look at it, smile at it, tear it or cover it with something new.” That is the rhythm of art in the street–perpetual fleeting motion.

The want to preserve Banksy’s mural above defy the nature of and remove the power of the work. The particular piece in question, ironically, is about impermanence, and retains its magnitude from also having a limited lifespan, if not from destruction then from natural forces of weathering. The threats made against the work of being defaced that prompted the gallery to remove the work from view do not destabilize the work so much as reveal the skewed objectives of an institutional setting.

This Banksy piece gives me an excuse to say what I feel is true of many street, performance, installation, conceptual art forms sheltered and protected by museums and viewing spaces. The work is meant to be transient and subject to the forces and itsaudience without mediation from a third party.

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Abramovic at MoMA: Museum Mediation

I didn’t get a chance to see The Artist is Present before this past week, the week before it closes. Fortunately enough, my visit towards the end of the show was a way for the visit to point out to me the brevity of presence, and what presence means in a museum context.

The title work of the show is the one in which Marina Abramovic sits in a large square and receives visitors who can sit facing her for as long as they want. Abramovic doesn’t speak, reciprocate movements, or move much at all, and the viewer is limited to a set of actions as well (not to touch, place anything in front of, etc., the artist).

While this work can be read on many levels, especially in light of her retrospective on display four flights up, I found it a perfect example of the museum altering behavior and perception, both implicitly and explicitly. Something as simple as a non-verbal human interaction when transplanted into the museum becomes infinitely more complex and regulated. For me, the show revealed more what a museum needed and imposed onto people, than what people did onto themselves.

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