Monthly Archives: June 2010

Guillermo Kuitca at Walker Art Center

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A new exhibition of paintings and drawings by Guillermo Kuitca, the Argentinian artist, just opened at the Walker Art Center this weekend. I went in to view the exhibition and see the artist interviewed by Olga Viso and Douglas Dreishpoon, two of the curators for the show.

There were a couple of works that caught my attention as I wandered through the gallery before the discussion. In the first gallery there is a smaller canvas that has a large black polyhedra with lighter round ink impressions surrounding. The contrast between the ink impressions and the solid black creates a vivid sense of depth to the solid outline, almost as though the black outline suggests something beyond the canvas, a sense of depth. Upon reading the plaque I discovered that the solid black outline was inspired by a building plan and the round ink impressions come from a ball being bounced upon the canvas.

Planta con juego de pelotas

In the second gallery there is another ghostly piece, this time of a bed painted upon a dark black/blue background. Beds were a common leitmotif in many of Kuitca’s works but this one had the most immediate aesthetic reaction for me. It’s a similar visual effect to the first plan and ball painting; there is a sense of the background receding beyond the surface and the lighter colored bed floating above the canvas.

In the final gallery I was most impressed by the capstone piece, Everything, one of a series of paintings of maps made on mattresses. From afar the picture is an abstract collection of lines; when near the labels of the map appear and the viewer feels a connection to an actual place. In conversation Kuitca said that he often chose for his source material maps that he had no personal connection, with the consciousness in the back of his mind that these maps had a significance for someone that he might never meet but still existed elsewhere in the world.

Kuitca is an unimposing presence in person. He is middle aged with thinning hair that was shaved down almost to his skull, dressed in the de riguer style of the academic/artist of a suitcoat over a button down shirt. There were a couple of interesting themes that came up during the conversation: memory and forgetting, drawing processes, the corrosive power of water, and the canvas as a stage.

Dreishpoon opened by talking about a trove of 3000 drawings that Kuitca rediscovered during the process of creating the exhibition. Most of the drawings were made during 1978-79 before Kuitca moved to his first independent studio. He stored most of the drawings and forgot about them, to the point where he said, in later interviews, that he wasn’t a drawer. Even artists forget about the previous activity or compartmentalize aspects of previous work. At least Kuitca didn’t go so far as Barnett Newman and destroy his early work.

32 Seating Plans is a series work from the exhibition that is more interesting after hearing the method of production. Kuitca downloads the seating plans from opera theaters around the world, alters them in Photoshop, prints them on photo paper, and then puts the prints into shallow pans of water. In the water the inks release from the paper and float free, creating abstract patterns that still retain an indication of their source. The water has a corrosive effect upon the printing.

When discussing one of his early paintings, El Mar Dulce (1986), Kuitca talked about his internal efforts to escape the idea of painting. He didn’t believe that painting had much to say, but he was still a painter, so he had to reinterpret his own canvas as a stage, imagining a bed at the foot of the stage and the actions that preceded the picture, creating a sense of drama where none appeared visually.

It is always a pleasure to listen to artists or authors, creators of any kind, speak or talk about their own work. Beforehand the work is just another object, afterwards the passion and effort that goes into creating is revealed. I’m reminded of how I felt when I first saw Samuel Delany and Giyatri Spivak speaking at an academic conference. I was abashed to see the raw emotion and passion behind literary criticism, and from there any intellectual endeavor. Perhaps this is one reason why the academic conference or the special exhibition will not disappear.

Art, Despair, and Virginia Woolf

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I’ve been reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf this summer. It is a wonderful and brilliant piece of art, part of the high modernist literary flowering from the first half of the twentieth century. The style reminds me of Henry James in many places, but with a smoother syntax. The link to James is the focus on internal dialogue, the thoughts that go on inside each of us when we think about our family; Woolf takes that idea and develops it to a fever pitch. Parts of the book are so good it is almost painful to read.

Which brings me to the emotional reaction to a work of art that I want to write about. It is not a pure reaction to the emotion conveyed by the work, instead it is a meta-reaction to the craft and form of the work that makes me feel as though nothing could ever be written to improve upon this masterpiece. I think of it as a form of despair or depression mostly because I’m comparing my own paltry artistic efforts to this greatness that is standing right in front of me. Even if the passage of writing I’m reading is meant to convey a happy emotion I’m still thinking about the style and the pinnacle of achievement that has been reached by Ms. Woolf or any other artist.

I talked about this a bit with my friend Chris on Wednesday and he described a similar experience reading If On a Winter’s Night by Italo Calvino. I’ve never finished that Calvino book but I’m not surprised at the reaction to his work as well as Woolf’s. The two of them are some of the best writers of the past 100 years.

There are times when I’ve felt a similar emotion with other, non-literary works of art. Some of the paintings by Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack, or Claude Monet have had a similar effect upon me. It seems to happen less often with music, perhaps because I don’t play music as much as I write or paint. Part of this despair depends on my knowing just enough about how difficult it is to achieve such a successful work of art. If I don’t know much about making music then it’s harder for me to judge when someone is truly performing or working at the epitome of their field.

Mention of the word field makes me think that this despairing feeling could be applied beyond art to other endeavors where one meets or encounters people working at the very edges of the accomplishable. But one still has to have enough experience and background to be able to recognize success.

Nina Simon on the Participatory Museum at Walker Art Center

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Nina Simon the author of The Participatory Museum and the Museum 2.0 weblog was in the Twin Cities this week to promote her book at an event hosted by the Walker Art Center. I was already at the Walker to give a public tour and decided to stick around and listen to what Nina had to say which was a good decision.

Simon spoke for half an hour about her work on encouraging participation by museum goers. I enjoyed her pragmatic, design-centric approach to the problems of encouraging participation and collaboration which showed off her engineering background.

She said that the typical museum is visitor agnostic. It is designed to give the same information to a 10-year old and someone with a Ph.D. The labels on the exhibits are the same for both visitors. But does this really make sense, especially in a world where technology and design are capable of so much more?

Simon advocates for three transformations of the museum:

  1. From destinations into places for everyday use.
  2. From trusted sources of information into trusted hosts for social experiences.
  3. From places for seeing and exploring into places for making and doing.

Why don’t maker workshops and hackerspaces take place at science museums? Do the directors of the museums realize that these groups exist? Do the hackers bother to ask the museums for space or support? What about stitch and bitch groups who meet in coffee houses? Why shouldn’t they meet in a museum (or a library)?

I think the most important thing that Simon talked about was the reminder that “to participate socially you have to invite individually.” I can see this having significant repercussions for computer supported collaborative work, open science, and almost any commons based project that is taken up. My own experience from running book clubs, experimental courses, attending conferences, and more verifies her admonition.

She elaborated on all three of her transformations with examples drawn from various museums and libraries across the nation. Simon emphasized the need for design to interact with and respond to the community. An idea that works at one museum may not work at another if the infrastructure and the maintenance costs are not taken into account. If the Worcester City Gallery gets visitors to vote on their favorite paintings the success may be due to the ongoing responsiveness of the museum staff as much as the novelty of using voting to get visitor feedback.

I also liked her overall point that design constraints are sometimes useful. If you give the audience a completely blank page you may be disappointed by the lack of response. But if you constrain their activity in a useful manner you may be surprised by how much feedback you receive. Sometimes people need a seed from which to grow their participation.