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Realism, and a Local/Global Internationalism
by Ellen S. Wilson
The shock of the new has been part of
every Carnegie International. New technologies have always overwhelmed,
at first. Today, our increasingly digitized lives, the dichotomy of the
computer screen and the physical world, the ease of travel and worldwide
communication, all lead us to question such fundamentals as the conditions
in which we live, the relevance of where we live, even the importance of
physical presence. These were not issues one hundred years ago, or even
fifty. This generation of artists and museum visitors is the first to struggle
with the implications of the digital age. And so when Madeleine Grynsztejn
set out to assemble the 1999 Carnegie International, she found artists
who are questioning their, and our, relation to reality.
Madeleine Grynsztejn
Grynsztejn told Michael Brenson in Artforum magazine that, to
her, “the most significant and compelling work being made today centers
on a conceptually oriented realism, on the active engagement of the viewer,
and on a slippage between reality and fiction that is deliberately fostered
in artworks.” This latest installation of the International series
focuses on three different approaches to “the real” in art a sensual
or phenomenological approach that can depend on interaction with the viewer;
a labor-intensive approach that emphasizes craft and material; and work
that places itself at the intersection of reality and fiction. These categories
overlap, and few pieces fit completely and neatly into just one. Nor do
they connect the viewer to some absolute definition of what constitutes
reality. On the contrary, Grynsztejn explains in a discussion of the exhibitions
themes. “These works present reality in all its impurity, multiplicity,
and intense presentness.”
The Phenomenological Approach, or Dancing with Horses
Some art in the exhibition asks the viewer to do more than merely
see it. Such works can generate heat or cold, emit smells or sounds, or
invite the viewer to participate. Video artist Diana Thater, one of 41
artists featured in the exhibition, has created one such installation for
Botany Hall in Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and another work in
the Carnegie café. Thaters work often encourages the viewer to
move between physical and digital realms. “When you cross a video beam
and cast shadows, you affect the work and in effect become part of it.
Diana welcomes your participation,” Grynsztejn says. Thaters work was
featured in the museum last summer, when her video piece the best space
is the deep space was installed in the Forum Gallery. (My two small
children approached this work phenomenologically, making their own shadows
dance with the horse when it appeared on the various screens. “A wonderful
reaction,” Grynsztejn says.)
Alex Katz,
Woman in the Woods III, 1998
Another sense-involving approach to the real can be found in the work
of Brazilian sculptor Ernesto Neto. Netos structure of translucent stretchy
fabric is as much about what happens to the viewer who enters it as it
is about the piece in a traditional, static sense. When you walk into the
piece, the fabric gives under your feet. When you press against the walls
of it, it changes shape. Anyone watching this interaction from the outside
has a different experience of it than the person on the inside. And, like
Thaters work, you are welcomed in literally. This art does not keep
a visitor at arms length. Unlike Thaters work, however, there is nothing
digital here. Netos piece is so wholly physical as to be a possible reaction
against the “virtual” real.
A Painstaking, Slow-Motion Environment
The work of artists who invest enormous labor and intensity of focus in
creating installations and multi-media works constitute a second approach
to the real. Gregor Schneider has lived in the same house outside of Cologne,
Germany, since 1985, when he was 16. His home appears to be ordinary enough
on the outside, but once inside, you see that he has built layers of rooms
within the original rooms, creating a Russian doll of a house. Each time,
the interiors become smaller. “When he opens a door, you can see the elements
of construction, you become viscerally aware of how much effort has gone
into creating what looks like a normal environment,” Grynsztejn says.
Gregor Schneider, Haus ur, 1995
(detail)
“When you visit Gregor, he sits you down in his coffee room, and when
you get up about an hour later, you realize something is awry that the
door you entered by, which had been behind you, is now to your side. It
turns out he has put the floor on a slow turntable, so slow that you dont
notice it. You never would have known if the door had not “moved.”
“Gregor has dedicated himself to reconstructing his own environment
as a way to affirm its physical presence in the world,” Grynsztejn says,
and, like Neto, he is responding to an interrogation of reality. Schneider
is carving out and shipping five rooms of his home to Pittsburgh for the
International.
When you visit the museum, you will be visiting his living space.
The work of South African artist William Kentridge likewise exhibits
sheer effort and intensity of production that has the effect of slowing
you down, too. Kentridges animated films, seen in the Forum Gallery in
1998, are painstakingly made from charcoal drawings that he alters from
frame to frame. The additions and erasures between shots reveal the movements
of Kentridges hand. At the end of the process, the artist has created
a strip of film but, unlike typical animation, produced only a few drawings.
At the Crossroads of the Real and the Unreal
There is a slippage between the real and the fictive in the third
investigation of reality. Thomas Demand, whose work was shown in Forum
Gallery two years ago, culls photographs from the media and builds life-sized
models of the scene represented out of paper and cardboard. He then photographs
the model. While the original photograph was of a real location, the final
product Demands photograph is three times removed from reality. The
large photograph resembles, at first glance, an actual site, but closer
inspection reveals its own artifice.
“This area of examination,” Grynsztejn explains, “has an important recent
history, postmodernism, which began in the 1970s and was at its height
in the mid-1980s. Postmodernism made us very aware of the potential pitfalls
of being immersed in the media, and questioned the effect of mass culture
on our perception of reality.”
Janet Cardiffs soundscapes are experienced by putting on a Walkman
and taking an “audio walk” through the main branch of the Carnegie Library.
Cardiff directs the itinerary, but of course each specific walk is influenced
by the real time and space that you inhabit. You may be alone in the stacks,
for example, where Cardiff has sent you, but on the tape you may hear someone
breathing just behind your left shoulder. Actual incidents, the real visitors
who may bump into you as you walk, become as much a part of your experience
of the artwork as the “tour” Cardiff is directing you through.
Gabriel Orozcos Ping Pond Table (1998) similarly shifts reality.
Orozco has doubled the traditional ping-pong table and installed a lily
pond in the middle, “like a small Monet water garden,” Grynsztejn says.
Paddles and balls are available, and you are welcome to play. “This stays
close to our perception of the world,” Grynsztejn says, “but it is something
weve never seen before. It changes the world for us.”
Multinationalism and the Influence of Home
There is more to understand at the Carnegie International besides
these approaches to reality. “All the works in the show reflect a multinationalism,”
Grynsztejn says, “which used to connote a crossing of boundaries with no
local references. Artwork today acknowledges the presence of the local
in the global, as many artists locate themselves at the intersection of
those two influences.” William Kentridges films cannot be divorced from
the racial oppression that dominates South Africas history. Grynsztejn
also cites the work of video artist Shirin Neshat, an Iranian-born artist
now living in New York whose work meditates on what it means to move between
East and West. Her video installations to date place the viewer in a physical
and conceptual interspace between two images that stand for the past and
the present, original and adopted home.
Paintings by British artist Chris Ofili incorporate elephant dung, which
is used ceremonially in his parents homeland of Nigeria. Ofili, however,
draws more on Londons urban hip-hop culture for inspiration, and gets
his elephant dung from the London zoo, toying with viewers assumptions
about his cultural background and directing attention both toward and away
from his origins.
The 53rd Carnegie International, like those before
it, reflects on our culture at this moment. It acts like a mirror, and
like any in-depth examination of ones own reflection, will probably feel
both shocking and familiar. What is important is that we as viewers are
welcome, into Schneiders house, into Netos stretchy fabric structure,
into the disquieting spaces created by video projections.
And will it all be terribly cerebral?
“Oh, I hope not,” says Grynsztejn. “I hope all these works, at an emotional,
intellectual, if not physical, level, open in the viewer a moment of play.”
Open, however, is the key word. Openness, and a pair of comfortable
shoes, will not only help you enjoy this Carnegie International,
but will doubtless be essential in the century that lies ahead.
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