Dimensions Art Journal Volume IV Issue 1 by Dimensions Art Journal

DIMENSIONS

art journal

fall/winter 2009

DIMENSIONS ART JOURNAL VOLUME IV, ISSUE 1 EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Ying Sze Pek Maggie Tsang MANAGING EDITOR Naina Saligram ART EDITOR Grace Needlman GRAPHIC DESIGN Maggie Tsang SENIOR EDITORS Jarrett Moran Emily Rabiner Nick Robbins

/LETTER FROM THE EDITORS This summer, Jock Reynolds, Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, raised $76 million to complete the renovation of Egerton Swartwout’s Old Art Gallery, even as construction projects around campus remain on hold due to University-wide budget cuts. With this donation, the Swartwout Building and Street Hall will be linked by the bridge on High Street, creating more exhibition space for existing collections, as well as a new department of Indo-Pacific Art. Museums within and outside the university context remain the primary site of contact for viewers and art, though controversies surrounding the museum as institution and issues of exhibition display inadvertently surface. In this issue, Nick Robbins takes a critical look at a new category of public exhibition with the MoMA’s Atlantic/Pacific installation, while Kelly Cannon reevaluates the role of the college art museum through the perspectives of museum staff and faculty. Dana Wu and Chris Labosky visit newly-opened museums in Sichuan and Athens, respectively, and explore those institutions’ intentions by surveying their displays and architecture. Our features editor, Naina Saligram, makes an argument against the death of the museum and proposes an alternative. And finally, Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale School of Art, shares his views on the role of the museum today, in the face of an internationalizing art world. Our staff has also put together a Public Museum Project, a little gesture on our part that affirms and extends the institution beyond the two museums on Chapel Street. We hope this issue will create a discourse, amid the global economic recovery, for the considered but necessary support of art institutions today. We would like to thank the History of Art Department for its generous support of the magazine.

CONTENTS/ Letter from the Editors 02 / From Subculture to Subway 01/ Escaping the Mausoleum 05 / Views on the University Art Museum 07 / THE DIMENSIONS CATALOG 10 / Reading Greekness from the Acropolis Museum 19 / Interview with Robert Storr 22 / In House: Public Museum Project 25 / Constructed Ruins: Remembering 5.12 NICK ROBBINS

NAINA SALIGRAM

KELLY CANNON

SELECTED WORKS FROM

UNDERGRADUATE ARTISTS

CHRIS LABOSKY

YING SZE PEK

DIMENSIONS STAFF

DANA WU

Back Cover: Mindy Lu, Untitled (Painting for Hannah); chipboard, pantyhose, hot glue, oil

Dimensions Art Journal is published by students ofYale College;Yale University and other institutions are not responsible for its contents.

Feature 01 Atlantic/ Pacific

White Cube

Written by Nick Robbins

MoMA

From Subculture to Subway “Subway art” can be sanctioned or unsanctioned. Sanctioned: Roy Lichtenstein’s long Times Square Mural in the 42nd Street

Station. Unsanctioned: graffiti — MTA’s eternal aesthetic Other. The former category, commissioned by and belonging to the public transit agency, addresses subway passengers as members of the civic and social unity; the latter inscribes the individual within the totalized Public. In February of this year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City installed over 50 large-scale reproductions of works from its gargantuan collection in the Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street subway station. It was a star-studded show — Starry Night, back-lit, was placed next to the stairs to the street.Where advertisements for television shows and Broadway musicals might usually be, MoMA hung its masterpieces as a sort of exhibition or enticement.Yes, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a Cézanne Bather, and Mondrian’s Broadway BoogieWoogie were there! As if to say: the real deal is just a subway ride away.Wouldn’t you like to get out of this white-tiled labyrinth?We have a ’white cube’ waiting for you, the art looks even better there. The artworks which MoMA pasted in the Atlantic/Pacific station pointedly do not belong to the public: yet, as art in a public space, it was sanctioned, planned, and paid for.Yes, it reminds New Yorkers that, as citizens of that city, they have access to the space of the museum. But the collection is the reflection and construction of the institution proper, a bounded thing — entering a museum, a viewer is enmeshed in the narrative told through its works and spaces. Atlantic/Pacific was both an exhibition in and an occupation of public space, one which enhanced those spaces while simultaneously writing over them. For as much as MoMA is one of New York City’s important assets and image-underwriters, it is also a private institution. That means that you would need to pay twenty dollars to see the works themselves, which MoMA was hoping many of the people who passed through the station would do. This form of promotion is a radical one, which relies on the familiarity of many people with works of art through reproductions.Yet in this installation, not only were the reproductions meant to bring the viewer into virtual contact with the work, but the arrangement of the reproductions (on walls, in juxtaposed sets, with text labels beside) itself elicited the form of a museum exhibition. This dual reproduction — that of objects and their contextual network — implied that the art belongs to MoMA and it belongs in MoMA (or in the museum in general). The transient space of the subway station was temporarily reworked to evoke the lingering and leisure-time gallery space. Evoke that is, not construct. While the installation seemed to draw the “works” into a relationship with museum-like viewing conditions and arrays, the images were still in a crowded, over-lit, and low-ceilinged station — outside the safety and narrative structure of the gallery. It is exactly this release from the tight referential circuit of the museum and the sequestered arts that points to and reifies the referent — the outside world, the relations within that world which art examines or reproduces. One of the works chosen for Atlantic/Pacific was a Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still, a photograph in which Sherman re-enacts an imagined character from Hollywood’s film noir typologies of the urban woman. Sherman renders herself with

specific anonymity, a face set against a backdrop of glass skyscrapers: an image of a frozen passerby, in a space of passers-by. The condition of the artist’s conscious self-display within the artwork must have something to do with the urban, shifting spaces in which Sherman made her work. This is a meaning which bears directly on MoMA’s imagined subway art public — dwellers of compressed spaces, observed by fellow passengers, full of the kind of tense role-playing and negotiation which Sherman’s characters display. The very spaces in which these reproduced artworks are placed — the empty spaces for advertising, continually re-inscribed — also recast the potential for viewing the work. An image of one of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can canvases was displayed, an image of an image which was comprised of images culled from the world of the advertised desire. This image, placed in void usually filled with advertising images, was then outside of the signifying chamber of the art gallery. No longer necessarily in dialogue with artworks more ostensibly removed from everyday practices of looking and consumption, the availability of this image to the roving viewer/passenger’s eye poses a possibility for different workings of the artwork. Or at least more so than that image on a T-shirt, mug, or mousepad might. More pointedly removed or recast were the objects from MoMA’s design collection, such as an Ettore Sottsass-designed Olivetti typewriter. MoMA, in its earliest years, pioneered the display of “functional objects” in a fine arts museum — the gesture of display, recommodifying those objects in allegiance with its ideas about modernity and the increasing cultural significance of everyday objects. And here they are again — back again to those urban spaces in which modern consumer identity first developed. A stark line is drawn — between any consumer object which might be displayed for sale in a subway advertisement, and this typewriter, a consumer object which circulates according to its aesthetic, not commodity, value. As advertisements, these reproductions produce desire — a desire for the masterpiece in its physical presence, which is a desire for the museum. It is thus a very coy access being accorded — a pure visuality which speaks to modern image ecologies, but which says very little about the experience of a work of art itself — and more about the spaces in which these works are said to belong, and which viewers must seek in order to consume the artwork. What museum wouldn’t want to shrug off charges of elitism or treasurehoarding by making its collection so seemingly available, so “public” and therefore relevant in the everyday world? Museum spaces have been thoroughly problematized as viewing spaces — yet they are and will probably remain sites of enormous cultural importance, of entertainment, tourism, and social negotiation. The most likely impetus behind MoMA’s installation in the Atlantic/Pacific station was to attract more visitors from New York City itself — to get the same people who participate in the vital life of the crowded subway to participate in the communal viewing experience which the museum provides. MoMA has always drawn on New York’s energies and status as a foundation for its own large stature in the global art world, and, of course, contributed hugely to that creative energy in turn. The website for the Atlantic/Pacific installation has an animated video walk-through where a disembodied eye zooms through the station, taking short pauses in front of some “works” — then darting under an oncoming train, sparks flying.

Beyond being a rather cool virtual excursion, this video also clearly positions these static works within the ephemeral experience of urban spaces. But to place these masterwork-copies in a subway station seems to instantiate a relationship of the type that private museums do not usually have with the cities which contain them. These plastered images are metonymic, constructing the discursive body of the museum itself from its parts, when it is instead precisely that Body and not the works which are a part of the urban environment. It is one thing to assume a part-for-the-whole relationship in displaying Starry Night in place of MoMA the institution; it is another to write over actual urban spaces in the language of a museum exhibition, as if to communicate the museum’s immanence in all urban spaces. It is a very different project than that of the Louvre, which installed reproductions of antique sculptures in the station beneath it. The Louvre-Rivoli station is a literal extension of a public museum into adjacent public space, but in this case a display of three-dimensional works reproduced in their three-dimensionality. These reproductions gesture more wholly to the real substance of the work and to the real display strategies of the museum. Not to mention that, as the Louvre is a public museum, the works are the property of the state. What belongs to the subway public, then, other than the advertisements themselves, which were replaced with MoMA’s artworks? The subway station and its world of images needs to be engaged with in a genuine way, instead of being replaced in a high-for-low culture substitution, which wields cultural capital in search of an assumed “improvement” through aesthetic elevation. Last year, people started seeing subway advertisements which had been cut up and recombined with adjacent ads—mixing public service announcements with celebrity culture, producing hacked-up bodies and scrambled words. Instead of adding to the proliferation of images in the subway space, the artist, known as Poster Boy, appropriates and recombines site-specific objects in the vein of many contemporary practices. The results plays on the way images work in public sphere—and violates the smooth message-making of the advertising image by exploiting its actual materiality. And, more importantly, these interventions engage with the kinds of looking which actually take place in a subway station, supplementing instead of supplanting. Yet, in a way, MoMA’s project engages with ideas of the virtuality of modern urban spaces — screens, image-surfaces, flat icons. In that sense Atlantic/ Pacific is both a modern and democratic gesture to the accessibility of images, as well as a rather cynical statement about the importance of the object. Artworks must be not flattened out for the sake of disseminating physical encounters with the images.There are other ways to make art, to show art, in the public space. Either way, we know that the work can’t be in the museum collection and public space at the same time, without seriously complicating the possessive aura of the collection. MoMA is in New York City, but it is not of New York City — and thank goodness. Museums are meant to be a retreat, not from engagement with the world but instead from an unmediated engagement. It is there that we can stop, look, contemplate, take our time: it is difficult to think too hard about Mondrian’s representation of jumbled-up, chaotic urban life when you are running to catch the train.

Feature 02 Authentic Experience

Museum Education

Written by Naina Saligram

Adorno

Escaping the Mausoleum Criticisms have been leveled against the museum throughout history — the museum as spectacle, as capitalist and imperialist enterprise, as selective representation of the past. But these haunting words from Theodor Adorno’s short essay “Valéry Proust Museum” best articulate what I find to be the most potent and enduring attack against the museum. Adorno begins the essay: “The German word, ‘museal’ [‘museumlike’], has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying…. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are like the family sepulchres of works of art.” (“Valery Proust Museum,” Prisms, p. 175). Does the Museum really kill Art? Presenting the views of the poet Paul Valéry, Adorno lays the ground for us to envision the museum as a sort of vampire, ruthlessly seeking out works of art in order to suck the life from their cores. For Valéry (much like for the earlier museum critic Quatremère de Quincy), museums are antithetical to life in so far as they displace objects from the realm of life. The museum is an artificial construct where works of art are robbed of their original function, removed from the context in which they were created. Underlying this criticism is, perhaps, a subtle attack on modern art. In the modern age, the museum had such a monopoly over art — its creation and consumption — that it became the only context for art. Art was no longer created for churches or palaces. It was created to go straight to its grave. But even more significant to the death of the object is the nature of the museum space: the museum space is sterile, and it absorbs works of art into this sterility. In a museum — a construct of visuality — works of art become frozen objects for passive viewing. Paintings are stared at; at best, sculptures are walked around. But all grow inert under the passive gaze of the spectator. Art becomes petrified inside the white walls of the museum. Today, the museum is a pervasive and fundamental element of culture. More museums exist and more people visit museums than ever before.Yet this ubiquity speaks less to the institution’s hegemony than its intrinsic value. Adorno writes that “pleasure” — of and in art — “is dependent on the existence of museums.” Museums are important, in fact necessary, to bring art to the public in a way that recognizes the art historical traditions to which artists respond. Thus, instead of asking how artists can circumvent the museum or annihilate the institution, one should ask: How can the museum overcome the line of criticism that Adorno describes? How can museums save their objects from entering into death? How can the museum escape its destiny as mausoleum? I believe the best solution is not to destroy the museum and return art to the domain of life, but rather to inject life into the museum space; to restore the “vital relationship” between viewer and artwork; to engage museum-goers in active viewing and contemplation. The answer, I think, is museum education. Museum education is not, or should not be, about putting forth information for viewers to consume. It is not about museum labels or audio guides that present

facts or interpretations. Museum education does not mediate experience: rather, it enables viewers to have a direct experience with works of art. The ideal of museum education, indeed its new direction, takes the form of a conversation: an educator elicits dialogue among viewers and between viewers and a work of art. Museum education invites viewers to spend as much as an hour looking at a single work of art, to think about it, talk about it, actively engage with it. The museum does not have to be a static space â&#x20AC;&#x201D; it can be a dynamic space of discourse and energy. It can bring works of art to life by fostering occasions for authentic experiences of them, and by promoting education programs to stimulate such experiences, museums can escape Adornoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s criticism. By turning the viewing of art into an experience of art, the museum can sever its ties with the mausoleum. _____________

/CONTACT DIMENSIONS ART JOURNAL DIMENSIONSYALE AT GMAIL DOT COM

Art at Yale YA L E UNIVERSITY ART GALLE RY

Both museums are free and open to the public. Chapel at High Street, New Haven, Connecticut artgallery.yale.edu & yale.edu/ycba

Feature 03 New Haven

Yale Center for British Art

Written by Kelly Cannon

YUAG

Views on the University Art Museum Walk into the Yale University Art Gallery any day and you will see third graders clustered enthusiastically around a modernist piece or an African reliquary figure. Wander onto a different floor and you will perhaps overhear a discussion about the representation of the country in French Impressionist paintings. Another day, you might find erudite School of Art students browsing the contemporary exhibit Continuous Present; talk with them, and you will probably come away with a much greater appreciation for the pieces.

Or cross the street and venture into the Yale Center for British Art, where the space is thrown open by floor-to-ceiling windows illuminating centuries of faces, townscapes, and romantic vistas. Depending on when you arrive, there might be student guides preparing their tours, Connecticut teachers engaged in a seminar, or the bustle of preparation to erect the centerpiece of Mrs. Delaney and Her Circle, a cascading wall of flowers in Louis Kahn’s entrance hall. These two art museums — which hold vast collections for anyone willing to tap into their resources — serve a distinct role for the public and students, and more significantly as a link between them. However, the value of such museums is not always recognized or maximized. At Brandeis recently, the President and Board of Trustees threatened to close down the renowned Rose Art Museum and sell the artworks to shore up the school’s finances. There was an enormous outcry from every quarter as the progress made for college museums seemed hollowed out in one move. Is the role of the college art museum so tenuously appreciated that these museums are threatened in this economy? Given the enormous fundraising drive of the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) this summer and the generous endowment of the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), Yale students need not worry that their art museums are in imminent danger. To preserve and reinforce the potential of the college art museum, though, it is the time for members of these museums’ communities to reevaluate what the museums are and what they could be for them. The college art museum is typically a collection on a focused subject or a depository of various donors’ gifts, amounting to a collage of highlights and supporting pieces to which other museums might not afford as much attention. Unique in their offerings and usually without either the financial need or the blockbuster appeal to charge high admission prices, college museums can often function as inexpensive tourist destinations. In “College Campuses as Affordable Travel Destinations,” New York Times writer Jane Margolies recommends the college campus for short travel because of the culture of experimental food, entertainment, and art that usually springs up around universities. Using Yale’s campus as her example, Margolies focuses on the “world-class” and free university art museums: “Sated with art, and having spent not much more than the cost of my hotel room,” she sang the praises of their comprehensive and accessible collections. More typically, daily visitors to a college art museum from outside the campus do not hail from far-off locales. Open to the public, these museums are unique-

ly positioned to integrate the university with its surrounding neighborhood. “You can’t forget that the Art Gallery and British Art Center are the two art museums for New Haven and the surrounding areas,” says Kate Ezra, the Nolen Curator of Education and Academic Affairs at the YUAG. However, the decision to use a college art museum is not always an obvious one for locals. Attaching a name and therefore the implied exclusivity of a university to a museum can make the public mission of the college museum more difficult. “With the word Yale (or any other school) in the title of university or college museums, the general public may feel that they must have a connection to the school in order to attend the museums,” remarks Linda Friedlaender, Curator of Education at theYCBA. In order to have a visible role in the community, the college art museum can expand its teaching mission beyond the university, using its personal and artistic resources for a wider audience. At the YUAG, Wurtele Gallery Teachers, a group of graduate students, teach visual and critical thinking skills in front of pieces of art to students from New Haven schools. Ezra describes it as one of the key benefits for both the Yale and local communities: “It’s a two-for-one, because the graduate students get the opportunity to teach, and the local students get to learn within the gallery spaces.” Many other college art museums have similar opportunities, especially those in small towns or hard to reach places. As a teaching institution, the college museum is, thus, not merely for those enrolled in the university, but for everyone from K-12 local students to residents. Particularly in Yale’s case, the integration of the community and university is visible: attending a YCBA opening lecture, or popping into the Gallery on the night of a film screening, one notices not just scholarly tweed and decorum, but a variety of faces, accents, ages, and outfits. As Linda Jerolmon, Membership Manager for the YUAG, puts it, “People from the community form relationships with the Gallery and feel very comfortable here.” Closer to home, the role and benefits of a teaching museum for university life are increasingly manifold, due in part to a recent emphasis on returning college art museums to their original mission. Beginning with the 1990 College and University Art Museum (CUAM) Project by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a select group of museums was given a three-year grant (along with the possibility of a second three-year installment) to refocus back into their parent college, as opposed to focusing on the international community, or in some cases, becoming an irrelevant financial strain on university resources. One element of the grant was to fund such positions as a curator of academic affairs, which enabled the museums to better connect with faculty on their campuses. After restructuring their initiatives, the colleges involved reported such changes as a transformation in faculty teaching and research, and an increase in appreciation — and resources — from deans and provosts. Coinciding with an international momentum to support interdisciplinary studies with material culture, the college museum, with its ability to overlap with academics, was found to be an ideal medium through which objects could be introduced into a curriculum. Curators, in particular, can help to set the academic focus of a college museum with the exhibitions they choose. Uniquely positioned between community and university, college art museums do not have the same pressure as most other museums to generate audience numbers with blockbuster shows. Rather, the opportunity to curate focused, research-oriented exhibits is a

major attraction of the university art museum. Says Laurence Kanter, the Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of European Art at the YUAG, “At Yale we do it because it’s worth doing. It’s not for 100,000 people, it’s for twelve, and that’s far more gratifying.” In “Why University Museums Matter,” New York Times critic Holland Cotter gave strong commendation for three shows at the YUAG and YCBA during the 2009 spring semester, emphasizing, “If it weren’t for academic museums, these shows wouldn’t happen. And that would be a real loss…The tucked-away university gallery gave us life: organic, intimate and as fresh as news.” He describes a college museum show as an “essay-as-exhibition,” in which, as in the case of “Picasso and the Allure of Language,” linguistics, poems, and images can come together for an “intellectual adventure.” Similarly, the decision to purchase and display certain works in a university art gallery arises from a different set of priorities than in other museums. Whereas others may turn down, for example, the chance to acquire an unfinished piece, university art museums collect these so that students can have the opportunity to learn from them. Unfinished pieces and other unique acquisitions such as multiple copies of the same artwork can teach students about an artist’s technique and the process of painting. In spite of the community reach that they hope to attain, can this academic focus of university art museums’ permanent and temporary exhibitions become exclusionary, working against their broader mission? While it is true that appreciating the displays requires something more than a cursory glance at a sensational, paint-splashed canvas on the wall,Yale History of Art professor Alexander Nemerov reminds us that the second half of looking at art is meeting it halfway. “There is an attitude of receptiveness you have to have, a capacity to be moved by things,” he suggests. To gain anything from visiting art museums requires being open to learning from what you see, and rather than making this process less accessible, college art museums are able to present in-depth background, thus inviting and engaging more facets of thought. However, it takes the cooperation of many beyond the curators for a college art museum to truly embody its mission. As the CUAM Report recommended, university art museums can be better utilized by reaching out for faculty involvement. Though professors can at times prefer the linearity and control that a lecture hall slideshow allows, none can deny the value of teaching inside a museum. Imogen Hart, who teaches the seminar “Great Exhibitions: Art in Britain, 1848-1914,” spends about half of each class period examining objects in the YCBA. For her, the most beneficial aspect of teaching in the museum is the visual literacy that she can hone in her students, and imparting the sense that images can have equal status with words. Lisa Ford, Associate Head of Research at the YCBA, stresses the prominence that the visual arts are gaining within interdisciplinary approaches. One need only look at Yale’s two art museums to witness the broad range of studies that take advantage of the arts in their courses. Kate Ezra cites that of the 575 class sessions held in the YUAG during the ’08-’09 school year, there were many from outside Art and Art History, including courses on Chinese medicine and Russian literature, and others from Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, African and East Asian Studies, and the School of Management. More recently, the summer science program STARS and Carol Armstrong’s fall 2009 freshmen

seminar “Science and Art” visited the Gallery and its conservation labs. At the YCBA, Linda Friedlaender leads medical students through training in front of paintings to develop visual skills, so that they can recognize and diagnose ailments based on visual symptoms. But without the involvement of students, the college art museum cannot come close to realizing its potential. One of the easiest ways to become involved with a college art museum is to take a class that has at least one section within its walls. “Students love using the YUAG,” says Carol Armstrong, who also sends her Nineteenth Century French Art class into the gallery to do research for papers. Both museums house study rooms where students can handle original works on paper, and in the recently opened Study Gallery on the YUAG’s fourth floor, dozens of sections each week find themselves facing the exact pieces they have been learning about. Imogen Hart suggests utilizing these resources to become familiar with sometimes daunting museum spaces, particularly in the case of the British Art Center’s — according to some students — formidable entrance. Designed to imitate the open entrance halls of grand British homes, Louis Kahn’s architecture has made some visitors feel “on view,” a discomfort easily remedied by a closer relationship with the people and objects found there. For more contact with the two museums, students can apply to be guides, doing in depth research on specific works that is then presented in an interactive format to the community, or they can assist curators in developing exhibitions and publications. “There is no wall between what the students can do and what the professionals do,” Linda Jerolmon emphasized. However, there is an obvious gap in engagement with college art museums once one looks outside of the Art and History of Art majors. “The question is, how do you get the student in the biology or calculus class into the museums?” asks Lisa Ford. Elizabeth Manekin, a YUAG Fellow and recent graduate of Brown’s Masters program, understands the commitments and schedules of students: “It’s not going to be an extra thing you do. It has to infiltrate either your academics, social life, or extracurriculars.” She suggests working Yale’s art museums into things students already commit to — for example, as a mentor or ‘Big Sib’ outing. Kate Ezra offers up College Night, which occurs once or twice a semester and gives student groups the opportunity to host events using the YUAG collection. The event has previously seen round table discussions as well as music compositions inspired by original pieces of art, a feature that will return again at College Night this semester, on December 3rd. Attended as well by the public, the program offers one of the strongest advantages of using a college art museum: an opportunity to interact in a creative sphere with the community. Whether at College Night or by becoming involved with any number of the grade school education initiatives at either museum, students can find a public that is open and reciprocally interested in engaging with them. On the most basic level, professors and museum staff urge coming into the galleries every once in a while for the sheer value of what a museum can do. “The museum is a respite from the flux and flow of ordinary life…there is a meditative view wherein the world does stand still for a moment,” says Alexander Nemerov. Imogen Hart reminds students to be aware of “what you can get from a college museum that you can’t get elsewhere.” And herein

seems to lie the heart of the university art museum: the work that professors, curators, staff, and directors do at these museums enhances their own work in many ways, but ultimately it comes together to create an engaged and intimate community of visitors and students that one can never find in large public museums, regardless of their international repute. “It is when you leave that you stop taking it for granted,” says Hart. So how not to take the college museum for granted during the four years here? Nemerov recommends, “Get to know one piece or a few over your time here. There’s no burden to take in the whole thing, which can be formidable, and students have to learn so much already.” As Kate Ezra reminds us, there is a convenience to the galleries in that they are free and open on weekends: “It’s a luxury that you won’t always have when you’re no longer a student.” Because you never pay an entrance fee, there is no strain to have an experience or explain to yourself or anyone else what it is you like about a piece in one visit. With the ability to access the same galleries over the span of four years, there’s more that can be taken away than in singular visits. Hart suggests, “By seeing the way exhibitions change, you can see the way knowledge is being transmitted and narratives are constructed.” Nemerov also notes the kind of internal lesson that can be gained from looking: “Art is there to provide a mysterious sense of otherness. It’s transformative, and isn’t supposed to give you back what you are. That’s consumer culture.” Ultimately, staff and professors suggest that the appeal of college museums will rest on opinions about art around campus and student word of mouth. “It’s one person at a time,” remarks Linda Jerolmon. And perhaps, if group or class involvement in the museums isn’t your thing, then it is best one at a time. Alone in front of the palpitating colors of a Rothko on a Thursday night when the YUAG stays open late, or at the YCBA on a rainy day, allowing the pure nostalgia and emotion of a Constable to engulf you, you might see something you have never found before on Yale’s campus. Not necessarily days or even weeks later, but months after other attractions have come and gone, the awareness of where you can find that kind of experience will return to you, and will keep you coming back to your college art museums.

DIMENSIONS CATALOG selected works from Yale undergraduates

DIMENSIONS PUTS TOGETHER A CATALOG OF WORKS BY UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS HERE AT YALE, BOTH WITHIN AND OUTSIDE OF THE ART MAJOR. THE WORKS WERE CHOSEN IRRESPECTIVE OF THEIR MEDIUM AND AIM TO PRESENT AN OVERVIEW OF THE CONCERNS AND CHOICES, AT THE PRESENT MOMENT, OF YOUNG ARTISTS AT YALE.

Brendan Schlagel Untitled Medium format photograph 12â&#x20AC;? x 12â&#x20AC;?

Sophia Ortiz five hundred feet of chelicerae mimicry Wire 14 1/2” x 4 1/2”

Izzy Chafkin Untitled (Chloe in her Room, 2009) Inkjet print 17” x 22”

Meg Fitzpatrick My Fellow Traveler Digital photograph

Audi Galvin Brancusi Acrylic 3’ x 4’

Anna Moser AcquiredValue II andVI Ink, charcoal, pencil, pastel, gesso, glaze 25â&#x20AC;? x 30â&#x20AC;?

Emmy Waldman Pencil Oil paint 10 1/2” x 1”

Feature 04 Museum as Text

Northrop Frye

Written by Chris Labosky

Athens

Reading Greekness at the Acropolis Museum The open doors of a museum and the open pages of a book are both gateways into what is generally called

“culture.” As such, it might be useful to look at museums in a way that others have looked at books, or, to speak more broadly, the way others have looked at texts. While the more obvious parallel may be the museum’s relationship to the library — where both are buildings serving as repositories of objects filled with cultural data — there is an interesting way in which the museum is authored more like a book than constructed like a building, and, furthermore, reads more like a novel than an encyclopedia. This implies that the museum makes use of tools roughly analogous to those of an author and wields them to achieve similar effects. It also means that we might analyze those effects according to categories which have hitherto been used primarily in the analysis of fiction. To read in terms reserved for fiction what presents itself as fact is not by any means a novel procedure. It is, to take one famous example, exactly what Roland Barthes does in his essay “The Rhetoric of the Image.” While Barthes’ concern is with photographic advertisements, one can just as well discern the “rhetoric of the museum” on the basis of the tools of presentation possible for the medium. Light, sound, arrangement of objects, coordination of displays, and paths of motion are all subject to manipulation and can thus be used in the service of producing a rhetoric of alliteration and rhyme, voice and tone, exclamation and understatement. In addition, a museum includes its own texts — its placards and labels — where the tools of the writer are more explicitly brought to the fore. Thus, while the museum is itself an apparatus of criticism — commenting on the objects of its collections — it is also open to critical interpretation. This paper provides an example of such an interpretation in the form of a few observations which I have made at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece. ____ Frye’s “Low Mimetic Mode” Northrop Frye, at the outset of his Anatomy of Criticism, takes his cue for his “theory of modes” from a dusty old Greek text, and specifically from an even dustier paragraph which, he complains, has not received enough attention from modern critics. “In some fictions,” he quotes, “the characters are better than we are, in others worse, in still others on the same level.” This is Aristotle, from the second paragraph of his Poetics. Frye emphasizes that the Greek words commonly translated as “good” and “bad” are in fact σπουδαιος and φαυλος, which carry the figurative meanings of weighty and light, and thus do not serve as moral judgments passed on literary personalities, but are rather, as Frye puts it, classifications according to “the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same.” With these distinctions in hand, he spells out his five modes of literature.

The following discussion will draw attention to just one of these, the low mimetic. According to Frye, this is the mode in which “the hero is superior neither to other men nor to his environment.” In other words, “the hero is one of us: we respond with a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we find in our own experience.” Frye argues that most comedy and realistic fiction belong to this mode. The Low Mimetic in the Museum While it would be too reductive to simply consider the object or collection as the museum’s equivalent to the literary text’s hero (what, then, would we call its environment?), I will follow Frye, considering the low mimetic to be the mode present whenever the museum emphasizes the nearness of both the object and its context to the viewer. This is the mimesis of Aristotle’s poetics: representation, imitation, reflection — the viewer recognizes himself in the mirror of fiction. The New Acropolis Museum first opened its doors to the public in June 2009. It is an imposingly modern structure. While old legal quarrels over zoning and real estate acquisition give their own local flavor to this word ‘imposing’ (twenty five buildings had to be demolished to make room for it), its 226,000 square feet of concrete and glass form an assertive modern response to the ancient achievement in marble which rests on the hill just across the Dionysiou Areopagitou Street. This marble achievement is, of course, the Parthenon of classical Athens; the hill is better known as the Acropolis. One of the first placards a visitor will read is entitled “The Slopes of the Acropolis.” The text is as follows: In antiquity the slopes of the Acropolis were the traditional zone between the city and its most famous sanctuary. They were the meeting ground of myths and legends, gods and heroes, official and popular cults, minor and greater sanctuaries, public edifices and private houses.

Nevertheless, the two sides are logically connected in the domestic, sympathetic language of the displays. At this lower level, still “on the slopes,” it is entirely possible to be in touch with the objects’ creative subjects. For example, one placard discusses “The Sanctuary of the Nymph on the southern slope of the Acropolis” in the following terms: In the vicinity of the two large sanctuaries of Dionysos Eleuthereus and Asklepios on the southern slope of the Acropolis was a small open-air sanctuary dedicated to the Nymph of marriage and wedding ceremonies. Here, the Athenians dedicated vases that had been used for their nuptial bath (loutophoroi), along with other offerings.The hundreds of finds recovered from the sanctuary highlight its importance in the religious life of the city from the 7th to the 1st cent. BC. The plaque is describing architecture, but it focuses specifically and exclusively on the way real people, “Athenians,” related to and made use of these structures. By recalling habits of ordinary life, its language domesticates these structures, and in doing so places them on the same plane as the household objects across the way. In both cases, the attention of the viewer is drawn to the accessibility of the objects, their nearness to her own way of life. It is also not merely the diction and the tone of the explanatory placards that produce this effect. The displays themselves are conspicuously connected to the atrium of the museum. A museum-goer easily takes in, at a single glance down the opening aisle, the entire Bronze Age while she checks her bag through security or purchases her ticket. The gallery space for the opening displays is seamlessly connected to the mundane world of contemporary Athens outside the museum’s doors. And here, glass plays a crucial role.

The plaque is on one level descriptive, but also strikingly self-referential, since the Acropolis Museum functions as an imposing mirror, a reflective structure, something of a parallel world to the rocky hill itself. Like the ancient Acropolis, the Acropolis Museum has its own “slope,” in the form of a giant ramp which constitutes the museum’s first exhibition hall. The plaque referred to above comes near the bottom of this ramp, and as a visitor progresses forward in time he finds himself slowly but inevitably ascending, though not always chronologically.

Glass, the building material of modernity par excellence, tends naturally toward sterility. The museum-goer almost universally encounters objects behind glass. This is, of course, so she cannot touch them and thereby spoil them by impertinent intimacy. In the same way a salad bar hides behind glass to defend itself from the breath (or the sneeze) of the diner, the museum display seals its hoards from desecration through touch. But glass has also the capacity to create continuity, and its architectural function in the Acropolis Museum is exactly this. Not only does glass dominate the walls of the structure on the museum’s first floor, allowing the world of contemporary Athens to make its presence felt amid symbols of its ancient antecedents – the very floor is glass, and a visitor can observe the excavation of an ancient Athenian village beneath her own feet. Nearness, immersion, and continuity are emphasized at every turn.

In fact, the two sides of this opening aisle serve two different functions: the south side to orient the viewer chronologically, the north to orient him spatially. On the south side are artifacts of prehistoric times, of pre-geometric, and of geometric pottery. The objects are invariably those of everyday life. There is no monumental art yet, no gleaming marbles — just house wares: kraters and amphorae. The art is small, tangible, and toy-like. It is domestic, and it is all in “proper,” chronological order. Across the aisle, the logic is spatial rather than chronological. The placards discuss the important artifacts and temples of the slopes regardless of the precise time period.

And this is not unremarkable, considering an exhibition can generate drama and interest by highlighting just the opposite: the oldness of objects, their remoteness, and their otherness. This is not at all the spirit of these displays, though it will be picked up later in the museum experience. Here, on the opening ramp, the arrangement solves the problem of the reconciling the chronological impulse (to arrange the museum objects in a progressive temporal sequence) and the spatial impulse (to create a museum experience that mirrors physical ascent of the actual Acropolis), by merging them on the same critical register. If we wanted to adopt Frye’s terminology from his

“theory of modes,” we would call it low mimetic. “Inhabitants” and “Athenians” This reading of the Acropolis’ opening display also helps to explain a striking curiosity in the language of its explanatory placards, namely, the decision to sometimes refer to the same people as “inhabitants” and other times as “Athenians.” The significance of this decision is not trivial. Given the above reading of these displays, it is obvious that something more significant than terminology is at stake. Moving back to the south wall and a little farther down the aisle (or, more correctly, farther up, since we are literally ascending with each step), we come to displays of more domestic objects — kraters, kylikes, kantharoi — which we are told, “emphasize the trading activities of the inhabitants.” It is almost impossible not to pause at this categorization, “the inhabitants,” since just across the aisle the same individuals are decisively referred to as “Athenians.”1 References of this type are by no means one of a kind. In an adjacent cabinet our attention will be drawn to a sampling of the “thousands of objects left behind by the people who lived there.” While the italics are not found on the original placard, it’s hard to read it without supplying them yourself. In fact, these “inhabitants” will receive a more definite name across the aisle, but not until they build the sanctuaries of Asklepios and Dionysos Eleuthereus. Farther along in the museum, the sculptures of the “Kritios Boy” and the “Pensive Athena,” the builders of the Parthenon and the Erechtheion will always be called either “Greeks” or “Athenians;” it will not be “the inhabitants” who carved the procession of Athena into the Parthenon Frieze. On the one hand, to call them simply “inhabitants” might be merely a method of distancing from the viewer a people whose laws, customs, and institutions are more shrouded in mystery than their great grandchildren, who were apparently much busier carving their culture into the marble of the archaeological record. If it is mere rhetorical distancing, it stands in serious tension with overall mode of the displays (on both sides of the aisle), which, as I have argued above, is in every way low mimetic. Another striking example is found in a nearby cabinet, where we are asked to compare a series of perfume vases (unguentaria), pyxides, jewelry, and various miniature religious icons to “those found in modern Greek homes.” Again and again, we are encouraged not to experience the culture of these people with a sense of wonderment at its separateness, but on the contrary, to feel near to them, to “relate to them.” Thus, appellations such as “inhabitants” or “the people who lived there” are not intended to distance them from us. They must serve some other purpose. As one moves through the museum, their actual function becomes clear: to provide a sense of genericism and in doing so to dissociate them. Not, as I have said, from us, but rather from the later “inhabitants,” who will be definitively “Greek.” In fact, what turns mere “inhabitants” of Greece (on the aisle’s south side) into full blown Greeks (on the north side) is a body a cultural achievement which the remainder of the museum is dedicated to celebrating.

What makes a historical people specific, rather than generic, is not a matter of geography or genetics. It is a matter of culture, which, for the museum, is discerned in the traces it leaves on blocks of marble, terracotta and bronze. Some of these traces are more important than others. The “Kritios Boy” of the museum’s sculpture gallery and, of course, the Parthenon itself, are later dealt with in a much different fashion, in a different mode, and they are always produced by “Greeks” or “Athenians.” Careful, critical attention to a museum display can produce a heightened awareness to the often subtle or hidden messages to which that display contributes. In the Acropolis Museum, reading a museum display according to a critical apparatus intended for literature reveals one of its implicit (though not necessarily surprising) biases. To state it simply, this is the preference for the Classical over the Geometric — a preference for the recognizably and symbolically “Greek” over what is merely archaeologically interesting.

It would be a mistake to assume that the relatively earlier displays on the south side of the aisle do not use the word Athenians because Athens as a political entity did not yet exist. The Athenians’ own legends date the use of the name “Athens” to the reign of Cecrops I, beginning 1556BC. The Acropolis Museum begins its displays at 1400BC. 1

Interview 01 The Curator

New York City

Interviewed by Ying Sze Pek

Biennial

AN INTERVIEW WITH

Robert Storr Robert Storr was appointed Dean of theYale School of Art in 2006. From 1990-2002, he was a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, and he was the first American curator to be appointed commissioner of the 2007Venice Biennale. A contributing editor of Art in America since 1981, he is a noted art writer and critic, who publishes frequently. Dean Storr also serves as consulting curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and is a painter. ____ You mentioned in a talk at the School of Art several weeks ago that the artist doesn’t have a need for a “position.” Do curators need to have a position? No, you don’t need a position. You need to know what you’re about. Positions are almost by definition static, right? To take a position or hold a position will ultimately produce a conservative result. Now, you need to know

what the crucial variables for you are. Not for somebody else, but for you. What you need to work, what your work is about, the circumstances that you will agree to work in, the ones that you will not work in you need to know these fundamentally. You need to know that you won’t go against that knowledge, just for the sake of, you know, an easy opportunity. To grow, of course, sometimes you have to take risks. But a lot of artists fundamentally don’t know what they are about, and a lot curators don’t either. Ultimately, the curators are not really very important and the artist is not really that important, it’s about the art. It’s about whether the art is significant and whether the public gets access to it. The focus on the curator and the artist is to make it about people. It’s not about people, in the sense of the individual maker, it’s about what they make, that is what’s important. What about the notion of the curator as creator? They can be creative, but they are not artists.

What do you think the curator should and should not do? What the curator should do is make it possible for the artist to do his best work. What the artist should do with the curator is to use the resources that the curator has available to make the best work. What’s important is the best work, not the identity of either the curator or the artist. And one of the ironies of the present situation is, after years and years and years of killing off the author — the author’s dead, the artist is no longer a genius and so on — what happens? All of a sudden we have all these curators who want to be treated as though they are artists even though the artist is dead, even though the author is dead, and so on. It’s nuts, the Auteur show that people talk about so much now, that curators are like film directors. They may work for the biggest production companies and stuff like that, but it’s so that you have your name above the title the way John Ford has his name about the title. I mean, that’s nonsense, and it’s also deeply inconsistent with the thrust of critical thinking in the last years. Of course curators have egos, of course artists have egos, of course everybody has them and needs them, but it’s not about that thing. And it’s also, as I said, a real betrayal of the critical models that have been used to suddenly at the last minute turn around and say what matters is the curator. It’s a job, it’s a good job. Does your double position, with academia and with museums, add a different dimension to your work as a curator? I have multiple positions; I didn’t have a steady job anywhere until I was forty years old. So I’ve worked as a freelance artist, I’ve worked as a writer, freelance, I’ve worked as an institutional teacher, I’ve worked as a curator — I’ve considered all of that work. All of it is my work. In certain roles, I’ve one kind of status, in certain roles, I have another kind of status. But what matters is the work you’re doing, not what they call you. And not what you call yourself. Do you feel, then, the need to align yourself with institutions? I don’t need to align myself with institutions, except that by aligning myself with certain institutions, I am able to do certain things that I could not do otherwise.You know, when I was first offered the job at the Modern, I turned it down. And when it came back a year later and was offered a second time, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be involved in an institution like that. And ultimately when I left the Modern, I left because I wanted to leave. It wasn’t because I was kicked out, I wasn’t going for another museum job, I wasn’t playing the field. It had gotten to the point where I couldn’t do the work that I wanted to do, in the way I wanted to, in the way I had done it. So, I said, fine, that’s enough. What is the role of the museum, given the international dimension that art is now taking?What does it mean when big museums in theWest acquire art from other diverse regions? They should be, they should have been for a long time. They’re way behind

for years, and some of the best ones have. The Modern has many, many, many faults; I’m not in any way denying it. But the truth is that the Modern had for a very long time a habit of collecting internationally that very few museums in this country did, at least in the contemporary field. And from the 1930s on, which is to say from the founding of the Museum of Modern Art on, the Museum of Modern Art had collections of Latin American art that were better than almost any in Latin America. Now, there were inconsistent cycles of collecting so that there would be years where this was done — they would lapse, and of course miss a lot of art, and then they would pick it up again and try. And this was true in other areas as well, but a museum of modern art should by definition be an international museum. And what went on in Latin America, what went on in Asia, what went on in Central Europe and so on, in Africa — that easily is as important a substance of a museum of modern art as anything. And MoMA was never as Eurocentric as almost any other museum of modern art. The problem is it didn’t take the pattern it had established and do the most from it that it could have done. Has the growth in the number of biennales today taken away from building good collections in museums? That is half true. That is not all certain, that the money that goes to biennales would ever go to permanent institutions. In fact there is good reason to doubt that. It is true that in the creation of some biennials, of which the first three most important ones historically are also the key examples:Venice, Carnegie International and São Paulo. All those three had a collecting component to them. The modern works that are in Venice at all, basically until the Guggenheim, came from acquisitions taken out of the biennale. Same and true as São Paulo, same and true as the Carnegie Mellon example. So if you found a biennale, it makes sense, if you can, to ally to the collecting strategies of a museum or to found a museum. But I don’t think it’s true that if you take out the biennale, that money then will flow (to the museum). That kind of money goes to public events that draw people.You can’t found a museum in Bali and say, I’m going to put $300-million in this museum, I’m going to invite everybody for a hot weekend in Bali. If you say, on the other hand, I’m going to have a biennale, I’m going to have some razzmatazz around the biennale, then you get them to come. But some of the $300-million ought to go over to the side of building institutions. This is a little bit utopian but not as utopian as you think. The problem is, that it isn’t done. It is possible to do this, it’s just that people aren’t thinking this way — they are so fixated on the big splash. There are so many people who have just entered the art world, so to speak, as collectors or as cultural bureaucrats. And they haven’t actually studied the history of building modern art institutions. And they think it’s a snap, and they think it’s done with a lot of leverage very fast. It is done slowly, with a lot of leverage, and it requires a lot of professionals, and the status of art historians should be respected by museums, much more so than they are. Not only that, but the art historians should think about themselves as entering into this fray and not rising above it. So it’s one thing to critique from high but never touch the machinery. It’s another thing to critique from inside, and to use the machinery itself as a form of critique.

Should the artist have a role in the promotion of contemporary art? Philip Johnson, the architect, was a man of many contradictions and complexities and so on, but he was a practicing architect. John Szarkowski, head of photography at the Modern, was a practicing photographer. And if you go down the list of people who have had leading roles in museums in this country, who made venues for modern art and programs for modern art, a very significant proportion of them were actually practitioners. And I think you find if you go to situations that are economically developing and where infrastructure for culture is developing, very often the artists are leading it. Now Ai Weiwei is doing this in China. So, if you make that decision as a practitioner, you may pay a price for it. But it is very often the practitioners who have the best sense of what can be done, and very often they have the best access to the machinery. Cai Guoqiang has also done it. Again, one could be critical of either one of those men, but the fact is that without them, there wouldn’t have been that kind of scene. Gao Minglu has done it, and he’s not a practitioner. He’s a good example, though he may have been (an artist) once, of somebody who really is a historian, curator and so on. So what you really need is those kinds of people operating at the core of the process. What are your favorite museums? That’s hard to say. I mean, there are so many of them I look at with interest. I live behind the Gardner Museum. It’s a completely crazy place but it’s a wonderful place where they store the old stuff. I think the Barnes Foundation, which I also used to go to, is a wonderful place, and I regret the fact that they’re moving it. But there are fewer and fewer museums that have distinctive character, because more and more museums are trying to meet a sort of abstract model of a museum, and less and less building on their own collections. Take New York — you have the Metropolitan Museum of Art which was the historical museum. The Modern was created in a way to do what the Metropolitan was not doing. Then the Guggenheim came in. The Guggenheim was doing what the Modern was doing but from a very particular aesthetic ideology. And then there was a Whitney, to do what the Modern was not doing because it was thought that the Modern wasn’t paying attention to American art. Now, these four institutions are really lively because of their differences. And then, El Museo del Barrio came in because the MoMA wasn’t doing what it was doing, Studio Museum came in because MoMA wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do. But in both cases they came in with support from MoMA people. So this diversification of museums answers to specific artistic contexts. That’s great, but I hope that forty years from now we don’t have six museums that are more or less doing the same thing but with slight differences. I hope we have them doing different things but in collaboration with one another.

at Northern Africa, but at a time when they just couldn’t sustain it. They’ve been very good in film from all over the world and prints from all over the world, but less good in painting and sculpture. Other museums have had equal interest in Latin American art, there are some museums that have specialized in Asian art, including specifically Asian art museums that have a contemporary component, and so on. There are some but very few museums that have focused on African or African diaspora art. None of these are adequate, frankly, but they have happened. And the question is where they fall down or fail to live up to their possibility and what do you do about the museums that have never attempted it. And how do you inspire them to see that this isn’t just an add-on but is actually central to what they are doing. Now, to turn it around, if you have a museum founded in Sao Paulo, great art center, quite a lot of money, is it going to be an international museum of modern art? Well, I would say that it ought to be, that there probably isn’t enough money around the world to buy the kinds of collections that exist in the great American or European museums now, retrospectively, to collect modern art. So if you have a few examples that come to you from patrons or whatever it is part of your heritage, but now, you can buy carefully. Now if the curators in those museums just run around and follow the market, they won’t end up with good museums. They have to be very selective, they have to be very tough about not just about who they collect but be very specific about the quality of what they collect. If that’s the case, if the new museums are being founded outside of Europe and North America really operate critically as museums and give their curators serious choices rather than their bureaucrats and rather than their big money people, and make sure that they get curators who know what they’re doing, then there’s a lot of opportunity. Lots of things can happen.

Why should a large museum have the onus to collect beyond its national boundaries? Again, the national boundaries, I can’t talk about this in the abstract. I think one has to talk about it in terms of actual examples. As I say, MoMA was really good with Latin American art. They made a stab, very briefly, at looking

Feature 05 Repossession

Frames

Edited by Dimensions Staff

Jeff Koons

Public Museum Project Although art historians have contested that art and life cannot possibly be one, the Public Museum Project attempts to prove the opposite. We want to believe that elements of the ordinary, when looked at through the Frame, can be turned into vestiges of Art in their own right. Have artists not staked their claim, covertly inserting their presence, into the ways in which we view the everyday?

Composition in Green and White: A Tribute to the Square Piet Mondrian 1944 Oil on canvas This exquisite and philosophical painting was the last Mondrian completed before his death in 1944, and the work is a rarity in his oeuvre for its use of the color green. Mondrian is best known for his geometric compositions in white, black, and the primary colors — the most basic and pure elements of painting. Here, Mondrian continues his interest in the Neo-Platonic “essence” by composing his painting through repetitions of the purest and most perfect of geometric shapes, the square.Yet he contrasts this classical essentiality with the predominance of different shades of green on the canvas. Green — a combination of yellow and blue — represents for Mondrian a degradation of the purity of essence. Thus, it is only in his last work that we see Mondrian commenting on life itself: life is green, a movement away from the purity of the source. And death is a return to the essence of the square.

View of Old Campus Georges Seurat 1890 Oil on canvas Renouncing the dogmatic influence of Neo-impressionism this pastoral work reduces Seurat’s more typical misanthropy to expression, primordially souped and poetically waxed, imbued and excised, watered and withered in the essence, the power, and the glory of summer day old campus. Discovered in the basement bathroom of Ezra Pound’s estate after his passing, sweater-vested academics worldwide reacted bombastically to the news that in his will the work was to be smoked into small gardens and reproduced wholesale as a key ingredient in the new Airy Light Picnic Basket. It was only after effusive attempts by cuckold conspirators resulted in wide-spread top hat lounging that lawyers representing the Poundian estate capitulated to the popular will and the piece was restored prosaically here.

Sniffles Jeff Koons 1988 One often wonders why this work by Koons is sometimes overlooked, in contrast to its more famous counterparts Popples and Michael Jackson and Bubbles. Created as part of the “Banality” series which exhibited simultaneously at three galleries in 1988, Sniffles makes its timely appearance here at Yale amidst irrational fears of contagious diseases. Sniffles is a unique work of Koons as it employs highly-durable plastic rather than ceramic or stainless steel that he is better known for, though it is crafted as meticulously by the artist and his army of assistants. Perhaps his most politically-charged work to date, we also see Koons at his most relevant. His uncanny ability to mirror the world of life through the lens of Pop, as with his cryogenic immortalization of MJ in sculpture, makes him sought after today by major institutions and oligarchs alike.

Big Pot Claes Oldenburg 1958 This is an early and forgotten work by the Swedish-born American artist, renowned for his public sculptures that are blown-up versions of everyday objects, including dessert spoons and rubber stamps. These oversized flower pots placed all around campus are believed to be early prototypes of the sculptor. The radical change in scale is an assault on the viewer and his or her sensibilities, while causing a dramatic reconfiguration of the college landscape. As an artistically-minded undergraduate, it is believed that Oldenburg created these objects that were less ambitious in scale, mainly due to funding constraints. Still, we see the beginnings of his later practice. Oldenburg graduated with a B.A. from Yale College in 1960. He has donated other works of his to the university, including Lipstick Ascending on Caterpillar Tracks, which now stands in Morse College.

Feature 06 Theatrical Wreckage

Deliberately Vernacular

Written by Dana Wu

Memorial

Constructed Ruins: Remembering 5.12 On August 25, 1933, a 7.5-magnitude earthquake hit Diexi, Sichuan. On April 14, 1955, a 7.5-magnitude earthquake hit Kangding, Sichuan. On August 16, 1976, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit Songpan, Sichuan. On May 12, 2008, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake hitWenchuan, Sichuan. On May 12, 2009, the Wenchuan Earthquake Museum opened in Anren, Sichuan, at the Jianchuan Museum Cluster outside Chengdu. It was one year to the date of the 8.0-magnitude disaster that shook the province and the globe. Over the first few weeks of the museumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s opening, amid international media fanfare, tens of thousands of visitors traveled to the museum, eager to pay their respects and investigate the infamous â&#x20AC;&#x153;earthquake relicsâ&#x20AC;? shipped in from the wreckage sites. The opening of the museum offered a place and time for national remembrance. As the introductory letter painted on the museum wall says, in a stiff English translation alongside the Chinese: In a short span of 75 years, our hometown was devastated by earthquakes. Unfortunately, no buildings are remained to speak to the world. But some buildings do remain, and the ruins are fresh. 100 miles north at the county seat of Beichuan township, the abandoned, quake-devastated town being preserved for remembrance, the rubble still settles in heavy rains. ____ On the mountainous road to Beichuan, the earthquake zone is slowly rebuilding. Navy-green emergency housing tents still stand by most lots, but many homes near completion. They are built in the simplest construction: cast-in-place concrete framework, infilled with sturdy red brick walls. Where the bus stops to let off visitors outside the ruins, an iconic building stands as a welcoming monument, its entire second and third floors collapsed in a theatrical wreckage, first floor miraculously intact. Piles of bent, rusted re-bar mark the sides of the road like oversized tumbleweeds. Uniformed guards stand before the iron gate of the ruined town, letting through only those who must pass through on foot or motorbike to access their homes past the preserved remains. They direct visitors, mostly local tourists, up a hill that rises over the old town. Vendors selling the same trinkets as tourist sites miles away (embroidered purses, yak horns) line the steep dirt path. Beichuan has taken on the life of both a museum and a memorial. From the top of the hill, tourists survey a panorama of ruin. Beichuan is a picturesque town,

nestled in a mountainous valley in the pockets of a sharp S-shaped riverbend. Closer inspection, however, reveals houses collapsed in the mud, bridges snapped in half and crumbled like unwanted sculptures. The main pieces of the city stand askew, but mostly still in place, among shards of smaller buildings flattened by the quake. The old part of town, which sustained more severe damage, has been smothered by mudslides in the latest rainfall. Locals tell me the town used to “look better,” as if it were a disappointing sight now that mud has obscured the worst of the destruction. The overlook hosts vendors selling scores of earthquake memorabilia: Hardcover books full of too-graphic photographs of bleeding children and mourning parents, and laminated before-and-after maps of the city with bold captions to help visitors decode the ruins as they inspect them from above. One woman selling maps tells me about the family members she lost, still buried underneath the rubble. Videos of post-quake despair loop on small portable DVD players sitting on the rickety display tables. Behind them, couples in sunglasses smile and pose for photographs taken by friends wielding oversized SLR cameras. Just over the peak of the hill, dropping down and away from the makeshift marketplace of tourists and vendors, several men and women work on the construction of small memorials cropping up on the hillside. They erect polished but dirty marble slabs engraved with Chinese characters accompanied by approximate English translations, such as “Deep Feeling of Grief for the Victims of the Earthquake.” Small collections of dried flowers and burnt incense sticks lie at the foot of each memorial, and several people stop for a moment, putting their palms together in prayer and bowing their heads. Bundles of red incense and yellow funerary paper wait in neat piles on a table next to a cardboard donation box, but few visitors use them.

A woman works on a small memorial overlooking the preserved ruins of Beichuan.

____ At the Wenchuan Earthquake Museum, visitors come to pay their respects by the hoard. The oversized relics are lined up outside the front entrance, like sculptures. Familiar piles of bent re-bar, a small rescue boat dubbed “The Boat of Life” (it saved the lives of dozens), and the rusting remains of a silver sedan crushed by a boulder three times its size, as illustrated by the photo enlarged on the display beside it, flank the sides of the museum’s entry walkway. Even “Strong Pig,” the famous swine that survived after being buried in rubble for 36 days, is out on display, slowly pacing around in his black metal pen. Real-estate developer, museum mogul, curator, and pig-adopter Fan Jianchuan recruited China’s top architects for the planning and design of the dozenplus museums in his massive privately-owned museum development, and the campus of galleries forms a mini-Dubai of Chinese museum architecture. It features a collection of innovative work by celebrity designers such as Beijing-based Atelier FCJZ and locally-trained architectural master Liu Jiakun. Li Xinggang, a Chinese-side collaborator with architects Herzog & De Meuron on the Olympic National Stadium (Bird’s Nest) in Beijing, was tapped for the Wenchuan Earthquake Museum. The museum itself is an elegant building of cast-in-place concrete, punctu-

An emergency-housing tent stands in place of a home in the earthquake zone ated by a series of large volumes faced in red brick. Despite its articulate massing and clean geometries, the building feels deliberately vernacular, its material palate a direct nod to the simple homes under construction near Beichuan. A diagonal seam fractures the glass window of the façade at a slight cant, as if shaken by a sudden jolt. Inside, however, the museum feels like an earthquake-themed fantasy park.

been shipped from the earthquake site and realistically re-arranged “in place” in the museum. Lobbies and corridors look into courtyards featuring major pieces of wreckage such as a large, fallen Bank of China sign and more rescue boats like the one on display outside. In one room, with walls crumbling and askew, a television perched on a sloping, dusty tabletop plays footage from the earthquake, segments similar to those looping on the vendors’ tables at Beichuan. In other parts of the museum, some of the walls are torn away to reveal re-enacted rescue scenes, with spotlights on mannequins dressed in camouflage rescue gear and goggles, heroically pulling victims out of the rubble underneath the stairwell. ____ The letter, stenciled on the wall, the spacing between lines a bit uneven, continues: We know that our country has suffered a lot. We also know we can only prosper by tiding over these hardships. But keep in mind. Draw on lessons, remember disasters.

Relics from the wreckage are reconstructed in “disaster scenes” at theWenchuan Earthquake Museum in Anren “Disaster” is aestheticized through creaky galvanized steel stairwells and deliberately dirty concrete floors. Tall visitors duck under a repeated rhythm of low exposed beams, each emblazoned with the alternating messages of “Be Careful” and “Stay in Line.” Exhibit titles and introductory panels are stenciled directly onto the plain white walls in black spray paint, and the bent re-bar becomes a design motif, forming window screens as well as the lettering that reads “5.12” on the wall. The museum features thousands of smaller relics in standard glass display cases: condolence letters from President Bush and the various foreign Prime Ministers, torn backpacks of fallen schoolchildren, reflective rescue gear, and broken eyeglasses. Throughout the museum, spray-painted statistics on the walls and enlarged photographs offer a wealth of information about the earthquake. The exhibits elucidate details of death tolls, minute-by-minute chronologies of the quake and its aftermath, accounts of rescue missions, and detailed captions for every single relic on display. But through the bent re-bar screens, curious visitors peer into reconstructed ruins. Entire wreckage scenes—fallen beams, broken pots, and all—have

During my visit, some visitors seemed impressed and moved, saying that they were “holding back tears” as they walked through the exhibit. The Wenchuan Museum pays important tribute to the earthquake victims, survivors, and relief efforts, and educates the public about a tragedy covered widely by media but still beyond the comprehension of most. However, it tells too much of the story, too soon. In its earthquake-themed interior design aesthetic and reconstructed ruins, the museum lacks a level of removal and contemplation that a remembrance project begs. Literal but false, it reminds me of Jinli, a newly-developed tourist strip that has “reconstructed” a fictionalized historic neighborhood in the center of Chengdu. Jinli sits on a site of little historic significance, now lined with bars and souvenir stores clad in picturesque traditional wooden architecture, offering visitors a glossy taste of the old Chengdu they never knew. Hereby, at the occasion of the first anniversary of theWenchuan earthquake, my colleagues and I with arduous efforts, opened this museum solidifying history in the form of diary. Back at Beichuan, the government has announced plans to turn the ruins into an open-air national museum and memorial site, while construction continues at Beichuan’s new location fifteen miles away. Tourists will wander the streets of the old town, viewing the preserved relics and curated exhibits and studying the history of the site. But while incense burns at the memorials on the hillside above, Beichuan has prematurely graduated to the status of ancient ruins, viewed largely without sentiment. Visitors stand above Beichuan and gaze in awe as they do at the ancient Shu archaeological sites around the province, curious about an unfamiliar time and place. The obvious disparity between the two, of course, is the time elapsed: two thousand years, versus just over one. Bless China, Bless Sichuan.

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