Exhibit: 23.875000: 57.630033

When a person enters a museum they are separating themselves from the larger society to join a smaller group of individuals seeking an aesthetic experience within the architecture of the museum. After receiving the exhibit, they leave the museum as part of a new sub-community- those who have shared the same experience. The museum itself becomes a 'liminal' space, or place of transition, where people pass intellectually and spiritually from one community to another.(Turner 1961) Unlike other ritual spaces there are no signposts negotiating who belongs to this community or not, it's largely an internalized membership. A church, for example, has members, you are either a member or not. A store or brand allows you to purchase membership into a cultural communitas, you either have money or you do not. The museum is seen as a ritual as Carol Duncan wrote:

    "we think of religious truth as addressed to particular groups of voluntary believers, while secular truth has the status of objective or universal knowledge and functions in our society as higher, authoritative truth. As such, it helps bind the community as a whole into a civic body, identifying its highest values, its proudest memories, and its truest truths."(Duncan 1991)

The ritualized museum experience is therefore a mental and spiritual process of communication between the museum and the audience. Once you see, experience or understand an exhibition, you belong. The museum, as the curator, is intensely aware of the communicative nature of what they do, but the reverse cannot be said of the audience. The audience is largely unaware of the curators voice and instead focuses their gaze on the objects themselves, in effect they are communicating with an invisible partner, visible only through the objects chosen and methods of display.

Marcel Duchamp famously declared a common urinal art because he as an artist decided it was worthy of exhibition, but what is often overlooked is the role of the viewer in determining the artistic merit of a work. As Duchamp himself wrote in a letter to his sister Suzanne:

    I do not believe in painting, in itself. A picture is not made by the painter but by those who look at it and grant it their favors; in other words, there does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing “ there is no exterior sign that explains why a Fra Angelico and a Leonardo are equally 'recognized.'"(Naumann 1982)

The National Gallery of Art's recent Dada exhibition displayed Duchamp's art in a manner that heightened the "resonance" of the objects themselves.(Duncan 1991; Greenblatt 1991) To consumers of art, presentation is part of the experience and a large retrospective could do nothing else but exhibit the objects in a meaningful way.

The unwritten subtext of such a show, as with any exhibition, is that this is an "authoritative" representation of our social memory, a somewhat finalized arbiter of what is considered important and of social value. Visitors who go to museums are seeking a better understanding of a specific event, time, place or an objective confirmation of what is or is not art. Through the physical act of placing an object in a museum, that object gains an aura of legitimacy that this is an important and meaningful object. While the Dada show was not the first museum to show Duchamp's urinal, it effectively builds upon past exhibitions to place his 'ready-made' as a pivotal work in the evolution of art.

Museums are some of the most architecturally experimental and modern of public buildings as the recent Guggenheim in Bilbao demonstrates. The physical building itself is imposing, interesting and unique, all of which can be considered theatrical devices to enhance what one will find inside. The doors of a museum effectively become the delineation between the ordinary and the spectacular. Much like the way a Joseph Cornell curiosity cabinets' walls intensifies each object a museum goes to great lengths to exhibit work to create resonance and wonder in the audience. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain Original version 1917, New York, lost. Photograph by Alfred Steiglitz

For my thesis exhibition I would like to create an exhibition that draws attention to the way things are exhibited, what objects are exhibit worthy and what constitutes a meaningful object. My intention is to focus on the exhibition space as a physical location and to burrow down into the history of the location of the gallery itself. The idea is to focus only on what can be found in the space, either physically or over time, and design an exhibit that treats the space itself as the subject.

By focusing the visitors attention on the physicality of the space, and the layered nature of a landscape I hope to question the idea of whether there can ever be one "truthful" or "beautiful" representation of anything. Something may be truthful or beautiful to you now, in this one space and time, but it won't be truthful to someone else or some other time or to someone else with other expectations.

This will be accomplished by taking the exhibit space, researching the history of the space, it's materials and construction and then de-constructing it and presenting the space itself as worthy of exhibition.

Joseph Cornell, Untitled (The Hotel Eden), 1945. Construction, 15 1/8 X 15 in. X 4 in, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Normally, an artist creates objects and brings them to a space that is declared a place to display works of art. The exhibition of objects creates resonance and wonder when in a museum setting, whether or many objects would not have the same mystique once outside. Thus, the museum itself creates a dialogue about what society deems important and worthy in the form of objects. My idea is to do the opposite, rather than bring in works that I then declare art, I will create objects based on what is found in the space itself. I will not limit myself to just physical objects currently in the space, but will also consider memory as an element, and research what has happened in that space over time.
Background

Other artists who are working in a similar vein would include Hiroshi Sugimoto, Andy Goldsworthy, Rachel Whiteread, Janet Cardiff, Timothy Hawkinson and Ken Aptekar. Sugimoto has photographed in museums to highlight and questions our interpretation of reality. His dioramas at first look like detailed images captured on film from the wild. It's only after close examination that you realize the details is far too crisp and what you are looking at is a staged event. The wax figures he has focused on are based on old master paintings and he has carefully lit them to imitate lighting found in those works. What emerges is a curious mixture of what looks like a real person, who looks like a painting but is actually wax. Sugimoto's work is interesting because he frequently is photographing scenes that do not really exist. For example, his images of theater interiors are not simply a still image of a theater, but what you are witnessing is the effect of 2 hours of a movie and the various diffuse patterns of light generated over that period of time. In reality, the theater was never lit in the way that you see in the photograph. Sugimoto is making the viewer question what is "real" and what is not.

The Japanese have used the word "mitate" to describe a stand-in for the real object. Often the stand-in has as much importance as the original, and I think this is implied in the hypereality depicted in Sugimoto's photography.(Yamaguchi 1991) Andy Goldsworthy creates his artwork by focusing on material in its natural location. In contrast to Sugimoto, Goldsworthy uses "real" materials found in their natural location. By carefully arranging what he finds and photographing it, he creates "resonance" through arrangement and placement.

My interest in Goldsworthy is not as much about nature, but about presentation and technique. Arranged randomly along the ground various leaves and sticks have little or no impact on the viewer, but once Goldsworthy arranges them with purposiveness, they take on a powerful aura. This to me demonstrates the power of even simple arrangement to create meaning, which is something that I would like to explore in my own exhibition.

Timothy Hawkinson is another artist who creates art out of ordinary objects that do extraordinary things. Frequently using his own body as an art supply store, he will construct mechanisms and drawings that turn the museum into a carnival of the senses.

In new media, Janet Cardiff is an artist that incorporates sound from the room into her interactive installations. In Words drawn in water commissioned by the Hirshorn, Cardiff created a multisensory audio walk using layered sound effects as she directs the listener along the mall in Washington DC. Curator Kelly Gordon commented "her soothing whisper is off set by sound effects so vivid, so subtle, so three- dimensional that they challenge participants to distinguish what is and is not 'real.'" Cardiff layers history and sound creating our physical space with our inner space. (Gordon 2005) Rachel Whiteread, Ghost, 1990. Plaster on steel frame, 269 X 355 X 317 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Rachel Whiteread is another artist who interests me because of her work casting interior spaces. By turning negative space into positive space Whiteread makes us aware of the space that we inhabit and to the traces that remain, almost like a memory. Implied in her work is the notion that once a virtual space has been made physical, it is finite, no longer accepting new memories.

Ken Aptekar directly confronts the issue of history and ownership by placing words between images of old master paintings and the viewer. The juxtaposition of text and image in Pink Frick reminds the viewer of the ownership, location and power relationship of the Frick Museum and it's philanthropic benefactor. (Robertson 2005)
Installation

In order to present the viewer with the ultimate paradox, I plan to create an installation that recreates a museum setting with objects that illustrate both real and important facts, and false and misleading facts. This museum would have as its focus several exhibitions of objects that would have no place in a real museum, but would be treated as if they did.

For example, time and use might be represented by the size and shape of images. Larger or longer images to represent the amount of time the land under the gallery was used for agriculture or wooded.

The room would be broken up into spaces that are lit vs. areas in shadow. Sound would change as you move through the space, creating a second aural space. I envision a mixture of video, paintings and built installation. There would be partially obstructed views that encourage the viewer to move through the space in order to activate the various props.

When an artist paints a simulation of reality, he is really depicting a different reality than what is truly possible. It is the artists hope that his vision of reality is more 'real than real' and transports the viewer out of the real world and into his particular vision of the world. In much the same way, museums are an 'unreal' space where real things are exhibited but carry more meaning than they would have if they were not in the museum space. The museum does everything they can to 'heighten' the sensation through display, lighting, aesthetic and historical contextualization.

Through my own use of space, artistic, physical and historical, my goal will be to create an exhibition environment that challenges the viewers' assumptions about where they are and what they are looking at.
Bibliography

Turner, Victor Witter. Ndembu divination: its symbolism & techniques. New York: Humanities Press, 1961.

Duncan, Carol. "Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship." Exhibiting cultures: the poetics and politics of museum display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. 88-104.

Naumann, Francis, and Marcel Duchamp. "Affectueusement, Marcel: Ten Letters from Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp and Jean Crotti" Archives of American Art Journal 22.4 (1982): 2-19.

Gordon, Kelly. Interview with the Artist, Washington: Smithsonian Institution, July 2005. http://hirshhorn.si.edu/exhibitions/description.asp?Type=&ID=20

Greenblatt, Stephen. "Resonance and Wonder." Exhibiting cultures: the poetics and politics of museum display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. 42-57.

Yamaguchi, Masao. "The Poetics of Exhibition in Japanese Culture." Exhibiting cultures: the poetics and politics of museum display. 1991. 57-68.
Robertson, Jean, and Craig McDaniel. Themes of contemporary art: visual art after 1980. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.