Sunday, April 13, 2003  
Feedback
New This Week
Around Town
Music
Film
Art
Theater
News & Features
Food & Drink
Astrology
 
Home
New this week
Editors' Picks
Listings
News & Features
Music
Film
Art
Books
Theater
Dance
Television
Food & Drink
Restaurant Menus
Archives
Letters
Personals
Classifieds
Adult
Astrology
Download MP3s


The Providence Phoenix
The Portland Phoenix
FNX Radio Network



Half fiction, whole truth
Carsten Höller at the ICA, plus Joseph Kosuth at the Gardner
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

"Carsten Höller: Half Fiction"
At the Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston Street, through April 27.

"Joseph Kosuth: Centennial Project"
At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 280 the Fenway, through April 6.

In his first major US museum exhibit, Carsten Höller, the accomplished Belgian-born, and now Stockholm-based conceptual artist, is represented by three separate installations at the ICA — four if you count the video loop on a pair of virtual-reality goggles on the mezzanine level. By far the most important of the installations begins so unassumingly (first floor, straight ahead, just as you enter the building) that you easily might not know it’s there — even when you’re part of its beginning stage. A small wall sign, the kind we’ve learned signals the presence of a work of art, says simply, CHOICE CORRIDOR, SHEETROCK AND FRAMING. Since there’s nothing to see except an empty stretch of a narrow, white hallway, the sign seems superfluous. Maybe it’s always been there.

Puzzling over the wall text, and with no place else to go, you’re obliged to walk the gangplank of the narrow white hallway. I hesitated: the hallway looks like it has no exit, a dead-end space, a pointless traverse. Why bother? You walk anyway, and when you’ve made it to the far end — maybe 20 yards away from the starting point — you discover it’s not a dead end after all. There’s been a doorway all along, concealed on the right, virtually invisible until you’re standing before it.

You enter the darkness. Enough ambient light makes the first few steps possible, but only long enough to be confronted with an inner wall. To continue the journey, you’ve got no choice but to run your hand along the wall to know which way to proceed — because at this point, not a particle of light penetrates where you’re standing.

No sooner have you figured out that the only way to ambulate is by groping sheetrock (and suspecting that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea to begin with) than a handrail appears at waist level. Doubts relieved: you’ve been provided for — somebody knows what he’s doing. You move hesitatingly along in the deepest, most uninterrupted darkness — and in my case, silence, since I was alone — you’ve ever experienced.

Again, no sooner has the handrail come to your rescue than it’s gone; another turn, another wall to grope, only now you’re further along, deeper in, lost. You reach in the increasingly sickening blackness to the other side of the passage; it lies just beyond arm’s reach. A few blind flailings of your other hand and a handrail appears on the opposite wall. You’re in a maze; you’re not sure whether it’s getting narrower. Only force of habit and a belief it must be coming to an end makes you persevere. I start reminding myself how I’m not claustrophobic, how I like Poe stories, how I didn’t mind the CAT scan.

With the next turn in the wall, panic. How do I get out? What if somebody has a knife? They wouldn’t let anything happen to the art critic, would they? I know I can escape the way I came in. I quickly retrace my steps, familiar, in the blackness that unrelentingly forbids even a pinprick of light, with the shifting handrails, the zigzagging walls. In a couple of moments (hadn’t I been in there longer, much longer?) I’m out, sweating, heartbeat accelerated, embarrassed, but only slightly.

Höller talks about his corridors (the first, mentioned in the show’s catalogue, dates back to 2001) and his work in general as concerning itself with doubt and uncertainty. Others, no less accurately, talk about the artist’s deliberate induction of fear. What interests me is the point at which Höller’s art qualifies as both ancient and new in its delivery of an unassailable, dramatic experience. It’s hard to imagine anybody, in the industrialized world at least, moving through Choice Corridor without a moment’s hesitation, a fleeting sense of vulnerability, a stark awareness of never having been in such ineluctable darkness before.

Memorable art has always changed our perceptions through its ability to make the familiar seem new — and it’s in that sense that Höller is a traditionalist. Who would imagine an empty passage built in a familiar, limited space could take us by surprise? Höller can be seen as belonging to another ancient tradition in Western art, one that connects the caves at Lascaux to the cathedral at Chartres to Guernica — namely, in the physicality of the experience he induces. We’re peculiarly sensitive to our bodies in space when the lights go out.

Of course, what’s different about Choice Corridor from the animals of Lascaux or the stained glass of Chartres or the distended figures in Picasso is that while they’re about sensory stimulation, about form, Höller’s Choice Corridor is about the opposite — about sensory deprivation, about absence. Not until Duchamp did Western art embrace nothingness, and with Choice Corridor Höller becomes Duchamp’s heir. Instead of turning a urinal upside down, however, Höller turns a room inside out.

Nothingness carries over into Höller’s other installations, my favorite being Slide #6, a steel-and-plexiglass chute that winds from the ICA’s third floor and down its central atrium to the basement — a cross between a playground slide and the piping you see attached to the windows of buildings being excavated. Patrons are invited to enter Slide #6 at the upper level and be funneled to a steel bench below. Höller succeeded at surprising me a second time — it wasn’t until I saw bodies whizzing by that I realized the slide was meant to be used.

Less successful was the less surprising. Transparent Black/Green Sphere looks like an architect’s model for a Christmas-tree ornament — for a tree the size of the Prudential Building. Spherical, open, over six feet tall, banded in geometrical cut-out patterns of shiny acrylic, it’s an elephantine, space-age whiffle ball. Intended to suggest a form of transport, it never gets past cool.

Similarly pleasant and limited is The Forest, Höller’s virtual-reality video that you take in through a pair of high-tech glasses attached to all kinds of cutting-edge machinery, while seated in a metal folding chair. The video itself is bilaterally asymmetrical; each eye gets a different and changing camera angle on the same scene. Maybe the trouble with The Forest lies in the fact that what it depicts — snow falling on pine trees — enjoys the canned, syrupy appeal of a postcard from Zurich, one you just happen to plug in.

Far less pleasant (and far more successful — Höller is at his best when he’s least agreeable) is Light Corner: two walls studded with nearly 2000 incandescent light bulbs that flicker like a strobe. (A warning sign, one to take heed of, indicates the work’s ability to set off seizures in those so disposed.) The room on the upper level where Light Corner is installed proves immediately painful to enter; the light assaults with such force, I had to avert my eyes and then quickly close them — which, say the catalogue notes, is the point, for it induces multicolored afterimages. Leaving it, I couldn’t help but wish the drama of Light Corner hadn’t been attenuated by the manner of its installation. The fact that you see reflections of its bright pulses the moment you enter the building — the only place they don’t penetrate is the inner recesses of Choice Corridor — allows us to anticipate and thereby shield ourselves from aspects of its power.

A delightful coda to "Half Fiction" appears just beyond the exit ramp of Slide #6, where a small antechamber houses a beautiful, bizarre collaboration between the MIT Media Lab and the ICA’s Media Department. It’s called Artifacts of the Presence Era. The installation consists of two wall projections. One is generated by a small, operating video camera planted at the building’s entrance; since few people were entering the day I visited, little was happening in it. The other projection looks like a fantastic seismographic reading; we learn from the wall text that indeed it is a kind of depository, all right. Through the wizardry of the scientists involved, a way of visualizing the images — and, best of all, the sounds — of what takes place in the gallery is recorded as a series of layers — colorful, strangely orderly, the Grand Canyon as recent history. Imagine.

A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO the administrators of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum solved an important riddle: how do you maintain a standing collection and at the same time generate new interest?

The answer some inspired soul came up with has since become the Gardner’s outstanding artist-in-residence program. Artists from all fields — they’ve included photographers, glass blowers, installation artists, and musicians, as well as a pair who succeed at manipulating photosynthesis to make grass grow into photographs — are invited to draw on the unchanging permanent collection to create work of their own. The Gardner’s innovation has proven a model for standing collections nationwide (such as New York’s Frick Collection) to inventively recreate themselves and thereby attract new audiences — deservedly.

Unfortunately, this year’s project by conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth — which celebrates the Gardner’s centennial — turns out to be, by turns, pretentious, confused, and underwhelming. Part one of Kosuth’s endeavor has him place gray velvet cloths of his own making (normally they’re covered with simple light-protecting fabric) on various glass display cases throughout the museum. Onto those cloths he’s sewn phrases from Isabella Gardner’s letters. The phrases themselves don’t relate to the objects below them; they aren’t aphoristic or otherwise witty; in fact, they’re typically hard to make any sense of because they’re entirely without context.

Another part of Kosuth’s tripartite project is a kind of temple of Isabella’s relations with Bernard Berenson, the man who helped her buy lots of art, and James McNeill Whistler, the painter whom Gardner collected. (The exhibit’s full title is "Artist, Curator, Collector: James McNeill Whistler, Bernard Berenson, and Isabella Stewart Gardner — Three Locations in the Creative Process, a Centennial Project by Joseph Kosuth.") In a small room designated for the artist-in-residence’s exhibit, Kosuth has had the walls painted with the words they exchanged by mail. The words run vertically and horizontally, in various typefaces and at varying sizes, layered and proximate and endless — they’re like rock strata. You feel like you’ve entered Babel. Not only is the layout uninviting, but when you go to the effort of figuring out who wrote what to whom, the content turns out to be pedestrian, humorless, and banal — who visited whom for lunch, how Isabella procured something or other for a bargain.

Finally, Kosuth has installed neon lights in the form of words on one of the exterior walls of the museum. Purportedly drawn from a lecture by Whistler, they’re as self-important and enervating as the rest of this tiresome show, with phrases like "establishing with due weight," "unimportant reputations," and "expensive."

Issue Date: February 13 - 20, 2003

Back to the Art table of contents.








  home | feedback | about the phoenix | find the phoenix | advertising info | privacy policy | the masthead | work for us
 © 2003 Phoenix Media Communications Group
All rights reserved