Don't read this.
No, seriously.
One last chance: Go see the exhibition Before Reflection Begins at
Brown University's David Winton Bell Gallery before it closes December 30. See
it, listen to it, dip your fingers into it. Then, if you like, think about it,
discuss it, read these comments, digest the show's thoughtful catalog.
This exhibition is an elegantly realized collective statement about the
primary importance -- which is not to say primacy -- of experience over
intellectualization. Five works by five artists, five opportunities to value
and trust our naïve initial responses to art, to pause and perhaps smile
before we consider what we're smiling (or frowning or wondering) about.
The exhibition as a whole makes a statement and request by its title that the
individual works do not, at least not explicitly. Not one artist here has left
their piece untitled, has relinquished the opportunity to take the lead in
assigning meaning. So unless you're an adamant New Critic, you're likely to
note the creator's few extra words about the creation and take them
seriously.
So, in the spirit of the show, I made a point of taking in the works for a
while before reading their titles and seeing where the artists would lead us.
(I say this as an unabashed museum info junkie, who never passes up a guided
tour tape or title card -- the latter too often before looking at the
painting.) Good decision.
Entering the dimly lit, high-ceilinged Bell Gallery is a distinct sixth
experience of the exhibition. Only three works are visible in the large, dark
space, so it's as if they each have a room of their own. All the pieces are
white against the black. The corner at the right is filled by a large amorphous
shape, looking like a canvas-covered amoeba, as inviting as an orgy-scale
bean-bag chair. (Even if you never read the titles, it's important to know that
you are invited to touch, sniff, lie, sprawl or otherwise interact with these
works, as impulse and self-consciousness permit.) Besides being filled with
what feel through the fabric like Styrofoam peanuts, Ernesto Neto's "I also
happen when you sleep" (2001) contains two fist-sized pouches. Poke your hand
in one and you can feel some small, smooth stones.
Near the middle of the room, further isolated by a spotlight, is a small
rectangular slab on the floor. It looks to be white stone, but when I stooped
and peered close I detected a glint at one edge that I took to indicate an
enamel surface. When I touched it, magic happened. What my mind had told me was
solid allowed my forefinger to dip into it. Startled, I splashed a few drops of
milk that surface tension had made bulge upward. Wolfgang Laib's "Milkstone"
(1982/88) offers that delightful discovery, a brief exclamation point of
cognitive dissonance, as he merges the two physical states. What a marvelous
way to trump the visual surprise of trompe l'oeil with a tactile dimension.
I couldn't come uninformed to Valeka Soares's "Fainting Couch" (2001), since
when I entered the gallery I saw the figurative pulleys and gears that make it
work: rows of strongly fragrant lilies that are normally enclosed within. The
size of a coffin, mirror-surfaced all around, the piece has perforations on
top, so that when you lie on top, your head on a white cylindrical bolster, a
rich scent drifts up. The fainting couch was an important cultural prop in the
Victorian era, when the myth of feminine delicacy was considered a fair swap
for personal power for women. The contrasts here are exquisite: the delicate
pillow and evocations of a vanity mirror and perfumed atmosphere, but a cold,
hard surface to lie upon.
Through a doorway is a room, a room out of a dream. What looks to be a large,
flat cushion fills most of the floor space, but as with "Milkstone," our
assumption deceives us: rather than being soft to the touch, it feels like
marble. Its wave-like pattern is echoed two-dimensionally, white on white, on a
wall in which a window looks into a similar room. The second room is doorless;
it can be entered only visually, like a dream. "Blushed . . . again (a place
revisited)" (2001) is by Marisa Telleria Diez.
Each of the above works has a focus of intention that concentrates our
responses. The same can't be said for the fifth component of the show, the
lobby installation "roll-run-hit-run-roll" (20001) by Jin Soo Kim, which
dissipates its impression by presenting several offerings at once. Sound
connects its components. There are low, steel tunnels, one which contains
several ticking clocks, another with a speaker that occasionally, softly, plays
the sound of breaking light bulbs. "Bouquets" of glowing bulbs, some flashing,
lie in two clumps. You are invited to walk on a mat composed of lead sash
weights, to make them grind together.
Make of these art works what you will. Before Reflection Begins
wouldn't have it any other way.
Human touch
Pity the poor philosopher, yearning to delve into the essence of experience.
Poor Martin Heidegger, for a 20th-century example, with his fetish of "das
Ding an sich," the thing unto itself. Oh, to derive meanings before our
cultural and psychological aversions and predilections tamper with them.
An age-old concern. Back in the French Enlightenment, the lust for naked
experience was enough to make Jean-Jacques Rousseau envy "the noble savage" of
primitive societies.
As the Beatles put it, "Get back, get back to where you once belonged."
Enter Before Reflection Begins, the current art show at Brown's Bell
Gallery. It invites us to stop for a moment when we first engage with the five
art works presented. The title of the exhibition quotes French philosopher
Maurice Merleau-Ponty who, like all good phenomenologists, touted the value of
deriving meaning from perceptions "before reflection begins," from felt
responses before cognitive ones.
When I entered the gallery, Bell curator Vesala Sretenovic was placing an
armload of still-closed lilies into the base of the "Fainting Couch," poking
their stems into the green blocks of Styrofoam that florists use. The scent of
these fresh buds mingled with the deeper aroma of the gone-by blossoms in the
sliding drawer.
"This is something that I've been thinking about for years," Sretenovic said
of the show. "How do we understand the world from our senses? What is that
experience before the thought begins?
"When you meet somebody, you don't know why you like that person, on whatever
level, you just think about it afterwards," she continued. "Or you watch a
beautiful sunset and it has an effect on you. What is it that made such an
effect? Then you'll step back and think about it."
Understand, Sretenovic stressed, that while the show is giving our pre-verbal
responses to these art works priority, she is not dismissing cognitive
response. After all, she is an academic. "I was trained as an art historian
with the different kinds of theoretical background and my mind does function on
that level. But this is almost a conflict or a contradictory side -- not just
to me but I think to lots of humans -- when you're fighting between logic,
reasons, and feelings, emotions; trying to understand something and letting
your feelings just be."
Sretenovic has been the gallery's curator for about three years, previously
working at Brooklyn Museum of Art and elsewhere.
Art criticism and art theory today is filled with jargon, empty statements,
and empty meanings, she pointed out. That hardly helps communication, which art
not in a vacuum attempts to do.
"I think a lot of people are put off by that," she said of jargon and
obfuscation. "And I guess my hope was to do an exhibition that would free
people from analysis, from theoretical statements and theoretical explanations
or from over-analytical approaches or conceptualizing. And try to invite people
to -- like myself -- to feel, be and trust their feelings. Let that be a first
step. Not to exclude thinking, theoretizing, contextualizing -- that is very
valid and I'm for that -- but not as a first step."
So this art show is an invitation for people to relax -- they're not going to
be disqualified by not having a theoretical background. A feeling can't be
invalid.
The curator smiled as she thought about that opportunity, the interactive
invitation of the show. "For a hundred years we've been told not to touch. All
of a sudden we said touch, please, do, come close, touch, feel me, hear me,
spend time with me. And people don't quite know what to make of it."
Marcie Muscat was the gallery sitter that day, stationed behind the desk at
the door. "Some are very hesitant," the Brown senior said of visitors,
"especially with the `Milkstone.' It's interesting to watch people bend over,
look at it, then blow on it, but they're afraid to touch it. And this one" --
she pointed to the Neto piece, which looks like an enormous beanbag. "When they
read on the wall that they can sit on it, they kind of look back at me first to
see if it's really true. Very few people actually get on top of it. They'll
just sit on the edge." (The two works she mentioned are the only ones not made
expressly for this exhibit.)
Ironic. This show is attempting to take High Art off its pedestal and remind
us of its human scale, yet there's that resistance. But as Sretenovic points
out in her catalog essay, the Greek word aisthesis means
"sense-experience," a far cry from the purely intellectual, judgmental realm
that aesthetics, the study of beauty, has come to mean in Western culture.
The five components of Before Reflection Begins aren't so much visual
offerings as experiential opportunities. They are not there to make sense of as
much as chances to come to your senses.
-- B.R.
Issue Date: December 13 - 19, 2001
