Wrangled up a pair of tickets to the sneaky-peek of the new ICA last night.  The new facility has no relation that I can see to the old ICA.  It's like a mouse growing up to be a mastodon.  The new facility is impressive for its size and its potential as a performance and education space.  Whether it lives up to its potential, and all the hype it's been getting, we'll have to see.  

The first major exhibition in the new space, the aptly named Super Vision, is a mixed bag.  It's a show about, well, as you might imagine, seeing.  On the macro and micro levels, with the aid of computers and microscopes and satellites.  In theory, it's the perfect subject to inaugurate a building that's dedicated to vision, to seeing.  

But the pun in the show's title goes beyond what the organizers intended, I think.  The exhibition is highly supervised, with ridiculously over-explanatory "text panels" and ICA art-harpies around every corner waiting to pounce on you if you look at an artwork the "wrong" way.  Museum-goers are a pretty educated lot on the whole, and don't need so much supervision, especially not the degree you find in "Super Vision."

All museums are, in essence, an ongoing three-way dialogue among artist, art curator, and art "spectator."  Contemporary art is often engaging and interactive, inviting the spectator in, teasing, sometimes taunting, asking intriguing questions the spectator is moved to meditate on.  In the context of contemporary art, art curators, especially, need to show restraint.  They play the role of host,facilitators of a sometimes far-flung, free-form exchange of experience and ideas between artist and spectator. Curators should be listening, not waiting to talk.

But too often organizers of exhibitions impose themselves on the process. They bloviate from their text panels, illustrated guides, and audio headsets,describing, contextualizing, and "explaining" works, often seemingly obviating the need for the works or the spectators themselves in the process.  Even group shows framed by an idea like "Super Vision" don't have to be over-explained.  It's art, not rocket science.  If the concept is good and the works fit it well, the works themselves and the experience of them provide a provocative and moving narrative. So shut the fuck up and let the works speak for themselves.

"Super Vision" is an excellent example of bad, bossy curating.  You know, "curate" comes from the Latin curare, "to take care of".  A curator is a guardian. According to my friends at dictionary.com, in Louisiana civil law a "curator" is "a person appointed by a court ... to care for the person or property of someone mentally incapable of doing so."  And that definition is close to how some art curators seem to think of artists and spectators.  The latter are far too often treated with condescension or flat-out contempt. This comes across in "Super Vision" in the compulsion to explain away the wonder in the process of seeing. 

Sometimes the curator's suspicion that spectators won't "get it" without a lengthy explanation is justified, of course.  But this also reflects poor choices on the part of the curator. 

In "Super Vision" some of the video-oriented material is not particularly compelling, in or out of context.  Mona Hatoum's colonoscopy video, Corps étranger (Foreign Body), a work emphasizing another aspect of the act of seeing ...


...which was projected onto the floor of a small booth, is a case in point—Mona, honey, Katie Couric did it on national TV, and she did it better (and by the way, if you ever do a sequel, take the Colon Blow first, please).  

Ms. Hatoum does have one advantage over Katie Couric, street-credwise: she is Palestinian.  So I was sure there was some subtle subtext here, wedged in her cecum or sigmoid.  Unfortunately, by the time I arrived in her colon I had stopped bothering to read the descriptive placards littering the gallery walls.  But a cursory internet search for commentary on Corps étranger yielded valuable insights: "The viewing chamber...allows the viewer to stand at the perimeter of the image, back facing the wall, in the classic pose of a victim. Movement is severely restricted, and communal proximity to other viewers also complicates the experience of intimacy." (Italics mine.) My Google search also turned up the obligatory references to Jacques Lacan, whose "mirror stage" is...

...the crucial moment of self-recognition for the infant as, when catching sight of itself in the mirror, it perceives the self as a unified whole for the first time. For Lacan this was a natural rite of passage in the formation of an individual's identity. Within the charged environment of [Hatoum's] circular chamber the implosive drive of 'Corps etranger' takes its audience through the looking glass. It involves them in an alternative rite of passage, one which combines experiences which are both frightening and moving, and from which they emerge irrevocably changed.

Personally, I had to run right to the john, and had an epic if not quite life-altering BM after viewing a couple minutes of Corps étranger.  If only I'd had my camcorder with me.  Instant art. 

But seriously, the question is, is any of the malarkey quoted above self-evident, and without explicit reference to it does anything profound or significant actually happen for the viewer?  Does the piece really have the power to evoke what the artist and commentators claim?  Or are they making specious assumptions about their audience and imposing meanings that their work alone is unable to convey? 

What Hatoum and her commentators are suggesting, of course, is that we, the viewers, will invariably experience catharsis, if unconsciously, when confronted with these images in this space.  I did not stick around for the grand finale, and don't know anyone who did, so I can't vouch for that, personally*.  

Which brings us to another vital question: does the piece itself merit the degree of attention and thought it would take to eek out an epiphany form it?  Seems like an awful lot of work to me, especially when there's real, accessible, powerfully executed art to be seen elsewhere in the gallery.  As I stood watching others in the booth, going on their own fantastic journey through Ms. Hatoum's intestinal tract, I noted an average attention span of about twelve seconds before they had had enough. 

Lesson: You can stick your head up your own arse—we all do at times—but don't expect others to stick their heads up your arse, too.  Ain't gonna happen.  Even in an art museum, where folks have their guard down, and are more gullible than usual.  The only exception is if you're Katie Couric. 

Moving along now. 

I was pleased to see an ambient piece by James Turrell, master of light and space, whose ongoing Roden Crater project has long fascinated me, but dismayed to see an attendant in the room barking orders at viewers—"You can stick your hand or your head in, but don't touch the edges!"—kinda killed the mystery and the mood for me.  Nor do I think an interloping art-harpy was part of Turrell's vision for his work.  The viewer is a fundamental part of a piece like this, and the process of discovery of not only a quality of light but your body's reaction to it is not secondary—this process is the piece.  It's a performance piece—the viewer's performance piece. 

You can be sure that all of this was explained, more or less, on the placard outside the little room which contained the piece, but was then totally undermined in its execution.  People walked in, were pounced on by an ICA art-harpy, told what they could and could not do, were then hovered over, and further harped on, told the piece was fragile and reminded not to touch it, and finally fled the room without having experienced the effect that had presumably merited the work's inclusion in the show in the first place.  Turrell's stuff is all about altered states, light and perception as a spiritual exercise.  You got the idea at "Super Vision," but you're there to actually experience it, not the idea of it.

These are just a couple examples of how curators failed to find a way to facilitate a fruitful dialogue between artists and spectators.  That failure actually takes a number of forms. 

Some  failures are the fault of artist and media.  It is particularly hard to carry off video installations that look anywhere near as dazzling as they do through an expert photographer's lens.  Video installations are seldom real successes in their execution.  This is partly because of inevitable limitations of space, but it's also due to the simple fact that we already have the perfect facility—the cinema—for viewing film and video.  Is there something more profound in film projected onto the gallery wall, or as in Ms. Hatoum's piece, onto the floor?  The observation that contexts/surroundings change meaning, a mainstay of art at least since Duchamp, is by now thoroughly hackneyed and utterly banal.  We get it. 

But artists have been repackaging and reselling Duchamp's Fountain for nearly a hundred years.  Basically by taking something commonplace and hanging it on a gallery wall (or projecting it onto a gallery floor).  Curators and commentators provide ad copy for them.  That copy, in the form of the placard afixed to the wall next to the work it seeks to describe, has become as elaborate as a white lie that's gotten way out of hand. And the more obviously contrived and bereft of craft the piece it describes is, the more outlandishly ornate the explanation of it must be.

Fact is, a work of art, especially a work of "contemporary art," is like a joke—if you have to explain the punch-line, it's not a very good one.  And the more you explain, the worse it gets. 

Take a large-scale piece by Anish Kapoor—his Sky Mirror at Rockefeller Center or Cloud Gate in Chicago's Millennium Park.  They are comfortably dissensual, and need no justification.  They are immediately recognizable and have an immediate impact.  You get them without having to reduce and contain them with art-jargon gibberish about "identity" and "the imperialism of eye."  They evoke wonder, and a pleasure that is purely aesthetic—a pleasure in form, not content. 

Kapoor's public art cuts out the middleman and speaks directly to the spectator, in the spectator's language, to the spectator's experience of the world.      

So the ICA's two-pronged approach to dampening the excitement of discovery so vital to the contemporary art experience involves over-serious, condescending "explanations" of works on display, and eagle-eyed art-harpies everywhere acting like your mother with a new living room set.  You know how it is for the first couple of months.  You have to go through the decontamination chamber before she'll let you sit on the new sofa.  The problem is, in so insistently justifying and vigilantly guarding their investments, they've missed the point of the exercise.  They need to lighten up, big time, and find a better way to bring the creative process of the artist and the creative process of the "spectator" together. 

Because, like Duchamp once said: "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."
_________________________________

*I would, of course, be happy to publish comments by anyone who "emerged" from Corps étranger "irrevocably changed." And let me take this opportunity to urge all men over fifty who may be reading this to have a yearly rectal exam to check for colorectal and prostate cancer. You should also have a stool guaiac test done every year and flexible sigmoidoscopy every 3 - 5 years. Patients at high risk for colon cancer—those with long-standing ulcerative colitis, prior colorectal cancer, prior large colorectal adenomas and strong family histories of colon cancer—should be screened periodically with colonoscopy.