The latest offering in the Holmes Gallery at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, “Embracing Space and Color: Art On & Off the Wall,” has a long title; the better, perhaps, to try to unite the diverse concepts that Curator Jay Williams tries to draw into it.
The themes that crowd the show include (but are not limited to) studio craft, painterly abstraction, assemblage, kinetic art, installation, interactive art, optical illusion and art about art.
Williams asserts that the works he included in the exhibition exemplify “new ways of making paintings and sculpture that break down the barriers between the viewer and the work of art.” These barriers, Williams says, include the gilded frames and pedestals of “traditional” presentation.
Still, the mind of the seasoned gallery goer may yearn for a theoretical frame around the varied collection of objects in “Embracing Space,” in order to understand their relationship to art historical precedent, to a particular era or school of thought, or simply to each other.
And when Williams writes that “these artworks may be experienced not only visually, but physically”
it is hard to know what he means.
All of the works in the show support the old-fangled notion that the goal of visual art is to engage the sense of sight (and thence, perhaps, the emotions, the imagination and the intellect). Despite Williams’ promise that we will experience the show physically, none of the works are intended to be touched in any way.
The only work not limited to the visual is a kinetic sculpture, John Douglas Powers’ “Ialu (Field of Reeds),” that emits a noise that sounds like a thousand tiny voices cheering. It’s well-crafted, it’s mesmerizing – but the piece is so different from anything else in the gallery that I wondered why it wasn’t exhibited in the context of the “Kinetics: The Poetics of Movement” show that opened in the museum’s Titelman Gallery last fall.
That said, some of the pieces in Embracing Space” will re-engage the way you look at an artwork, and several of them will delight and entertain.
One of these is Ralph Hemlick’s “Disorders of Magnitude (Portrait of Werner Heisenberg)” in which a group of devices, including measuring sticks, magnifying lenses, slide rules and clocks, hang suspended in seeming disarray from an overhead grid made of carpenter’s levels. A red dot on the gallery floor at the long end of the arrangement shows the visitor exactly where to stand for the mass of floating objects to coalesce into a portrait of Heisenberg, the theoretical physicist known for the uncertainty principle.
Then there are Devorah Sperber’s sculptural pictures. Using spools of colorful sewing thread arranged in a grid on the wall, these recreate upside-down, pixelated versions of famous artworks, including Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” Leonardo da Vinci’s self-portrait and Vermeer’s “The Music Lesson.”
A glass ball mounted on a slender stand in front of each art artwork serves as a simple lens through which the visitor can see the picture right-side up. Thus viewed, the mind supplies details that the rudimentary images of the icons merely suggest. It’s a fascinating foray into the connection between vision, mind and experience, and it’s just really, really cool. My money is on Sperber’s homage to “American Gothic” being the artwork that visitors recall most vividly from the show.
What kept me musing on the use of optical illusion in art was a colorful shaped painting by George D. Green, hidden behind a wall at the very back of the gallery. It is one of two works from the permanent collection that Williams chose to display in “Embracing Space.” It is “not officially part of the show,” he said, but was added to fill in a gap left in the exhibition space by a change in plans.
The show, says Williams, was inspired by a quote from Robert Rauschenberg included in a 1959 catalogue for “Sixteen Americans,” a group show at the Museum of Modern Art: “A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric.”
Rauschenberg’s full statement referred to the art works he called “combines,” because they combine painting, sculpture and collage. They included “Satellite,” a painting that sported crocheted doilies, newspaper comics, a stuffed pheasant and, yes, a pair of socks.
Nowadays, the prohibitive insurance value and fragility of Rauschenberg’s combines make them unlikely to be loaned to a small museum like the VBMA. (In fact, a major work Williams wanted by Sam Gilliam was not available because shipping was too costly.)
So, to provide the show with touchstones for Rauschenberg’s celebrated statement, Williams gives us two pieces from the artist’s Hoarfrost and Jammers series of the mid-1970s.
In both series Rauschenberg created free-hanging fabric collages that are tacked to the wall by their top corners. The Hoarfrost series employs imagery transferred from magazines and other printed media onto white fabrics. The piece in the show includes collage elements – a cardboard box and dog chow bag – to illustrate the artist’s use of non-art objects in art.
The Jammers series forgoes imagery to concentrate on the sensuous colors and textures of the Indian silks of which they are composed.
The works suggest paintings that have come not only out of their “gilded frames” but off their wooden stretchers to let gravity drape and air currents stir the material.
In proximity to the Rauschenbergs hangs the large and spectacular “New World Map” by Nigeria-based artist El Anatsui. It is composed of the heavy foil found around the necks of wine bottles, a material from everyday life of which Rauschenberg would have approved. Folded into small squares, rectangles, and lozenges and linked together with wire, the thousands of foil pieces form a glimmering, draped mass of fabric that recalls the colors and geometric designs of African kente cloth.
One of the more interesting artists to be included in the show’s tenuous theme is Sam Gilliam, who is represented by two works: an untitled painting on fabric from 1967 and a painted wood construction from 2009.
Those works made me wonder if the exhibition would have been more coherent if, instead of relying on Rauschenberg, the starting point had been Sam Gilliam and the Color Field School with which he is identified. Through his long career, the 81-year-old Gilliam has thoroughly embraced art both on and off the wall, with his stretched, draped, wrapped, bevel-edged, and quilted paintings.
I could see as the exhibit’s centerpiece the piece that got away from the current show: one of the huge draped paintings for which Gilliam earned a place in art history back in the 1960s.
Perhaps such a show might be in the museum’s future?
Embracing Space and Color: Art on and Off the Wall continues through June 7.