From the Blind Woman at MOCAD's New Show: The Curator Speaks

Let's get the disclaimers out of the way:
   1) This is not a review of the exhibition.
   2) I know very little about art.
   3) I am not literally blind, although I would see better if I wore my glasses.
   4) I can't draw, paint, or sculpt.
   5) I have great admiration and respect for those who do, in spite of anything I say in the rest of this    post.
   6) I have been to every show at MOCAD, most of them several times. Even though I don't usually get it, I am fascinated and keep going back.

The quotes in bold type are from the talk that Anthony Huberman, the curator of the show, gave on Saturday, February 6th.

"The ability to unknow"
The new show at MOCAD is titled, "For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn't there".  I can't tell you what it's about, because it's a show full of pieces that are like reading tea leaves (spoiler alert-there is a piece that is literally someone reading coffee grounds), or using a Ouji board, or reading Rorschach blots..... they are all about you, and what you see in them. It is a meta-exhibit....an exhibit about the nature of exhibits themselves, and the nature of our perceptions of them.

No photos are permitted inside...so I took pictures outside. These are the only windows that open onto the exhibition space. They create a great graphic pattern inside on a sunny day.

For me, this exhibit was like falling back down the rabbit hole that I first encountered in high school French, writing about Magritte. I did not realize at the time that it was Duchamps who had lifted the lid off the rabbit hole in modern art, decades earlier than Magritte. The exhibition catalog does a wonderful job of wandering through the many different philosophers and artists who have worked this angle over the centuries.

 **See footnote for source and fair use rationale**

Above is the 1929 work by Henri Magritte that introduced me to the conundrum of modern art. (It says, "This is not a pipe.") Its title, "The Treachery of Images" seems like a descendant of the quote that is the MOCAD show's title, in the way that racehorses of the same lineage share elements of their names.

I walked thru the exhibition several times, as I usually do at MOCAD. The first time, I move through quickly, looking for the pieces that I'm drawn to and ignoring those that don't call to me. I'm looking for the ones that I can fall into...that I have to step within inches of, careful not to touch my nose to them or trip on them...then I have to step back and look at the big picture again...then a reexamination of the details to see what I have missed. Sometimes, I find a piece that makes me sit or lay down on the floor next to it, caught in its spell. I want to climb inside it like a lover. 

I stopped for a while at Rachel Harrison's Voyage of the Beagle, a series of portraits that suggest they could be interchangeably affixed to her nearby freestanding columns of different heights, your very own mix-and-match art people.

 Then, I came upon The Annunciation, by Jimmy Raskin. I had found true love. It is one of the bigger, splashier works in the show, with size, color, texture, shape, graphic qualities, and even sparkles. I heart sparkles.  It is inspired by Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and an imagined battle between an eagle and a donkey. Oh, and it has bunny ears.

After a time with the bunny ears, I sat and read more about the exhibit and the different pieces. Usually I learn something from this step that pushes me to go back and look at something I've missed, or take a second look at something that didn't fully capture my attention the first time through. Here, it was the last work of the exhibit that stopped me in my tracks, and made me begin to think instead of react. (On a second visit, I stopped at this piece again. I remembered it as a "poem on page" kind of piece. Guess what it was? The exhibition catalog. See disclaimers 2 and 3.)

"A series of juxtapositions and proximities that leaves the viewer with a richer history and understanding"

I went back to the beginning of the show, a literal dark room, and closed my eyes. Now I am a blind man in a dark room. How do I find the cat? I found myself thinking about a series of other things.... if I were a blind man, what would my experience of this exhibit be? What would be art to me when so much of a gallery experience is visual?

 How tightly are seeing and knowing connected in most of us? I found myself thinking of the blind cat that lives at my workplace. She may not have eyes, but she can certainly see- in a different way. She finds her way around seamlessly, using her other senses. Her eyes cannot play tricks on her, and she would easily perceive that there was no other cat in the room. And there is a work in the show that is a guy asking his cat what it thinks of a painting. She would totally get that. To us, it just sounds like, "Miaow".

"I don't think of an exhibition as an explanation"

After exploring the show, I listened to the curator give an erudite, sometimes funny, and enlightening talk about his creative process. He discussed "the theme show problem", gave examples of different approaches, and then drew a picture of his approach.

Some shows are "flimsy" themes, very loosely connected by concepts such as a letter (a show with all artists' names starting with the letter "w"), or a color (all red works).

Others are very tightly structured, with artists and works chosen to advance the curator's theory of the show.

His vision of a theme is to "put an idea into motion", and he depicted it by drawing a box representing the gallery space, x's around the edges of the box (representing the art works), and arrows pointing outwards from the box representing the independence of the ideas once set on their way.

From MOCAD looking east

"There is no secret code."

After the curator spoke, he took questions from the audience. Someone asked a question that went something like, "Is it ok that some viewers won't be in on the joke?" I thought that was a brave question, considering that many in the room were wearing artfully mismatched outfits expensively made to look like vintage. Someone else followed with, "Is there a joke to be in on?", to which Mr. Huberman said no. That was a relief. Maybe I do get more of it than I thought...or maybe there's nothing to get.

"Consensus is the enemy of art."
When I was in college, I was fortunate (or insane) enough to take a class with Douglas Hofstadter, that Godel, Escher, Bach guy (among other things). Briefly. I couldn't stick it out. The sensation of my brain imploding from holding onto the contradictions grew more overwhelming with every class. Remember that exhibition catalog that I discovered on visit two? Mentions Hofstadter. Of course it does. I'm guessing Mr. Huberman, the curator of this show, would have understood every word.

From MOCAD looking west

"A good exhibition is one that starts when you leave it." 
Well, Mr. Huberman, I live only a few miles from the museum, yet I was so deep in thought about the exhibit on the way home that I looked up to find that I had missed my turn a long while back.... I was that idea, that outward arrow that you spoke of, set into motion, not knowing where I would land.

***Henri Magritte's work, The Treachery of Images, is now owned by and exhibited at LACMA.

This image of the work is taken from the Wikipedia article about Henri Magritte. 

It is originally from a University of Alabama site, "Approaches to Modernism"

This image was restored and enhanced by Shimon D. Yanowitz, 2009 for Wikipedia

Fair Use:  Though this image is subject to copyright, its use is covered by the U.S. fair use laws because

1. It illustrates an article about self-referential art as a visual example of the concept.
2. It is a low resolution image.
3. Its inclusion in the article adds significantly to the article because it is a famous example from modern culture of the concept of self-reference.
4. It is not replaceable with an uncopyrighted or freely copyrighted image of comparable educational value