You Had to Be There

by Beth E. Wilson, February 25, 2008

The adventure of art is in the new. The consolation of art is everything you have seen, read, heard, and kept inside you as a talisman against the popular lie that nothing matters anymore.
—Jeannette Winterson

It’s something of a commonplace to say that “art” has not always meant the same thing to different people, in different times. Contrary to the standard “pyramids to Picasso” approach of most art history surveys, it seems presumptuous to think that any one concept could stand eternally, universally understood across millennia of human history.

What we call art is a cultural expression—something like a visual language, manifesting (when it works properly) something worth saying about the world that births it. That said, it seems clear that when the big picture (note that metaphor) changes, the art that speaks to it must adapt as well. That’s why some things, in retrospect, seem to epitomize a period in the past, when of course they were the very newest, freshest style in their own time—Art Deco from the 1930s, for example, or psychedelic posters from the 1960s.

If art is a living (visual) language, then obviously it will change over time, as the culture itself shifts from one state to the next. Just ask anybody who’s tried to read Beowulf in the original how much the English language has metamorphosed in the last thousand years.

I was prompted to think about all this in the wake of some recent exhibitions that seek to redefine the artwork—rather than a particular, singular object of contemplation, artists Lorrie Fredette and Jeremy Holmes present the viewer with a space—an environment, really—that demands a very different sort of attention. In musical terms, these works function more like an ambient piece by Brian Eno, setting a particular tone, giving a visual/spatial texture to the gallery, rather than standing out as a particular point of focus.

Last month at KMOCA (the tiny, but regularly courageous Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art) on Abeel Street, recent New Paltz BFA grad Jeremy Holmes re-installed the work that had been shown previously at the Dorsky museum as his thesis show in December. Conversations Continued consists of two long, flexible ribbons of wood (one mahogany and one ash) installed to loop around the gallery space, embracing it in a Möbius strip gone slightly mad, encircling and almost cocooning the viewer. When shown in the much larger, high-ceiling space of the Dorsky, the wooden strips were almost entirely unfurled, stretching across the Chandler Gallery, finally swooping down into the low-ceilinged North Gallery, eliding the connection between the two spaces.
By contrast, the KMOCA installation seemed to tightly box in the looping wood, creating a greater sense of spring like energy, as it waited to burst out of the gallery container. The material reads differently because of its changed relationship to the space—something that seems equally applicable as a way of describing its effect on the viewer.