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Tunnel vision
(by Dickson Beall - April 30, 2008)
Entering Gallery 337 at the St. Louis Art Museum is a bit like boarding an airplane. Installation artist Sarah Oppenheimer has constructed plane-like windows, which the viewer peers through to have an exclusive experience of art and movement in the gallery space; the result is very much like looking from the window of an airplane that frames the movement on a runway.
Simply put, Oppenheimer has built gallery walls and constructed windows that frame works of art from the museum’s collection, yet the experience is more nuanced than that.
The viewer also experiences other museum visitors, who not only are looking at the works of art on the wall but back at other viewers. Oppenheimer’s windows function like architectural windows and provide a frame — much like a filmic frame, which limits what is seen — yet the action is like live theater.
Though not theater of the absurd, the experience comes close, in that it is both serious and funny. The installation allows the viewer to become aware of the way art is seen by different people. Some viewers are serious and spend reflective moments before the works of art before moving on. Others wander through the galleries looking at the art as if looking at poster ads while passing time waiting for a train.
Movement seems to be one of Oppenheimer’s primary themes. This first becomes apparent when the viewer enters the gallery and is stopped by a wall that contains a porthole-like window. Looking through the opening, the viewer sees, two galleries away, the face of Chuck Close’s “Keith,” in shades of gray, gazing back intently at the viewer. Close shocked viewers in the 1970s with this enormous face, which fills the gallery wall. Oppenheimer has worked in an even bigger scale, creating an installation that fills five galleries with art that brings architecture into the experience.
Oppenheimer’s Horizontal Roll presents a nuanced play on the word “roll”: The museum visitor plays a role, as do the installation’s horizontal walls. But Oppenheimer is also having fun presenting a roll call of the various movements of art through history: religious paintings, fauvism, pop art, photo-realism, kitsch and contemporary sculpture. Each of these enters our vision.
Looking just to the right of the window that reveals Close’s photo-realistic painting, one sees a pop-art painting by Roy Lichtenstein; quaint curtains frame the window that frames the world.
On the other side of this gallery is a window framing Ellsworth Kelly’s panels of monochromatic colors, each canvas framing a single color. Together, Kelly’s panels provide a full-color spectrum, with after-images of color appearing along the edges of each of the frames.
Still other works from the museum’s collection assist the viewer in understanding art as a window on the world. For example, in the background of a 16th-century depiction of Mary Magdalene by Cornelisz, the artist has painted a window through which a mountainous vista appears.
Seen through one of Oppenheimer’s windows and reflected in a kitschy, convex mirror, this presentation of Cornelisz’s painting is a good example of the way Oppenheimer’s “gallery within a gallery” installation seems to want the viewer to question what is seen: What limits or frames our horizon? How does our movement affect what we see? What is in our foreground? What is in our background? What movements or objects interfere with our seeing? How do architecture, the frames of film, television or reflective surfaces impact what we see?
After completing my walk through the exhibition, I paused to look toward the far end of the gallery, two galleries away, where a brightly colored (fauve) painting, “Big Indian” by Max Pechstein, faced off with Close’s painting “Keith,” which was looming in the gallery behind me. I observed the art watchers as they moved through the galleries, unaware that I was watching them. Suddenly, an older woman backed off from the Mondrian painting that she was viewing. She turned and saw me, standing motionless, framed in my little window, looking at her from the other side of the wall.
She paused. I wondered if she thought I was a realistic portrait in a small frame or maybe the head of a super-real Duane Estes sculpture posed in a little niche. She appeared puzzled, and then she smiled, realizing that I was a real person who was studying her — she was a viewer being viewed. As she walked around to my side of the wall, I couldn’t resist asking, “What did you think, seeing someone looking back at you?” She said, “I was wondering ... they must have planned it this way.”
Before I could launch into an educational moment, she turned and said, “That artist over there made a mistake.”
“Which artist was that?” I asked. She gestured toward the Mondrian painting.
“What was his mistake?”
“The blue in the lower right corner,” she said. “The other colors are all red, white and black; that’s the only color that doesn’t fit.”
Then, without missing a beat, she turned her attention back to the small windows in the walls and said, “I think they must have planned it to look this way.” I smiled and agreed.
I left the exhibit thinking how much credit is due Oppenheimer for remaining in the background, much like a movie director does. By limiting the frame, Oppenheimer opens a window onto a vista of questions about the way we see, and along the way our vision gets bigger. We might even see a mistake or two made by Mondrian, an artist who, like Oppenhimer, also did some precise planning in his day.
Horizontal Roll continues through July 6 at the St. Louis Art Museum in Forest Park. For information call 721-0072.
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