Before and After

Museum Educators, when not educating others, educate themselves. So I conceived for this blog the idea that I would post about objects I knew about in the galleries but how fun to mix it up from the beginning. One thing I often tell first-time visitors to the museum or people uncomfortable interpreting art on their own is that you already have the tools and skills to understand and interpret works of art. Keeping in mind that there is no one definite conclusion about artworks, it's a great thought to plant in people's minds to make them more comfortable in galleries where the artworks can be more challenging and difficult to penetrate.

So I wanted a taste of my own medicine. At the Art Institute of Chicago an exhibition of Contemporary Art, the Collection of Donna and Howard Stone, recently went on view. I wanted to select a work that I had no prior knowledge about and record my observations before and my findings after some research.




Before

It is made of cut black felt. Cut very precisely. It hangs on the wall and takes up the entire wall space. It reminds me not just of drips of paint but controlled drips of paint very much like Jackson Pollocks action paintings from the 1950s. Perhaps it's a modern take on the Abstract Expressionists who attempted to free painting from any real-world reference or narrative or subject. Instead they tapped into their individual emotions and even subconscious (many were either reading Freud and Carl Jung or knew them in pop-theory).

This in fact may be the opposite of that. While Pollock gestured wildly, stepped all over his canvas, poured, slung, splattered and dripped paint across the surface this is meticulous. It's slow, careful and calculated. (Don't run with scissors!)

I even wondered if this was a 1960s female artist. A comrade of Eva Hesse? There was a generation of female artists in the 1960s and 70s who challenged the AbEx'ers, their masculine gestures and intuition, by using materials traditionally associated with women (fabrics and weaving).

I wondered if it ever had to be de-linted in the show. Black felt must attract a lot of dust.

Time to read the label:

Arturo Herrera (Venezualan, b. 1959), Let me Go, 2000, wool felt

After

Ok so kind of off. And Arturo Herrera is a pretty big name in contemporary art. The kind of name that makes me go "Oh yikes...should I have known that?" He's a name I know but know little about I will admit. And an intriguing title as well. "Let me go" is unexpected. Looking at it a bit longer I see that the "drips" I saw before look like dappled light coming through a thick forest. So it's time to hit the files.

Arturo Herrera is a contemporary artist interested in abstraction, particularly finding forms which are unrecognizable and with no specific meaning. His works not only relate back to the drip and action paintings of the Abstract Expressionists (who also wanted to eliminate recognizable subjects in their works) but also to the Pop Artists of the 1960s (Roy Lichtenstein has a painting of a splatter at the Art Institute looking as if it were printed rather than painted or actually splattered). Hi works are carefully conscious of form in terms of formal aspects such as line, color, balance and an overall sense of composition. (Look at the heavy, more dense left side of the work compared to the spindly, detailed areas in the middle).

But we are able to bring our own conclusions to this work. "It’s a bridge, but it is paved with the viewer’s own references and associations," the artist says of his own work.

He looks at graphic design of today, particularly comic books and big billboard advertisements (think of the large scale of this piece). But these examples of graphic design are all about specific ideas ("Buy this product!" or in the case of comic books "Swoosh!").

Herrera notes "the graphic has specific messages—it’s political, or it’s advertising. It is successful if it gets its point across. My work actually tries to discourage a specific message. It tries to free a place up, to clarify through ambiguity. I use strategies of design and placement to enable the viewer to access the image."


Let me Go

So this sheds some light on the subject. "Let me Go!" almost rings like a phrase from a comic book or even...a Roy Litchenstein painting.
(Roy Litchenstein, Ohhh Alright, 1964) The phrase has the same curtness that suggests it's a part of a larger dialogue or narrative but we as viewers don't know the before and after. Who is saying "Let me go?" Is it a "Let me go!!" or a "please...just let me go now." Now its up to us to bring our own baggage to the table.


It lingers somewhere between painting and sculpture. It looks like paint but is sculpted felt dangling off the wall. It's very flat but it isn't 2-D. Several areas buckle off the wall. And I found that with this work especially, its ok if you don't have the answers. You have it all in your back pocket. How appropriate for a work about letting the viewer vacillate between knowing and not knowing, wanting to know more and filling in the gaps.