BENTONVILLE--Good luck finding an easy way to describe State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now. The curators of the exhibit, recently opened at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, were aiming for diversity, and that's what they've got.
"Unpredictable" might be the best one-word summation. Consider Understudy for Animal Farm, an interactive series that includes a rack festooned with jovial pig masks crafted from pillowcases. During the museum's recent members' preview of the exhibit, Santa Fe artist Ligia Bouton invited visitors to pull a mask over their heads and pose for a photo, which could be accessed via a website the next day. All fun and games, right?
Not so, says the artist. "I am interested in exploring how the domestic realm comes to symbolize complete totalitarian control in George Orwell's Animal Farm," she says in an utterly serious statement on the museum's website. "By inviting viewers to interact directly with Understudy for Animal Farm, I hope to question and expose the roles we all play in maintaining power hegemonies and hierarchies."
Move on to Slow Room, an installation by Jonathan Schipper of Brooklyn, N.Y., that looks like a typical 1950s-era living room with a gold brocade sofa, a nicked-up piano, ashtrays, lamps, books, a record player and stack of albums, family photos and landscape paintings on the walls, ceramic figurines on a coffee table, and a prim ladies' handbag. Each has a cable attached to it that runs into a hole on the wall. During the course of the exhibit (which runs through Jan. 19), those lines will drag each object into the hole, effectively destroying it. "Slow Room focuses not only on the end but on that process of being moved from one state to another," the artist writes on the placard that accompanies the installation.
Then there's the sensory experience that is Ialu, a sculpture by John Douglas Powers of Knoxville, Tenn. It's an array of steel reeds, resembling waves of grain in a field, connected to a wooden support that moves, squeaking and groaning, with the help of a motorized drive shaft, in front of a video projection of wide-open blue skies. "There's math that would explain this stuff when you see it in the world," writes the artist on the State of the Art website. "And in a simplified version, I'm capturing that essence. But it's totally fake. It's a bunch of wood and steel and plastic. Everything's exposed. There's something almost deceptive about that ... it's so exposed that there's a trick happening. There's still magic there, I think, even though you see everything that's leading to the result."
It's pretty clear at this point that many works in the show are too original to fit into traditional definitions of art as a medium of expression. Even though there are plenty of prints (several by Little Rock artist Delita Martin), paintings (among them Cain and Abel by Guy Bell of Little Rock), carvings, drawings, ceramics (including work by Linda Lopez of Fayetteville) and photographs among the exhibit's 227 pieces, this isn't a standard hang-on-the-wall exhibition that allows visitors to passively gaze upon handsomely framed works presumed to be worthy of museum display.
Typical art-description phrases don't apply. How to define Mom Booth by Andy DuCett of Minnesota, an installation staffed with real mothers cheerfully answering questions about motherhood posed by visitors? Or Water Bar, an interactive sampling of area waters by Minneapolis-based Works Progress Studio that's set up in the museum lobby across from the coffee bar. In another part of the museum, puzzled looks abound when observing Stack by Hamilton Poe of Detroit, a vertical array made up of box fans, twirling sombreros, and weighted plastic eggs.
Along with being full of surprises, State of the Art--the largest exhibition the museum has staged since its opening in 2011--took some work to assemble.
In 2013, Crystal Bridges president Don Bacigalupi and curator Chad Alligood hit the road to investigate what's happening in American art today. The team logged more than 100,000 miles that year, visiting nearly 1,000 artists in their studios. The intent is to examine how modern artists are working with old and new materials and engaging with current issues and events.
"Contemporary art has too often been dismissed as something a child could do, or--worse--irrelevant," said Bacigalupi. "Contemporary artists live and work among us. We can learn so much about the past and other cultures from art. It's been a lifelong passion and responsibility for me to expand access and understanding of the valuable and important communications embedded within the art of our own time."
The exhibition is a call to action, he added, "both within the field and beyond, to pay more attention to the artists around us, and what they have to say."
Editorial on 09/21/2014