(Believe it or not, this is not a line waiting to get into your local Best Buy on Black Friday. It’s the line waiting to get into the Detroit Institute of Arts.)
I was fairly aware of the hype surrounding the reopening of the DIA and the new Michael Grave’s designed expansion overThanksgiving weekend. I was planning on taking advantage of being fairly close to Detroit to go to the DIA and MOCAD last weekend anyway, but the bonus was that it was a free weekend for the DIA.
I started out at MoCAD, dragging along my confused mother, grandmother and seven-year-old nephew. To be honest, MoCAD confuses me too. I want it to be great, I want to fully embrace the efforts of bringing a non-collecting contemporary art museum into Detroit. It makes both my nature and nurture tingle. Maybe it’s because I haven’t attended any of their public programming because the e-mails I get from them seem as though their program is pretty aggressive. They seem to keep a consistent schedule of movies, artist lectures, music, workshops and all the kinds of things that make museums like the Walker Art Center so incredible. However, my few visits to MoCAD over the past year or so since it’s been open have been quite the opposite. Today we walked into the door to an empty museum with the echoing sound of vacuuming coming from the back cavernous gallery.
I understand the emptiness – it was a little after noon on the day after Thanksgiving after all. I understand the vacuuming – it’s gotta happen sometime. And that sometime is going to be during regular business hours now and again. I just don’t quite get the exhibitions. Conceptually they seem alright, but it seems like the shows are planned but only ¾ of the art actually shows up, so the work is just spread out, ultimately leaving a lot of empty space.
The first gallery upon entering is usually decently layed out – most of my reason for really wanting to go into the museum this time was because the exhibition was about language (read: text) in art. The large posters by Annelise Coste were stacked floor to ceiling and my nephew and I took turns reading them out loud: when we got to “I Don’t Care” my nephew cracked up giggling.
My nephew taking a shot of “I Don’t Care”
Into the second and smallest gallery was the Carl Pope installation of humorous posters which were aesthetically and neurologically pleasing. It’s the third and largest (and most “raw”) of the galleries that perplexes me every time I go in. It’s often left quite open and empty but is still treated as an official “exhibition” space.
There were about seven works in the space and all were very minimal and split between projections, video monitors and actual signs either neon or lit from behind. Many of the pieces, taken individually, were strong and relevant and interesting. I was incredibly happy to be in Detroit and looking at art that is easily seen in New York City (possibly due to the fact that the show was curated by Matthew Higgs from New York): Sam Durant, Carl Pope, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Jeremy Deller to name a few. The show as a whole felt sparse and not easily accessible. My mother and grandmother ended up spending more time staring out one of the few windows in the galleries reminiscing about when my grandmother lived mere blocks from here when she was in her 20s.
Martin Creed, Feelings
Onward to the Detroit Institute of Arts. It’s the grand re-opening day and I’m left to navigate the museum, located about 3 blocks from MOCAD, with my nephew in tow (the rest of my family opted for a different activity, particularly the one where you put some money into a machine, see some blinking bright lights and spinning wheels and then not get your money back). Back on Woodward Ave., the DIA was festive, and by festive I mean packed.
(view of the front entrance from the vantage point of a seven-year-old)
It was a good problem, having so many people in the museum that it was hard to actually see any art. I haven’t been to the DIA in about ten or so years but had two goals in mind – of course I had to see the Diego Rivera mural and to find a Jasper Johns piece a friend told me about. The Rivera mural was easy to find, but it was not an experience of quiet contemplation like I had remembered, at least not on this day anyway. I squatted down next to my nephew and started explaining the different parts of the mural, the symbolism, how his great-grandfather and great-grandmother worked in a place similar to what was going on the mural. He looked for a brief second, then turned to me and asked “Do they have any mummies here?”
Mummies. Alright, down to the Egyptian collection. There were no actual mummies to see, but the sarcophagus collection seemed good enough. We tried to guess if any of them belonged to a king based on their size and what was painted on them. I eventually stopped the fun when I explained that the king’s sarcophagus’ (sarcophagi?) were probably still in Egypt, not Detroit.
We then made it up towards Modern and Contemporary, excusing our way through the masses of people and past the Dutch, African, Chinese and Native American collections. This was when I really started to notice the “educational additives” placed throughout the museum. I’d read that the museum was trying some different approaches to education, trying to make the art more accessible and the information more fun and interactive. I noticed a strange projection of sentences above a precisionist painting by J. Francis Criss that would switch occasionally.
I am a huge fan of this era of painting – the industrial scenes of the River Rouge plants by Charles Sheeler are among my favorite paintings of all time. If anything, this kind of scenery would be incredibly familiar in a place like Detroit. Yet, it was felt that a projection that talks about “urban scenes” was needed above the painting in order to fully understand what was going on. After about a minute I realized I was watching the changing projection and not looking at the painting.
Perhaps my other hang up about the projected words on the wall came from the fact that about two hours earlier I was at Mocad looking at changing projections of words on a wall, in a piece by Fischl and Weiss:
Fischl and Weiss’ projected words at Mocad ranged from heavily philosophical questions (Am I Abusing My Power?) to very silly mundane ones (Am I Strange?) and was meant to be the art. At the DIA, the projected statements were “factual” tidbits meant to enhance the art. At the end of the day, I guess I’d rather not have projects words on any walls when I’m supposed to be looking at art. Maybe I’m getting old and stodgy.
I plan on returning to the DIA when I’m next in lower Michigan for the next holiday. For now, I’m concluding that the DIA put a good effort into the rehang and into the education. I do wonder if the education becomes too much like watered down entertainment for the attention deficit disorder generation. It’s definitely not academic or scholarly. But is that o.k.? Wouldn’t scholars pursue more research on their own anyway? Some are referring to the new DIA as the “People’s Museum”, so maybe this approach will give more access to more people? But beyond that access point, with only the surface of educational value of the art being presented, could this merely widen the gap between low culture and high culture?
Up next, an upper midwest tour: Calumet, Michigan, Minneapolis and Dultuh, Minnesota.
