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Mood River floods the Wexner Center with an exuberant, if unexamined, stream of products.
By Peter Hall
May 2002
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A suspended flurry of household objects--toothbrushes, flyswatters,
bottle openers, razors, and toilet brushes--is illuminated from below by
automobile headlights (above). E. V. Day's Bombshell, a sculpture of
fabric and fishing line, evokes a famous image of Marilyn Monroe
(below).
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Photo by Kevin Fitzsimons
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The exhibition Mood River really starts to swing in the second gallery.
Passing through one of the trademark narrow passageways of Peter Eisenman's
theatrically organized Wexner Center for the Arts, the visitor arrives in
a grotto of light and color. Sprouting from the floor is a thicket
of car taillights and headlights, removed from their sockets and lit up
like dragon eyes. Above is a cloud of household objects--toothbrushes, flyswatters,
bottle openers, razors, and toilet brushes--each suspended from the rafters
by fishing line. The dazzling newness of it all has a mesmerizing effect,
as if one were witnessing a freeze-frame of a tornado at Target--or, given
the retail prices, a maelstrom at Moss.
Yet what are we to make of these beguiling and otherworldly displays? This
experimental procession of contemporary design and artwork is grouped according
to mood--from bliss and ecstasy to trauma and rage. It is not an exhibition
with a text-heavy narrative. In fact, it is quite a struggle for the visitor
to find even the minimal identifying placards, obscured as they are
mostly on walls outside the galleries. Nor is it a show where the
design wares might be squeezed, stroked, or sat on by those eager to respond
to the shapely calls of color and texture. On opening night, harried security
guards patrolled the galleries attempting to dislodge all inquisitive sitters
and prying fingers.
The one exception to the "don't touch" rule is the climactic centerpiece:
a swimming pool-size skateboarding bowl constructed out of wood by
the Chicago design group SIMPARCH. Approached from below, where its underside
resembles the hull of a ship, Free Basin is open for skaters to use
while visitors watch. The whir of wheels rolling down the slopes and the
clacking of boards against the rim permeate the exhibition and send the
hanging exhibits into little paroxysms. Those visitors baffled by the
overarching premise of the show can at least complete their dreamlike journey
with decisive applause atop the pleasantly vibrating skate bowl. (At least
until mid-April, when it will be replaced by a preprogrammed paint-ball
robot.)
It makes sense for the public to see the work of a single designer or artist
organized into a retrospective, but a review of contemporary design risks
looking like a series of store displays. Curators sometimes fall back on
the rationale that they are showcasing "the best" of today's chairs,
running shoes, and toilet brushes. But this raises the sticky question of
museum endorsement in the age of sponsor dependency, as well as casting
the institution in the old-fashioned role of pedagogue. By contrast Mood
River's creative installations--designed by Jose Oubrerie with the Wexner's
in-house team and lighting designer John Bohuslawsky--make a farce of the
traditional "best of" museum exhibition. In the "waterfall,"
a cascade of chairs tumbling over the wall of one gallery into the next,
the curators chose almost perversely to hang chairs upside down and at jaunty
angles, so that it is difficult to single out one piece and even more
difficult to find out who designed it.
Jeffrey Kipnis, who cocurated Mood River with Annetta Massie, describes
the show as a "gentle burlesque" on Philip Johnson's landmark
1934 exhibition Machine Art, at the Museum of Modern Art. Aiming
to celebrate Platonic beauty in the straight lines, circles, and geometric
shapes of everyday manufactured designs, Machine Art arranged appliances,
tools, tableware, and machine parts like art pieces. Kipnis and Massie's
scheme displaces the Platonic agenda with one inspired by a quotation from
Heraclitus: "On those who step into the same river, different and still
different waters flow." The look and feel of today's toothbrushes,
dresses, haircuts, and even artworks cannot be explained by singling out
products as evidence of an all-encompassing "spirit of the age"
(à la 1934); they are best illustrated by shoals of products that
swim through galleries, interconnected through form, texture, and color.
Where Machine Art displayed prosaic designs that exemplified
classical ideals, Mood River displays the uncanny similarities between
products as evidence of continually shifting influences. Both exhibitions
adhere to the civilized notion that the visual world is not just a chaotic
mess. But Mood River effectively eschews the idea that design and
art can be measured by timeless standards, putting forward instead a poetic
account of their intertextual nature. In the "Trauma" gallery,
we see the connection between the jagged form of a Stealth fighter
and an Eisenman building (both represented in model form), and between Ingo
Maurer's Porca Miseria lamp--a suspended explosion of broken white tableware--and
E.V. Day's Bombshell--an installation of white fabric and fishing
line that evokes Marilyn Monroe's billowing-dress scene from The Seven
Year Itch. Art and design, the show proposes, are part of the same narrative
structure.
The brazen assumption behind Mood River--and its audacious effort
to depict the flows of influence that make today look like today--is
that visitors will do the rest. It is up to us to discern what Massie terms
the "complex webs of practical, aesthetic, political, and economic
issues" connecting the disparate objects. A similar rationale prompted
art critic and curator Dave Hickey to eliminate wall captions from the recent
SITE Santa Fe biennial, Beau Monde. Hickey, who considers wall texts
patronizing and distracting, used new combinations of artworks to draw attention
to the relations between them, furthering the idea that beauty has more
to do with what art does than with what the artist intended. Mood River
operates on the same premise.
Yet the elimination of wall texts can look like elitism. To get beyond a
cursory appreciation of the formal links--between, say, a blob-shaped light
and a blob-shaped bowl--the curious visitor needs prior knowledge of the
subject: a little background on emerging production methods and movements
such as the rise in the 1980s of one-off furniture in studios like Ron Arad's.
Withholding a curator's informed account of a show ends up concealing the
process.
Kipnis confessed at the exhibition's opening that there is a "deeply
suspicious indulgence in formalism" inherent in the show, but he argued
that it is in the nature of burlesque to exaggerate the trite aspects of
a character at the expense of deeper traits, in order to convey a larger
message. In the symposium, Kipnis addressed the informational void by inviting
some of the featured designers to provide a context for their work. It was
a fascinating supplement. E.V. Day showed slides of her work leading up
to Bombshell, including a series of dissected wetsuits that reveal
their superheroic, anthropomorphic characteristics when cut up and suspended
with surgical wire, like flayed skin. Designer Giovanni Pagnotta argued
that the forebears of his carbon-fiber Z chair include Gerrit Rietveld's
ZigZag chair and a Ferrari Formula One car.
Incorporated in the exhibition, the flashes of illumination these vignettes
offered would have tuned an inquisitive ear to the different strains in
Mood River. Still better would have been an attempt to alert the
visitor to the kinds of economic, technological, and social forces that
manifest themselves in the designs around us. A case in point is the Flex
toothbrush, which swings alongside its dental-care peers in the second gallery.
In his essay, Kipnis uses this object to brush up a defense of the show's
denigration of function. "Appeal itself is a paramount function,"
he argues, citing a survey on the effectiveness of the Flex's shock-absorber
neck design. Although it yielded no improvement in brushing methods, its
visual and tactile appeal did increase the occurrence of brushing, thereby
vindicating what is ultimately a mannerist design. Yet this tacit nod to
design's complicit role in adding features to products that don't need them
might have been more usefully explored with some toothbrushing history to
chew on. Alas, Mood River's prevailing mood is insistently celebratory,
indulging in the joyous array of shapes, colors, and textures.
Kipnis's best defense is that Mood River is a comedy. He cites Marx's
wisecrack about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then as
farce. He also stated during the opening that one ulterior motive was to
lure the half of the Ohio State University student population that never
sets foot in the cultural center. The model is to present less a sober thesis
than an immersive crowd pleaser.
So be it: Mood River is a thrill ride in the theater of the absurd.
A few more signposts certainly would have made a more accessible guide to
current thinking on the nature of visual culture. But as a model of exhibition
design, this show boldly demonstrates that there are fresh paradigms. It
may have a great deal of influence on exhibits to come.
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