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A first peek... inside the Carnegie International
Friday, November 05, 1999 By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Art Critic, Photos By Bill Wade
Behind the Carnegie Museum of Art the raindrops form lazy patterns in the smooth surface of Olafur Eliasson's installation, distorting reflected images of Sculpture Court trees. Change is a planned part of the Danish artist's Carnegie International work. Already these same trees have contributed golden washes of leaves to the shallow pool. Colder weather will bring ice. The seasonal passing of time will mark the work.
Inside the museum, time has speeded up as artists, staff and volunteers put the finishing touches on the 53rd annual exhibition, which opens to the public tomorrow. It's already Tuesday afternoon and if anyone's worried, it doesn't show. It's a contemporary thing: schedules are tight, works are complex. An army of workers fueled by adrenaline will get it done.
It's not your mother's Carnegie.
Nor is it her show.
Curator Madeleine Grynsztejn has taken a risk in commissioning works that are nearing completion so close to opening day, but it is a commendable one that courts the freshest and most mature expression of some of the most interesting artists working today.
Even in its raw state, there's something very enticing about this exhibition, which generates a sense of the "unpredictable" -- the promise of discovery -- from first contact.
A series of plywood cubbyholes have sprung up along the staircase that leads from the museum parking lot, and one of these that nestles against the glass wall facing Eliasson's steaming scape holds carpeting and a sofa.
The artist, Suchan Kinoshita, is feverishly at work atop another, while an assistant sits at a table that is surrounded by mounds of odds and ends, assembling parts. Rolls of carpet remnants sprawl in corners. The walls of the boxes are rough, pieced together by a foam that oozes out of cracks. The same foam is squiggled into a covering for a table that sits, along with chair and lamp, on one of the roofs. On another is a clock. The presumption is that each room will be topped by the time the piece is completed, but maybe not.
They aren't pretty. They're downright confusing. And they're absolutely compelling. There are 10 within sight and each closed door beckons to the sleeping explorer within, who at one time amused himself by probing the corners of basements and yards. This response would probably please the Japanese-born artist, who now lives in the Netherlands and is also a student of experimental theater, but she doesn't have time to chat.
In the galleries, the usual quiet of the museum is interrupted by the pounding of hammers and the harsh clambering of material-filled dollies being pulled across terrazzo floors. Displays by the 41 artists in the exhibition, representing 22 countries, are in various stages of completion.
A few days ago the order that the paintings that make up Franz Ackermann's colorful visual travel diary would hang in was established, and they lay in wait propped against gallery walls. Now, as the last of them is being installed, they take on new clarity, and set up a dialogue with the other work in the room, Bodys Isek Kingelez's fantastical three-dimensional model of his native Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Elsewhere in the Scaife galleries, paintings by Luc Tuymans and the photography of Sam Taylor-Wood are in place, but temporarily sealed behind thick sheets of plastic that protect them from the workday activity surrounding them.
The perfectionist in Takashi Murakami has painted over the earlier design he created on his installation wall, and he's returned his fanciful sculptures, which are inspired by Japanese animated film and comic book imagery, to bubble-wrapped safety while he reconsiders the look of the environment they'll hang in.
A few feet away, Venezuelan Jose Antonio Hernandez-Diez emerges through a panel from behind a wall where he's working on the wiring for his video piece. Across the room his sculpture, rumored to have something to do with a dish drainer and acrylic fingernails, remains an enigma within packing material bulk.
In front of a video gallery that has been constructed for the International, Shirin Neshat's young son waits patiently for her. Neshat was born into Iran's Islamic society, but now lives in New York. Her "Soliloquy," which tells the story of a Muslim woman who lives in constant tension between East and West, traditional and contemporary expectations, will premiere at the International.
Israeli Nahum Tevet, next door, is casting a critical eye upon his just-completed "A Page from a Catalogue," a complex, room-sized arrangement of open and closed wooden forms, and wonders aloud what the visitor's reaction is. It's a push-pull space that both invites and blocks entry as you circle it. Tevet talks about it in the formal language of sculpture and painting, seeming to like best the spontaneity that he's been able to bring to a traditional additive sculpting method.
Over in the Heinz galleries, life is more serene and most of the emanations come from the artworks themselves.
The entry piece, by Chen Zhen, is a rich sculptural work that will no doubt speak differently to those of Chinese heritage. Bucket-like forms are hung on poles to suggest a bronze-age musical instrument. Members of a Western audience are unlikely to recognize that the forms are the chamber pots that Zhen saw women washing out in the streets during his daily walks to school in Shanghai.
Beyond it are six paintings by Briton Chris Ofili, who became the object of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's wrath for his interpretation of the Blessed Virgin Mary that currently hangs in the Brooklyn Museum of Art. They've slipped into town relatively unnoticed and are unlikely to provoke the same ire, though they do probe some touchy issues of the black experience. Everyone knows so much about the attached elephant dung, truth or exaggeration, that it's by now taken on a meaning beyond original intent.
Sarah Sze's flowing, whimsical installation is complete -- she's in Paris working on a piece for the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art -- but cordoned off. The cavernous, stretchy, skin-like, ethereal "Nude Plasmic" by Brazilian Ernesto Neto, has already been tested by KDKA's David Crawley during the filming of a feature spot.
Things are looking positively polished in comparison to the other side of the building, but farther along only five of the eight screens of Irishman Willie Doherty's video "Somewhere Else" are rolling, and a moment later a dolly loaded with water and waterlilies rumbles up to Gabriel Orozco's "Ping Pond Table."
If there seems a lot to be done, preparations have come a long way already, and soon it will all be in the hands of the visitor.
There are walk-through pieces, participatory pieces, films, videos, an audio work that you follow with a Walkman and some artworks that invite you to look at them in a -- yes, this still happens -- traditional way, though their content is contemporary.
The most striking characteristic of the exhibition may be the pervasive presence of the unfamiliar, which builds curiosity in the visitor and leads to an intense engagement of the imagination and the intellect.
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Where: The Carnegie Museum of Art.