[my favorite wish: I wish I had a turtle and there were no wars]
Yesterday brought the reception and opening of the new Rivane Neuenschwander exhibit, “A Day Like Any Other” at the New Museum. My friend Kyle invited me to the reception, and as usual we ranged over a broad array of topics – time, semiotics, narrative, desire. And Neuenschwander similarly ranged over topics: time, memory, freedom and confinement, enclosure and danger, paranoia and vindication. She did something extra though – something that permeated each of her pieces and really spoke to me – each piece, even if melancholy or fearful, had an element of play embedded in the experience. At the end of the night, I felt like skipping down the Bowery, chanting “art and ideas! art and IDEAS! ART AND IDEAS!” like a little girl riling herself up for the circus. It felt good.
The first piece we saw was “Rain Rains” – steel buckets suspended from the ceiling slowly drip water into steel buckets on the floor beneath. Museum workers refill the dripping buckets every four hours. This sets the stage for more contemplations on time passing, but also starts to hint at a cyclical philosophy of time; in this piece the same act is repeated, over and over, though at long enough intervals that the casual observer might miss the return. To the person passing through, time is being counted, drip by drip, into infinity; to the Museum worker, time is resetting every 4 hours.
Next we watched several minutes of “The Tenant”, a video of a soap bubble wafting through an abandoned (or under construction?) house. This piece is apparently based on Roman Polanski’s film of the same name. Speaking of that, check out this trailer, from when a studio might actually want to overtly promote Polanski as the director of a film:
Getting back to our much less frightening soap bubble… As Kyle and I watched the bubble, it took on a sense of animus – we felt protective of the bubble, fearful for it, caught in suspense – what edge or surface might burst the bubble? At one moment, I grimaced, and said, “Oh no! Hinges!” as if I could warn the bubble against going too close. The camera follows the bubble quite closely for much of the film, so we never have the benefit of seeing more than the bubble ‘sees’ – we do not know what is around the corner, or up the stairs. In some respects it reminded me of the first-person POV involved in many video games – so close in to our faces that the element of surprise can lift you off the ground.
“Involuntary Sculptures (Speech Acts)” is what it appears to be – “communally evolved sculptures made by customers during conversations at bars and restaurants near Neuenschwander’s home in Brazil”. Little pinwheels made of colorful straws, bits of paper rolled up into tiny joints, labels from bottles folded into origami shapes, or molded and folded into goblets. This is the detritus of hands kept busy during conversation – the things our subconscious makes while we talk. You find yourself wanting to know what the conversation was about.
“The Conversation”, based on the 1974 Coppola movie, is an example of a game-like piece. Neuenschwander hired a security company to install listening devices under carpeting and behind wallpaper tiles throughout a space; the artist and her team do not know where the bugs are, and have to search for them, scraping off wallpaper and tearing up carpet. As they move through, discovering the bugs, they record the sounds they make. The wallpaper scraping sounds are especially evocative – there is something of paranoia and even the franticness of the search that comes through in that sound. You begin to imagine the paranoia taking hold – and wonder how the artist knew when to stop searching. Was there an undiscovered bug? Were we being surveilled? Did it matter?
As a concept, I think I am most fascinated by “First Love” – a forensic artist sketches your first love based on your memories of him or her. Inevitably, some new creature emerges – your memories have faded, been augmented, are fallible. You believe you have a clear image of this person, but you probably don’t. The pictures the sketch artist made hang on the wall behind him; an eager rememberer sits next to him, prompting with this or that detail – the way the eyes should squint slightly, or the shape of the bow of her lips. What I wondered at was why all these portraits were of adults. I would have gone much farther back, to my first crush, a 5 year old called Caleb Parker – who I remember with braces or a retainer (why so young?), red hair, freckles, blue eyes (or were they green?). I think pushing the remembrance back to childhood, and seeing what we invent/remember would be incredibly revealing, and bittersweet.
“One Thousand and One Possible Nights” was also beautifully composed – hole punches of paper taken from One Thousand and One Nights and scattered across a black canvas to portray imagined night skies for each day of the exhibition; then framed and hung in monthly calendars. Again, a rumination on the passing of time; again, a reflection of play – these are not the skies we will see (or could theoretically see, this is Manhattan after all – we don’t see stars, which is why we get so excited for lightning bugs). This is imagination, serendipity, pretend – an arbitrary marking of time, like deciding to call today Thursday and tomorrow Tuesday because what does it matter? They’re also very elegant.
There was a lot to see, but of course we can not ignore “I Wish Your Wish” – just there at the back of the main floor of the New Museum. The picture up top is a shot of my favorite wish on the wall, and the title of this post, “I wish I had a turtle and that there were no wars.” The object of this ‘game’ is to take a ribbon, tie it around your wrist, and write your own wish, roll it up, and stick it back in the hole the wish you’ve taken came from. The wish will come true when the ribbon wears away and falls off. I’m no good at tying knots, so mine came undone quickly – does that mean they’ll be granted sooner?
One of the wishes I put in the wall? ”I wish I knew”.
Posted by Farrah Bostic via email from prettylittlehead