still another note by Jerry Cullum on “From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again”
I have always been a big fan of wall texts, even though I critiqued them in one of my early conceptual-art pieces for Lisa Tuttle’s “Oh, Those Four White Walls” show. (“Before You Proceed Further, Please Read This” was a wall text exploring the pitfalls of and preconceptions behind wall texts.) In fact, I have often told artists that if viewers need to be put in a particular frame of mind by knowing some information about the art, that information had better be someplace where they can’t miss it, like on the wall.
There wasn’t time or budget to do that with “From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again,” so the show tries to provoke viewers into wanting to find out why they feel what they feel about it, regardless of whether they read the curator’s statement before looking at the art.
I tried to make viewers react to the show by wanting to go back through it again, or at least explore parts of it more than once. (All the juxtapositions are meant to elicit this reaction.) Some of the show’s visual metaphors and interconnections are too condensed to emerge into consciousness on first viewing, so there was a practical as well as conceptual reason for sending smartphone-wielding viewers in a complete circle by incorporating QR codes—Henry Detweiler’s concept and artwork, but my choice of QR codes—that lead to the webpage photographs on which Karley Sullivan’s drawings of moons of the solar system were based. (There was also the idea that some viewers still don’t carry smartphones, or wouldn’t perceive the framed artworks as real QR codes.)
On the purely conceptual level, this is an extremely abbreviated way of introducing the idea that our information technology interacts with our inbuilt mental habits to influence the way we respond to the world. Marcia Vaitsman’s image immediately adjacent to Henry Detweiler’s QR codes conveys the same notion, but it conveys it only if viewers know that it’s a picture of the Japanese tsunami constructed by piecing together successive video images. There is nothing self-evident about Vaitsman’s piece, any more than there is anything self-evident about Seana Reilly’s pieces incorporating information about fracking and, coincidentally, about the dynamics of tsunamis. (I knew Reilly’s works were very beautiful and they looked conceptually provocative, but I had no idea what the scientific allusions of the titles and internal elements of the pieces were until Reilly told me.)
“From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again” is more like a systematic allusion to a complex set of ideas than an exploration of them. Each individual wall of the show is an independent visual argument that is meant to intrigue and entice rather than demonstrate and explain. As I have said about conceptual art, if you don’t like looking at it in the first place, you won’t want to stop long enough to discover what it’s all about.
But I still wonder whether I should have stuck a couple of words on the wall to get viewers in the mood.
Maybe a line at the beginning saying “This is not an exhibition about cosmology.” Then a line on the opposite wall saying “This is not an exhibition about neurology.” Then maybe in the next gallery, “This room is not about the politics and cultural meaning of water.” Then maybe by Beth Lilly’s photo, “And this is not an exhibition about exhibitions, either.”
I thought of a few more, but they would just be random punch lines without purpose. Though one that says “Please notice which walls don’t have any wall text” might be to the point.
