‘Nothing’ Is Happening
Any good work of art should wake y
ou up. Some art objects do it more seductively than others. A gorgeous Titian such as “Europa” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, for instance, pulls viewers in with a spectacle of story, tone, and technique.
Unlike “Europa,” the works in this show don’t carry you away with color and drama. Indeed, they’re spare, oblique, and lacking in narrative. They don’t expect the viewer to make sense of them; rather, they invite you to engage and discover what the art provokes within you. Intrinsically, they’re less about themselves than they are about you and your response to them. They work to open an empty space, in which your assumptions fall away or are elucidated, and your perceptive powers quicken.
Some will run from this exhibit as quickly as they’d run from a meditation cushion; it isn’t always easy spending time with oneself.
In her catalog essay, Dumont quotes Sweibel saying that the viewing experience of her scrawny wire works “pushes the point of paying attention.” It’s true. Her untitled pieces are tiny on the vast white wall, but they demand scrutiny. They look like scraps of trash (another Sweibel series here sports tiny scraps of fabric), and in a sense they are; the artist recycles wire from previous sculptures.
One of the simplest ones drew me right in. The roughly straight strand with a tiny circle curling at its head made me laugh; I saw a little stick figure, upon which I projected a host of characteristics: scruffy, humble, noble in the face of adversity, lonely but soldiering on. The piece cast a pale shadow downward; Sweibel had carved another “shadow” into the wall above it. It looks like a drawing, not a cut in the wall, but knowing it’s a cut changes the game; perhaps the little wire figure has wrenched its way out of the wall and into the open.
You may think it’s easy to make up stories like this, but it isn’t when an artist is intent on pushing his or her own agenda. The artists in “Many Kinds of Nothing” deliberately make open-ended work.
Tags: pace, paying attention