DreamingNow: an exhibition of eight mixed media installations
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
January 27 – April 24, 2005
February 16, 2005
Installation artists have a knack for stretching the borders of what one might consider ‘art’. In other words, it’s quite possible to feel like a damned fool while taking an excursion through their creations.
The main conceit at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum’s current exhibition seems accessible enough: use dreams, usually considered quite private, to make comments about the political, cultural, and social world surrounding us. The artists’ intent has been to stimulate us to see that our dreams have as much to do with the world around us as within us. So far, so good.
When I read the show’s introduction, however, I began to think about Alice’s slippery ride down the rabbit hole. “Withdrawn from an entirely privatized arena and made public, the diverse dream metaphors in DreamingNow shed light on contemporary issues of transnationality, globalization, the distribution of political power, consumer and popular culture, the media, hierarchies of social structures, and gender politics. They also explore the capacity of art as a rich terrain where new links and imaginative thoughts can be mediated, discussed, and tested.” Raise your hand if you followed that.
Without reading the artist’s explanations accompanying the installations, I would have needed mind-altering drugs to guess the metaphorical intent to convey a social or political message. “History of the Main Complaint”, William Kentridge’s five minute animated film on post Apartheid South Africa is an example. There was something violent and troubling going on in the corporate white male’s dream life, symbolic images floated about. Was he passively acceptant, emotionally paralyzed, or part of the problem. Short of ESP, there was no way I could have interpreted the artist’s explanation of his piece.
The Dream Bed installation is the sleeper of the show. The artist Marina Abramovic created a bed in which participants can sign up to sleep in for an hour and consent to record their dream experiences in a log which becomes part of the exhibit. Sure enough, when I entered the softly blue-lit room, there was a man lying in the special zip up “dream suit” for his one hour Big Sleep. I felt like a voyeur as I tiptoed around the room looking at the Dream Bed and the guest dreamer and became part of the installation in spite of myself, wondering what he was dreaming and what I might have dreamt if I’d been in his suit. And did I mention the magnets embedded in the ‘dream suit’, the crystal pillow, and that the wooden sided "bed" looks alarmingly like a coffin? Her statement offers an imaginative explanation.
After the exhibit travels the world for ten years, Abramovic will collect the dream records into a ‘dream library’ that will become “ a barometer of the political and social issues of our time.” I don’t trust the accuracy of self-selecting socio-political barometers but am impressed by Abramovic’s artistic hubris and her sense of scale. I just might return for an hour and to sacrifice myself and my dream world to art.
Ever play cat’s cradle? The entire second level of the Rose Museum and the stairway leading down to it is one massive, spider webby, black yarn cat’s cradle-like installation engulfing fourteen beds. Being the performance artist she is, Chiharu Shiota may occasionally be found sleeping in one of the beds. Depending on your point of view, the encapsulated beds and the dreams we have on them can be cocoon like structures protected from the outer world or prey captured by one tyrannical man eating spider (I cribbed some of this from the artist's statement, part of which actually made sense to me). For the life of me I can’t fathom her notion of how “dreams challenge the western concept of identity” but could, without the pretension I often need to practice in museums, actually grasp her idea of a collective unconscious swirling around the universe. Who knows, maybe there’s a master weaver at work up there somewhere. He’s a bit spastic but that’s the subject for another day.
I could make some guesses about two of the other installations, “falling bodies blanket me” and “Dream” that seemed plausible until I read the artist’s explanatory text. How do they dream this stuff up?
This exhibit is a great opportunity to experience one of art’s classic conundrums: the viewer’s reactive interpretation versus the artist’s intent. How much of the personal can be conveyed as universal?
I don’t know about the “art-speak” notions of “transnationality, globalization, or the distribution of political power”, but The Adventurer will admit that the visit offered him alternate constructs for thinking about his dreams. As with most exhibits featuring installations, this one has its hits and misses and seemed both accessible and dense. But then again, so is our own dream life.
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