Museum Appetite 3: Context

Many specific museum exhibits have stayed with me, for either emotional reasons not relating to the art, emotional reasons relating to the art, or on the basis of the art itself.   The last exhibit I really loved was called “Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary In Contemporary Art” from the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego at their La Jolla location.   I spent an hour walking through the exhibit on my way home to Los Angeles after a weekend in San Diego.   At the time, I had just begun planting the seeds for the novel I was writing and, as I walked through the exhibit, the broad concept for my novel came alive and my ideas snapped into place.   I felt like the exhibit’s curator, Robin Clark, had peered inside my head, glanced at all the half-cocked ideas that were swimming around in my brain, and decided to create something that would answer all of my aesthetic questions and finish my sentences for me, metaphorically.   I felt like the exhibit had been designed for me.   The thematic concept of the exhibit drew me in (from the museum’s website: “Automatic Cities explores the myriad influences of architecture on contemporary art production.”) and I also loved every artist, every piece of art.   I walked through the exhibit three or four times and before leaving the MCASD, I purchased the museum’s book for the exhibit, the first exhibit book I ever bought, because I knew I would want to remember.

The day that Automatic Cities closed, an exhibit of drawings from the artist Rachel Whiteread opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.   Whiteread was one of the artists featured in Automatic Cities, so I was excited by the opportunity to examine her art in more detail.   I finally made it to the exhibit of her drawings on the last day it was open, April 25, and I was frustratingly disappointed.   I didn’t like her drawings; they bored me.

The best part of the Hammer exhibit was arrangement of the pieces by the curators Allegra Pesenti and Ann Gallagher.   Instead of arranging Whiteread’s drawings in some kind of familiar taxonomic arrangement, they looked to the art.   Whiteread concerns herself with domestic spaces and buildings, her art is focused on architectural structures, so Pesenti and Gallagher arranged the rooms according to elements in a building.   Her drawings of doors were grouped with doors, her drawings of windows were grouped with windows, her drawings of floors and floor plans were grouped with other floors.

Whiteread is famous for her sculptures, not her drawings, and while a few smaller sculptures were sprinkled throughout the Hammer exhibit, the emphasis was on her work on paper.   Automatic Cities‘ Whiteread section had the same make-up, mostly drawings, with one sculpture, but I loved Whiteread when I saw her in MCASD and didn’t like her at the Hammer.   Context, in this case, is everything.   In the midst of a longer narrative on the influence of architecture on art, I liked her, she meant something.   Out of that context, Whiteread didn’t mean anything to me on an emotional or narrative level.   So instead of remembering her drawings from the Hammer Museum, I remember that the words “Floor,” “Door,” and Window” were painted onto the museum’s walls, separating one section of the exhibit from another.

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Catie Disabato lives in Los Angeles, 5.0 miles from the Hammer Museum and 120 miles from the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, in La Jolla.   She has written essays and conducted interviews for The Millions and The Rumpus and writes about music for Venus Zine.