Pompidou Pieces and Lithograph Lore: An Exhibit Review

I’m going to start this by saying contemporary art often has a negative effect on my brain. Bluntly put, it pisses me off. Walking down the halls of Paris’ Centre Pompidou, I see massive gray canvases, painted down the center with a single white line. I do not call this art. But, for instances such as this, I need to convince myself to go into installations and exhibits with as open of a mind as possible. Since I am going to judge and critic these pieces, I can’t let my prior views to influence me too much, although they ultimately will. At first glance, the “At Close Distance: Labyrinth of Self” exhibit seems modest in scope. 10 to 15 pieces scattered around the space not much larger then a two car garage. Walking throughout the room there are a mix of mediums: lithograph, found objects, photography, digital video. The mix of mediums makes the exhibit feel modern even when many of the pieces look ancient. With that said, I can’t seem to come up with a general theme for this graduate student installation. The name “Labyrinth of Self” implies that each piece is the artists attempt to express some internal belief or feeling, thus leading to my relative confusion as to how the exhibit flows and fits together. A few of the pieces that stick out to me most are Maggie Puckett’s “Lithographs on Paper” and Colleen McGann’s “of Mine: A Ritual of Self.”

In Puckett’s lithograph’s, her beautifully colored and intricate drawings stand in stark contrast against their white backgrounds. Her piece’s of ancient sea creatures and explorers conjure up stories of the deep sea and the “monsters” that inhabit it. They make me relive reading Jules Verne’s 2000 Leagues Under the Sea as a child.

With Colleen McGann’s large format film/digital prints, “of Mine: A Ritual of Self”, the artist has used a manipulation process that turns the photographs into a ghostly, milky, almost paint like finished product. These images are blurred, the women dressed in white dresses bleed into their surrounds in this whimsical set of three prints. They bring up images in my mind of a time long ago. The prints transport me somewhere else, somewhere distant; something that I look for in a successful piece of art.

This feeling of contemporary art as actual art that I can enjoy, for me, only lasted so long. Soon enough I came across a few “Pompidou Pieces” that, to my biased eye, are far from art. This may be harsh. It may be ignorant. It may be wrong. But with Kelli Cousin’s installation entitled “Imaging”, the viewer stared into thee white panels while strange, animalistic, natural, and humanoid murmurs were whispered into their ears via headphones. For me, the only emotion this conjured for me was that of creepiness. While this may in fact be the intended notion, I can’t get past the existence of the panels. For me, art’s function is to entertain, and, like I said earlier, transport us somewhere, anywhere. Whether our grandma’s kitchen or a far off world. To me, these panels don’t serve a useful purpose. I am sure the artist had a very strong reasoning behind placing them there, or they would never have made the piece, but I can’t read her mind; I can’t see why.

Contemporary art has never been something I have enjoyed. Maybe due to my desire to think long and hard about why a massive, inflating and deflating hot water bottle is art (as the Pompidou Center said in one of their installations). This exhibit drummed up all of those prior beliefs on the topic. Overall, I commend the artists as a whole for their work and dedication to their projects, yet I still cannot bring myself to sit for hours in front of a piece figuring it out. Why are those white panels there and why is this creepy lady is whispering aimless sounds in my ear?

by Kevin Hartmann