Exhibit finds ‘Madness’ in the everyday

“Ordinary Madness”

exhibition

Carnegie… “Ordinary Madness”

exhibition

Carnegie Museum of Art

This Friday to Jan. 9

Film screenings Oct. 22 and Nov. 10, 6-7:30 p.m. at the

Carnegie Museum of Art Theater

Free to public

If you’ve ever been struck by how something often overlooked as “commonplace” is actually pretty bizarre, the Carnegie Museum of Art’s new exhibit Ordinary Madness might resonate with you. If you haven’t, Ordinary Madness might make you start looking at things a little more closely.

The exhibit, which opens tonight with a free reception, examines “The underbelly of ordinary life, the actually really messed up things in the world that we take for granted,” said Dan Byers, curator of Ordinary Madness and associate curator of contemporary art at the museum.

In planning the exhibit, Byers sought to utilize the museum’s extensive contemporary art collection, much of which is not on permanent display and is infrequently seen by the public. He speculated that the museum’s collection is large enough to do as many as five exhibits at a time but is limited by exhibition space. Many museums today face a similar problem.

“There are a lot of pieces that are not normally seen, which is no reflection on their quality,” Byers said.

Many art exhibitions progress chronologically, a trend Byers wanted to break.

“I wanted to use the opportunity to remix collection a bit and think about making comparisons between artworks that we wouldn’t normally make when we’re trying to tell a cohesive story in other exhibits,” he said.

Byers found inspiration for the exhibit in a collection of poetry titled “Lunch Poems” by Frank O’Hara, the curator for the Museum of Modern Art in New York during the 1950s. O’Hara wrote the poems on his breaks from museum work at lunch counters and on demonstration typewriters in stores. The poems were influenced by his work with art but were predominantly about the city, relationships and culture.

“I wanted to underline that things that look so foreign and strange to us are actually quite ordinary. People feel alienated by contemporary art because they don’t recognize it, but there is something in all of these art works that you can relate to, something ordinary, and you can draw the meaning from there,” Byers said.

One of the main themes on Byers’ mind as he assembled the exhibit was the way much of contemporary art deals with everyday life.

“A lot of what art has been about for the past 40 or 50 years is making us think about ordinary events in different ways, breaking down the boundaries between everyday life and art. Artists used pop culture as legitimate subjects for art and everyday materials as legitimate materials for art making,” he said.

When Byers says the exhibition has “everything,” he isn’t exaggerating — art forms represented in Ordinary Madness include installation pieces, paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, animations, digital works and sculptures from a wide array of materials, as well as some short films.

The Carnegie Museum of Art was among the first museums in the nation to establish a film department in 1971.

“The museum has a premier collection of some of the most important films that were made in the ’60s and ’70s. Film, more than any other media, is suited to dealing with everyday life because it captures surroundings that we all know,” Byers said.

The collection of films screened for this exhibit was selected for having what Byers described as “otherworldly or schizophrenic or skewed perspectives.”

“These are classics of avant-garde film and this is one of the few times that people can see these prints the way they are meant to be shown,” he said.

Amanda Doman, the departmental assistant for contemporary art and organizer of the film screenings, said selecting the films from the archive of nearly 200 films and videos was a process of “narrowing it down to films that fit with the exhibit and that seemed to resonate with each other.”

Some of these films can be found online or seen at art-house cinemas, but others in the museum’s archives are difficult to find anywhere.

Doman echoed Byers’ sentiments on the unusual properties of film as an art form, stating that “Film is this medium that reflects our perception of reality and can manipulate that perception in a way that other art media can’t.”

In contrast to the cohesive illusory reality presented in a Hollywood feature film, these experimental films are about dismantling that illusion and the ideologies hidden within it.”

A related exhibit will be on display concurrently with Ordinary Madness in the Forum Gallery, exploring the works of the enigmatic artist James Lee Byers. Curator Byers described the pieces as “minimalist sculpture-esque but with a spiritual undercurrent to them. They’re about a perfect moment or perfect geometry.”

Images from Byars’ first art performances — held at the Carnegie in 1964 and 1965 — will be projected, featuring dancer Linda Childs’ unfurling paper stacks.

A collection of his unusual paper art — fragments of letters sent on different postcards, poetry written on cash-register paper, mundane logistical details inscribed on Japanese rice paper and letters that unfold into circles or hearts — will be on display as well. “It’s hard sometimes to get your head out of glass and go to museums,” Byers said. “This is a really good opportunity to see a lot of really interesting contemporary art, and I would encourage as many students to come see the show as possible.”