Web Exclusive: Life on Mars offers insights on art

Making an effort to use my Pitt student ID, I stirred up the initiative to traipse through the… Making an effort to use my Pitt student ID, I stirred up the initiative to traipse through the “Life on Mars” exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art. While attempting the duty-bound circuit between the portraits, films and installations, I was astonished at how much they baited my mind.

The first surprise was Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ untitled installation piece. A bunch of junk was scattered around the room: shoes, pots, tools and even a butt-smashed sofa. I looked at the title card and discovered that I was wrong.

Suddenly each item became a lot more important. There was a dusty rain-grayed plank with split seems and wood-knots that couldn’t have been more interesting if the guard was cracking it over my head. It looked like wood, but it wasn’t. The title card said it was made of polyurethane. Was it really?

I don’t know. I wanted to climb inside the roped-off room and try to kindle a fire to see if it was wood or not. But I doubt the curator would have appreciated how convincing the exhibit was for me if it meant sprinkler explosions and water damage. I’m still not sure if fire damage would have been a potential outcome. For all I know, some of the objects were just tossed in the room after the artists left, as a joke.

The question I rolled around inside my head was: What’s more real? What I’m seeing or what this little title card is telling me I’m seeing? After a few minutes, I realized I was still standing in front of the exhibit, now with polished-bright eyes. I wasn’t even looking at all the things in the room, I was just thinking about them.

I’ve admired art before. I’ve thought about how important it is and analyzed it according to color schemes and so on, as my high school art teacher showed me with saintly patience. She probably still winces when her students, now in the real world, mumble about how ridiculous it is that a bunch of different colored squares can be called “art.”

But I’ve never stood in front of art before and actually had it talk back to me. Art is to be seen, not heard! Quiet down, art, I’m trying to look sophisticated here. This exhibit turned my conception of art around.

However, Ms. Roberta Smith found the same exhibit to be a faux pas in her New York Times review of the show. She thought the models “add[ed] nothing to the show or our sense of [Fischli and Weiss’s] achievement.” In fact, Ms. Smith thought the entire show was only able to “inspire mild interest or resigned indifference,” as she feels such large international exhibits often do. Having a great deal of experience with art in all its forms, Ms. Smith was unfazed by what she saw as a lack of controversial or medium-stretching displays.

It figures. Not that Roberta Smith would dislike the show, but that as soon as I have a positive epiphany about art, it becomes somewhat degraded by the direction in which high culture is traveling. In fact, I find it so frustrating I must disagree with her.

It’s not that I think her outlook on art is faulty, but rather that I think the show has more artistic value than she gives it credit. After all, it changed my outlook on art, more than any art show before. While it might not be inspiring to her, it’s far from an exhibit that “dulls the imagination.” To the contrary, it sharpened my imagination.

Ms. Smith finds that familiar art can’t incite imagination as controversial art can. As for me, I’m not so affected by controversial material these days. Ever since my much younger and then dogmatically religious eyes clasped onto an image of a crucifix submerged in urine, I find everything tame in comparison. These days I must resort to searching out new interpretations and ideas to apply to old things to find enjoyment.

While Ms. Smith might find the “Life on Mars” exhibition uninteresting, I don’t see that as a reason not to go for everyone else. As she points out, she was familiar with the work of many of the artists, and a reviewer of her stature must have quite a bit of experience and ideas locked away from years of studying art.

There’s still reason for anyone else to go. When I told a co-worker the other day that I was going to the exhibition, her friend chipped in that she had gone and didn’t get it.

When she finds something to get it with, the exhibition will become enormously valuable for her.

E-mail Dan at dmv17@pitt.edu.