Life on Mars found, proves quite artistic

Life…Life on Mars 55th Carnegie International Carnegie Museum of Art Runs through Jan. 11, 2009 Carnegie Museum of Art 412-622-3131

Nothing feels more like Martian territory in “Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International” than Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Cavemanman.”

The 2002 installation piece aims to transport viewers into a desolate and dangerous underground. The imagery evokes a sense of being in a bunker during a nuclear fallout. But a closer inspection shows that an eclectic collection of revolutionary books – works by Chomsky, Nietzsche and Marx – are hooked up to dynamite that is wired directly to the minds of aluminum foil sculptures of earthly beings.

It’s a fitting centerpiece to “Life on Mars,” the Carnegie Museum of Art’s most recent international collection of works from 40 artists around the globe. “Cavemanman” imaginatively displays the curatorial questions the exhibition asks: “Are we alone in the universe? Do aliens exist? Or are we, ourselves, the strangers in our own world?”

While the concept of revolutionary works of literature as cranial time bombs certainly isn’t something new, Hirschhorn’s environment is so seemingly extraterrestrial that the piece’s originality comes from asking how alienated humanity has become from its own intellectual consciousness. While this might seem pretty heady, the majority of the works brought together by curator Douglas Fogle for the museum’s 55th international approach these questions in a more subtle way.

Instead of attacking the show’s theme head-on, most of the 204 artworks in “Life On Mars” – ranging from painting and sculptures to video and sound works – seem to be created with an ever-increasing awareness of both the growing connection across the globe and also just how small our world is in the universe, a conjecture about how little we seem to know about ourselves in a world that keeps getting smaller.

As Fogle explains in his curatorial statement, “these artists are inheritors of an artistic legacy that seeks to produce not the monumental but the momentary, the ephemeral and the modest.”

The best works in “Life on Mars” accomplish just that. Paul Thek’s humble paintings on newspaper are quietly stunning. His painting method of broad strokes with smudges and blemishes is most revealing in “Earth Drawing 1,” which depicts a touching view of the Earth as seen from space that recedes into oil advertisements on the business newspaper he used as a canvas. Pieces such as Bruce Conner’s “ANGEL” series (1975) of photographic abstractions and Vija Celmins’ “Night Sky” (1990-’96) works seem to have been chosen for their fame and obvious relationship to the theme but end up offering very little. Celmins’ series is a collection of paintings of groupings of stars as seen from Earth. While the correlation to the questions of “Life on Mars” is apparent, it doesn’t seem to reveal anything beyond that when compared to newer works by artists such as Richard Wright and Ranjani Shettar.

Wright’s mesmerizing wall design of patterned golf tees painted to the wall of the museum, and Shettar’s 2006 “Just a bit more,” an installation of suspended wax beads that seem to hang frozen in time, seem to be inquiries into human consciousness’ place in the world. In comparison, Conner and Celmins seem to simply be making pedestrian observations.

One of the nicer features of “Life on Mars” is that a number of the artists contributed to a service in which museum-goers can use their cell phones to listen to artists talk about their works while they go through the gallery. The number and extensions are placed throughout the gallery by participating artists’ works.

Fogle has stated that he came up with the title from the David Bowie song of the same name. Like the song, the 55th Carnegie International isn’t a search for aliens but a question of whether or not there is escape from the pangs of existence on earth.

“Life on Mars” feels like a museum of global folk art: a collection of simple expressions with a consciousness of humanity’s place not only in the world but the universe. Perhaps years in the future, when cosmic travelers visit Earth and go to museums to see what type of ancient art earthlings produced, this is the stuff they’ll find.