Friday, August 19, 2011

Funhouses and Madhouses

J and I recently enjoyed these two shows in Seattle: Funhouse, a show at Western Bridge Gallery, and MadHouses (exhibit now closed) in a row of former Capitol Hill residences sponsored by MadArt and 4Culture. Together, these two exhibits point to the strengths and limits of “public” art and gallery-constrained art.

Funhouse wants to be a party in your backyard. The winking drapes of Martin Creed’s “Work No. 990” flash open and close across the wide entrance windows, hinting that something playful and large hides indoors. In the main room, under the shadow of Creed’s wall drawing, you climb into the show’s center piece, Julian Hoeber’s “Demon Hill,” an optico-kinesthetic illusion: that is, a box with a titled floor. Two or three steps inside the brightly lit, ten by eight foot wooden crate-like structure, you immediately feel sea-sick, despite the plumb line hanging from the ceiling. The simplicity of this architectural gesture points to a strong modernist ethos that undergirds this piece and the show. Essentially, each piece asks the visitor to reassess her commitment to perspectival space, emphasizing constant physical relations just the way a Donald Judd or a Walter De Maria might. The show purports to be about “fun” and “funhouses” which might lead to post-modern pieces that tugged at cultural expectations, but in fact, the work focuses on light and space, the great mainstays of modernist architecture.

In the back room, perhaps the most exciting piece hides: Mungo Thompson’s Skyspace Bouncehouse, a Claus Oldenburg-like version of a James Turrell. On a wood pew in Turrell’s original, you look up to see a square of light from the sky you’ve been in the habit of ignoring rather than worshipping. Inside Thompson’s piece, you bounce over the inflated cushions of a county fair moon-walk beneath a similar hole in the ceiling.

Visitors’ reactions to Skyspace could be shouts of “The sky! The sky!” while hopping like children. But Funhouse is ultimately a gallery show. The hush and dark of the gallery space invites a quiet, “Ah” instead. The roof blocks out the sky that appears in the actual Turell and the white walls and air-condition muffled backroom of the gallery mute the art from an “event” to a set of purchasable pieces.

Madhouses succeeds in offering a more fun place to be than Funhouse, although the actual sculpture does not reach the subtly of those tucked away at Western Bridge. SuttonBeresCuller, creators of numerous architectural-scale works at, for example, Bumbershoot and the Lawrimore Project, installed the initially and outwardly striking, “Ties that Bind,” red bands winding through two houses. Laura Ward’s “Skin” transforms the exterior of a house into a fragile latex cast that underscores the structure’s vulnerability. By padding the interior with used clothing, Luke Haynes points toward the history of inhabitation by past residents and visitors and caretakers that patinas the houses.

The opening of Madhouses included artists and friends but also members of the Capitol Hill community of all ages who happened to walk by the show. Likewise, on a sunny Sunday, a wide swath of the Seattle community – much more diverse than the handful of visitors who make it to Western Bridge – wandered through the structures. The effect of the informal open door policy created the atmosphere of an estate open-house, but one where no one was buying, a trope emphasized by the barcoded price tag in Troy Gua’s “Crysalis.”

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