THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
ARTS
13
EXCEPTIONALLY INVASIVE Cow Bladder in the Gallery By Rachel Kay Illustration By Julieta Cárdenas
F
rom a distance, Atrabiliarios looks flat, a blur of five rectangles on the far gallery wall of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). Upon closer viewing, each shape is revealed to be a compartment, a niche that pushes deep behind the whitewashed plaster. Even closer, it becomes clear that inside each compartment a single or a pair of women’s shoes is inclined. They hide behind a translucent, fibrous cow-bladder violently stitched to the edge of the niche with black surgical thread. Positioned within the largely empty wall, the vague and hopeless shoes sink into memory. Meaning ‘defiant’ in Spanish, Atrabiliarios is Salcedo’s post-autopsy commentary on missing persons from her native Colombia, mainly female victims of domestic violence. The work is arresting for its unconventional installation and introduction of organic components and material objects into the controlled gallery setting. Its odd materialization—the yellowish and rubbery cow bladder—elicits a visceral response, an assertion of the work’s subject in living memoriam. The artist Salcedo chooses to employ less relatable materials than the paintbrush and canvas, the wide aperture lens, or the video camera and projector. Her adventurous medium physically invades the wall space of the ICA. The viewer’s reaction to Salcedo’s art is central to the work, but there is more to the story behind the installation of Atrabiliarios. In the three minutes it takes an ICA visitor to look at the work, roughly one stitch of the surgical thread through the cow matter and into the wall would have taken place. Salcedo and her assistants devised an extensive process to assemble the specific materials of her art. They examined hundreds of dried bladders to find just a few of pristine translucence and minimal imperfections. They wet the selected bladders to fit them firmly over the exacted wall niches, sewed around their edges, and finally spacked, sanded, and painted the
minute holes that resulted in the wall. According to a segment on Atrabiliarios from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, such attention to fine levels of detail is integral to Salcedo’s work. She installs with a great deal of precision and awareness, and then passes that vigilance along to where the art is on view, in this case the ICA. Yet paying proper attention to Atrabiliarios, upholding the integrity of the work and providing for its fragile and unusual ingredients, is a far from simple task—a job that raises many questions surrounding the place for this materially-provocative art within the museum. Anna Stothart, a curatorial assistant at the ICA, spoke with the Independent about the nuances of exhibiting Atrabiliarios. “Since the work contains cow bladder, it is important to ensure the care of it while it is in our galleries,” says Stothart, a duty that includes “maintaining appropriate humidity, temperature, and light levels,” as well as reserving an entire wall for the roughly 5’ by 2’ installation. The “pull and clarity in the material,” says Stothart, “reflects the tension of the art’s subject.” And preserving the artistic effect of the cow bladder depends entirely on the ICA’s ability and willingness to meet the work’s specific environmental constraints. John Smith, director of the RISD museum, considers caring for a work like Atrabiliarios a measure towards “ensuring its physical and intellectual livelihood. You make a commitment to the work when you acquire it, you make certain that its importance and impact will have staying power and that you have the capacity to care for it.” He spoke on how organic materials pose challenges both sophisticated and worrisome for museums, referencing other provocative installations similar to Salcedo’s. In Anya Gallaccio’s Preserve ‘Beauty’ (1991) for example, Smith explains how gerbera daisies are fresh-cut, squeezed between panels of glass, and left to decay for weeks
in front of a half-amazed, half-disgusted audience. As the flowers wither and die, their once bright and fragrant faces fall limp onto the floor, rotting and circulating the smell of decomposing plant material. Preserve ‘Beauty,’ while a beautiful and compelling work, according to Smith, “created all kinds of issues with dying plant material and mold.” The rotting flowers from the art developed fungal spores particularly problematic for viewers with asthma. The ‘side effects’ of the certainly striking work of art, these ‘thumbprints’ in the daily functioning of the gallery space, raise worry as to the responsibility museums should assume when displaying work that defies normalcy of material. While Smith seems up for the challenge of adapting the museum for its artists and the trials they pose—whether Salcedo’s holes in the wall and humidity adjustments, or Gallaccio’s mold, insects, and smells—not all installations are met by art personnel with equal eagerness and enthusiasm. Alia Al-Senussi, Art Basel coordinator and Tank Magazine contributor, questions the material aggravations that artists present for museums. As example of the problems posed by off-the-books mediums, AlSenussi referenced another work by Doris Salcedo that was exhibited in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall in 2007. Five stories tall with 3,400 square meters of floor space, the Turbine Hall displays work specifically commissioned for its factory-like setting inside of the Tate Modern. Salcedo’s work, Shibboleth, was the “first to intervene directly in the fabric of the Turbine Hall, ” says AlSenussi. Shibboleth formed a huge chasm in the floor space of the Hall, a crack spanning the length of the Hall at some points even a foot wide. Al-Senussi told the Independent that despite the ambitiousness of Salcedo’s work, there exists today a shadow on the floor of the Tate because of it, a “scar,” as she says, forever defacing the “incredible museum.”
The installation or rather, deconstruction of Shibboleth, “is extremely unfair to the artists that will come after [Salcedo].” Other criticisms of Shibboleth raise more anxiety surrounding the work’s daring and unconventional materialization. The New York Times reported that “fifteen people suffered minor injuries in the first eight weeks that Shibboleth opened,” visitors who had tripped and hurt themselves on the crack in the gallery’s floor. “It is certainly the responsibility of museums to present works to the public that the normal husband and wife team won’t buy,” says Al-Senussi. “It is certainly their responsibility to give artists the opportunity to make epic works.” However, as both Al-Senussi’s concerns over the permanent defacing of the Tate and the unsuspecting museumgoers hurt by the installation’s elements demonstrate, the museum’s responsibility should not stop at appeasing the artist. Museums must be able to anticipate how materially or structurally far artwork in their institutions can go. Cow bladder, rotting flowers, large-scale cement breakages—there seems to be no limit to what museums allow their artists to realize. Curators like Anna Stothart and John Smith greet the challenges that art of different materials present, whether in support of unyielding art, or for the good advertisement and special attractions that these pieces bring to their collections. Whatever the reason, the difficulty of upholding the integrity of these works—and realizing that the integrity extends from the work itself to the gallery environment as a whole and the people who roam around within it—cannot be forgotten. RACHEL KAY B’13 developed particularly problematic fungal spores.