The Making of Life: an art installation

I love the way I move in art, and I feel somehow changed within a space redefined by sculpture.

Yet I’ll be honest: going to see modern art always takes some gearing up for. These days I’m a skeptic, and I don’t automatically see beauty in a single black dot or meaning in an amorphous hunk of clay. What I do like is the searching, and inevitably, the finding.

Sunday’s blustery cold didn’t stop me from visiting the New Museum in Soho, another one of those spots off the R or N train that have been on my list forever. Although Urs Fischer’s (he’s “hot, young and European”) much touted exhibit takes up all three floors of the main gallery, I was taken with Nikhil Chopra’s smaller ground floor installation, “Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing IX.”  In a nutshell, it was real, imaginary, past, present, transcendent, temporal. Still, there’s more you need to know.

Three tableau vivants of 1920′s New York life filled the otherwise sparse, post-millennium space. A cot made up with an army blanket was strewn with old-fashioned black gloves and a sting of pearls.  An old-world table was set mid-meal with tangerines, a jar of loose tea, used utensils, and the type of canisters and bowls that went out of style and are now back in again.  A  crumpled pair of long underwear with the arms and legs splayed out resembled the black frock the Wicked Witch of the East left behind when she melted. A shaver and a pile of fuzzy cut hair along with a wig on a faceless plastic head defined the boundaries of a corner bedroom. An unfinished Manhattan skyline scrawled on a thick canvass hangs the length of the back wall, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty prominently figuring into the background. Signs of a past life, one that is shrunken and deflated with time gone by. The instillation succeed in breathing new life into the past.

It was odd to see the recent past recreated as a relic – these were not arrowheads or clay pots that once belonged to ancient civilizations, but items that some still possess in their homes that retain memories of grandmothers or ancestors they never even knew.

The preservation of objects, like enshrining the room of a lost loved one, has a creepy, otherworldly quality to it. I could not help but recall the mounds of shoes and eyeglasses I saw at Auschwitz when observing this exhibit. When items  are in use, they are still objects of purpose; therefore function precedes significance. I suddenly became intrigued with the idea of creating my own tableau vivant and pictured what items lay strewn across my bed: crumpled sheets, an open bottle of lotion, the sports bra and lycra pants I had left inside out, my ipod cord, all atop my Ikea bed on my the Bed Bath & Beyond sheets. I had gone to the vending machine of modern life, popped in a few quarters, and ended up not with things I loved, but items that will hold me over until better options emerge (perhaps on a wedding registry at Bloomingdales one day). My items, yes, but a definitive aspect of my character? No. Mine would be the tableau of a generic slob.

Objects are not us – but they are our values and culture. 100 years from now, when artists are reconstructing our present as their past, I’m certain things will be quite different. I can’t help but think that we cling so dearly to items in this world because we don’t know what, if anything, awaits us in the next. As in any reconstruction of the past, we edit history by picking and choosing what best defines the essence of an individual, a time, a place, and let the rest be swept away by the forward movement of time.  This is fine – for art.  After all, as much as we may try to define/brand/reconstruct ourselves in this life, that is in the historian – and the artist’s – hands.