Although I am currently interning at the Corcoran and have visited the gallery several times over the past month, this past weekend was the first time I spent an extended amount of time in the exhibitions. Since I am usually running between classes and my internship, I typically only have a few moments to visit the exhibitions. Taking advantage of the Corcoran's free admission during the month of September, I was able to visit all of the exhibitions and really linger through the gallery.
Courtesy of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, www.corcoran.org
Through the end of the month, Chris Martin's exhibition, "Painting Big", is on display in three areas of the gallery. One of the first areas that visitors encounter is the gallery's central atrium. Here, three site-specific canvases by Martin are installed. The three canvases are huge -- 26 feet high and 17 feet across -- and create a room within a room. I did not like this installation -- it distracted me instead of enticed me. I am unsure if the artist created the pieces with the space truly in mind. One of the handouts for the exhibition states that this installation, "..forms a vibrant 'room' of color and pattern in the museum's central public space". Although the canvases do create this room, I think that it is too claustrophobic and the visitor is not able to fully view the canvases from this vantage point. I found it easier to view the canvases from the second floor balcony.
The three canvases are also intense -- hypnotic blacks and whites, dazzling glitter, and bright yellow and blue canvases are all arranged within close proximity of one another. Each canvas is individually intense. The exhibition title, "Painting Big", clearly refers to more than just the scale of the canvases. The same handout claims that the canvases in the atrium create a dialogue with the Beaux-Arts architecture it inhabits. "The patterns of curving forms echo the rhythm of the atrium's columns, and their height approaches its grandeur...they are aggressively not part of the background". I would maintain that they did not achieve that kind of echo with the building. The "aggression" they mention was certainly achieve, but I am not so sure that it was a good thing -- I found it instead distracting, if not a little jarring. It may have been intentional to introduce such intensity to the space, however I found it attempted to seriously dissuade me from visiting the rest of the exhibition.
With Martin's work, I tend to find his intent more interesting than the actual paintings. His engagement with landscapes -- both physical as well as mental -- is intriguing. The intentional cacophony of disjointed styles, colors, and shapes all create atmosphere and mood, but sometimes I find it more interesting to read about his works than to actually experience them. Often it is only when they are juxtaposed with one another that any kind of interest in generated. Individually, they can be a little one dimensional in my opinion.
If interest is achieved through exhibition, then, should these works be seen as individual pieces?
If it is through a disjointed perspective that an understanding or dialogue is created, than I suppose you could say that the entire exhibition is really about creating a harmony.
I started out thinking that the Martin exhibition was unsuccessful. But now I am wondering if it actually was successful -- I am still thinking about it. How can you judge an exhibition as successful? Is it the lasting impression on a visitor, regardless if positive or negative?
With this exhibition, I think that it is successful, in a backwards way. Kind of like the canvases themselves -- they are almost so wrong that it is right. The exhibition is the same way -- it is so disjointed that it actually makes sense.
I think your observation is a very interesting one. Sometimes the intent of a project makes more sense through the written word than the project itself. The odd juxtaposition between these massive paintings and the stateliness of the Corcoran's architecture creates a dialogue that might feel uncomfortable and claustrophobic to some viewers, or cathedral-like to others. Martin's paintings remind me of those enormous tapestries that used to grace the walls of old castles. Their anthropomorphic abstraction lends the space vibrancy...or cacophony depending on your perspective.
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