With the growing number of museums and competition heating
up, museums across the U.S. are finding new and inventive ways of attracting
the public and building upon a growing audience. In an article in ARTnews by
Frances Vigna, the Museum of Modern Art in New York brings food and art together
in an experience far from the traditions of the old. Embracing Rene Magritte’s
fascination with image making, MoMA, in collaboration with artist Elaine Tin
Nyo, reinterprets Magritte’s most iconic paintings as a five-course meal.
From cocktails of sapphire-colored curacao with plates of rosy-hued cheese puffs, based on Magritte’s 1930 oil Pink Bells, Tattered Skies, to prosciutto di Parma with an olive standing in for the eye to resemble The Portrait (1935), the attendees experience, interpret and connect to Magritte and his work through their bellies! While many might argue that this dining experience alone speaks nothing to the art and fails the participants by removing them from art itself, they will be happy to know that all attendees were also provided with a 45-minute private tour of the show by curatorial assistant Danielle Johnson. The careful planning of this demonstrates the success a museum can achieve in connecting the public to art in ways that are reflective of the visitors’ worlds while paying reverence to art itself. What gap might have formed had MoMA done one without the other is gone and in place, a bridge that has provided participants with an unforgettable experience of engagement and participation.
The participant is not asked to make the meal themselves
from scratch or design their own “artistic” meal, but rather, to participate in
a larger project by joining the team and doing their part….eating. For the
final meal, dessert, the attendees were instructed on how to paint their “canvases”
representative of Magritte’s Celestial
Perfections, four canvases from 1930 featuring the artist’s sky motif. Painting
aquamarine crème anglaise onto
clean, bare plates and dotting their blue sky with pillow-soft poached meringues,
the audience was provided as Simon would call, a “constrained” and “well-scaffolded”
participatory experience. Constrained projects such as this motivate and focus participation
and create a “comfortable entry point to engagement without limiting their
creative potential.”
Museums are constantly changing and the vehicle by which
they engage and connect visitors with art has taken on some interesting forms. “Getting
visitors to connect to what they see, on whatever terms that might be,” argues
Lisa Roberts, is to provide the audience with the skills of “perception and
interpretation” which shifts the focus from the object to the process of
looking at it. As in MoMA’s dinner with Magritte, the audience is introduced to
a new way of looking at art, of interpreting it, and validating their own
personal connection and responses to the art. While there is no denying the
power of art to trigger an emotional response, experiments such as this take a
step away from the authoritative traditions of looking and interpreting art, to
eliciting visitors’ response on an internal and personal level. A successful
example, the final plate!
A single molded dark-chocolate sparrow the size of a
baseball begs its visitor to partake in the same act that appears in Magritte’s
1927 oil Jeune Fille mangeant un oiseau (Le Plaisir).
In this painting, a serene girl violently devours a bird she has plucked from a
tree like ripe fruit. And for the participants, the chocolate sparrow was to be
devoured in the same violent embrace, cracking the shell of the bird which
burst from its hollow belly, the sweet taste of rum-raspberry sauce. Now this
is a painting…and experience…you’ll never forget!
Roberts, Lisa C. “Changing Practices of Interpretation.”
Simon, Nina. “Principles of Participation.”
No comments:
Post a Comment