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THE FI V E SENSES

THE FIVE SENSES - Scottsdale Museum Of Contemporary · PDF fileThe Five Senses begins with a simple premise: five senses, five works of art. However, as with many perceptual, cognitive

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THE FIVE SENSES

scottsdale museum of contemporary art

We are all sculptors and painters,and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.1

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

Consciousness is always in rapid change….It is the continuous readjustment of self and the world in experience.2

— John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934

Janet Cardiff I Olafur Eliasson I Spencer Finch I Roelof Louw I Ernesto Neto

THE FIVE SENSES

THE DELICACY OF THE WORLD3CONTENTS

A visitor to an art museum naturally expects to see the art, not hear it. To anticipate smelling, tasting or touching the art requires an even more radical leap. The Five Senses begins with a simple premise: five senses, five works of art. However, as with many perceptual, cognitive and phenomenological issues, closer examination reveals a more nuanced web of interrelationships. The imaginative sculptures of renowned international artists Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson, Spencer Finch, Roelof Louw and Ernesto Neto activate the body and mind (or mind-body if one rejects a distinction between mind and matter), cross boundaries and dodge museum conventions.

The human body experiences sensation through an inextricable aggregate of biology, physics, neurology and chemistry. Recent scientific research into human perception andsensory awareness indicates a very rich spectrum of experience. This increasing understanding of complex sensory modalities suggests that perceptions of time, space and temperature are as significant as sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell.4 That premise is confirmed in the artworks in this exhibition. Artist Spencer Finch’s careful synchronization of electric fans, 2 Hours, 2 Minutes, 2 Seconds (Wind at Walden Pond, March 12, 2007) (2007) melds the unexpected, visceral thrill of wind to the romance of philosopher Henry David Thoreau’s cherished forest and creates a liminal space between technology and nature, body and consciousness. Beauty (1993), an installation by Olafur Eliasson, constructs a setting of sensory contrasts — shifts between darkness and light, warm and cool, dry and damp — that amplifies the spectacular visual experience of standing amidst water and a beautiful spectrum of fractured light. The stretched, sagging, globular forms of Ernesto Neto’s spice-filled structures, Cai Cai Marrom (2007) infuse the gallery with rich scents and heighten awareness of the architectural context around the sculpture. Soul City, Roelof Louw’s colorful pyramid of six thousand ripe oranges (1967) perched atop one another, invites the visitor to select a piece of fruit — activating four of the five the senses: taste, sight, smell and touch. In Janet Cardiff’s audio installation, The Forty Part Motet (2001), a 40-voice, 16th-century choral composition drifts among 40 speakers, each projecting the voice of an individual singer.

Encounters with these five works are forthright and direct: hearing the haunting tones of ecclesiastical music, tasting the tart flesh of an orange, seeing a rainbow, feeling the wind on one’s skin, inhaling the heady scent of spice. Just as effortlessly, one perceives the rich yellow-orange color of turmeric, the acoustic hum of box fans cycling on and off, the vibrations of music skipping from speaker to speaker, the sharp smell of citrus, the humidity of a mist-filled room.

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Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet

The Delicacy of the World: Introduction

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Olafur Eliasson, Beauty

Spencer Finch, 2 Hours, 2 Minutes, 2 Seconds(Wind at Walden Pond, March 12, 2007)

Ernesto Neto, Cai Cai Marrom

The Delicacy of the World: Conclusion

Roelof Louw, Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges)

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1 Previous Spread, Left Page: Henry David Thoreau, “Walden,” in Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 1993), p. 209.2 Previous Spread, Left Page: John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin/Perigee, 2005), p. 277.3 Ernesto Neto, interview by Ralph Rugoff, “An Interview with Ernesto Neto,” in Ernesto Neto: The Edges of the World, ed. Cliff Lauson, et al. (London: Hayward Publishing, 2010), p. 24. 4 For more information about how new scientific research on sensory modalities challenges traditional philosophical views (including phenomenology, a touchstone for much art-historical theory), see The Senses: Classic and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Fiona Macpherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

For The Forty Part Motet, Canadian sound artist Janet Cardiff commissioned the congregational choir of England’s spectacular Gothic Salisbury Cathedral to perform a choral arrangement written by 16th-century composer Thomas Tallis. Spem in alium, an a capella composition often referred to as Forty Part Motet, is considered a masterwork of counterpoint, in which individual voices harmonize, but with varying rhythm and pitch. To maximize its power and uniqueness, Cardiff recorded each singer’s voice on a single channel.

Cardiff’s installation is more than a technically complex recording of Tallis’s music. Her 40 synchronized loudspeakers are carefully arranged in a large oval in eight groups of five —mirroring the way Tallis composed the piece for eight quintets. The speakers, mounted at eye level, occupy an oddly anthropomorphic position. Visitors meander freely among them, as music fills the room and each voice lifts, blends and disperses.

In a live choral performance, the sound travels in one direction toward the audience; even the privileged choirmaster receives the unified sound at once. By isolating each voice and projecting sound from 360 degrees, Cardiff creates a radically different sensory experience. She describes her motivation in the simplest terms: “I just wanted to climb inside and hear them individually.”5 For Cardiff, feeling the vibrations of the music is as essential as hearing it. Step by step, visitors move through the shifting boundaries of sound. She explains the piece is “about how our bodies are affected by sound. That’s really the driving force.”6

Janet Cardiff (b. 1957 Brussels, Ontario, Canada) lives and works in Grindrod, British Columbia, and Berlin. She graduated with a BFA from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada in 1980 and received a Master of Visual Arts degree from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in 1983. Cardiff and her partner, George Bures Miller (b. 1960 Canada) with whom she often works, exhibited large-scale installations at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and 2011, as well as at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany in 2012. Three major surveys of Cardiff’s work have been organized by the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2001); Modern Art Oxford, United Kingdom (2008); and the Art Gallery of Ontario (2013). Cardiff and Miller are also the recipients the German Academy of Arts’ prestigious Käthe Kollwitz Prize.

Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet, 2001 I

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5 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller (Long Island City: P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center, 2001), p. 142.6 Ibid.

Previous Spread and Opposite Page,Top: Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet, 2001. Reworking of “Spem in Alium Nunquam habui” (1575) by Thomas Tallis; 40-track sound recording (14:00 minutes), 40 speakers. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder in memory of Rolf Hoffmann, 2002. Image courtesy of the artist and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK. © Janet Cardiff. Photo: Colin Davison

Opposite Page, Bottom: Salisbury Cathedral, Salisbury, United Kingdom

IIOlafur Eliasson, Beauty, 1993

Olafur Eliasson’s Beauty, consisting of an electric light, water and a hose, is technically simple. This intimate, human-scale work from 1993 predates Eliasson’s massive outdoor and architectural installations. Danish-Icelandic, Eliasson grew up in close proximity to the ocean. The natural world features throughout his art, whether sculpture, installation or photography and light projections. Eliasson invites viewers into an environment to consider their place in nature and amidst fluctuating elemental materials. Distinctions between mind and body are blurred in the perceptual experience.

Viewers enter Beauty through a series of dim corridors in which humidity and temperature shift incrementally. The floor slopes gently upward and seemingly all at once light spills through a doorway opening onto a cloud of mist and a rainbow. In the split seconds before the eyes adjust to the drastic change in light levels, sight, temperature and time all seem heightened. As viewers intuit and enter the space of the room, they experience subtle changes in the rainbow from different angles.

Although the installation requires a specific environment, the artwork itself is the light fractured through the multitudes of water droplets. Beauty truly exists in a liminal space — a threshold between the outside world and an interior world — and serves as a metaphor for the delicate and subtle shifting of sensory perception.

Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967 Copenhagen, Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen from 1989 to 1995. Eliasson represented Denmark in the 2003 São Paulo Biennial, the 1997 Istanbul Biennial, the 1999 Carnegie International and the 2003 Venice Biennale. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized Eliasson’s first major retrospective in the United States, Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, in 2008. Eliasson’s largest public installations include The Weather Project, Tate Modern, London (2003); the annual Serpentine Gallery Pavilion design (2007); and New York City Waterfalls commissioned by Public Art Fund, New York (2008). The most recent exhibitions were Olafur Eliasson: Little Sun at the Tate Modern, and EXPO 1: New York, a group exhibition organized by the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (both 2012).

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Previous Spread and Opposite Page,Top: Olafur Eliasson, Beauty, 1993. Spotlight, water, nozzles, hose and electric pump, dimensions variable. Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by Paul Frankel. Installation view at Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Image courtesy of the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. © Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Jens Ziehe

Opposite Page, Bottom: Olafur Eliasson, Iceland Series, 2002. C-print, unique. Private Collection. Image courtesy of the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery,New York and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. © Olafur Eliasson

Spencer Finch, 2 Hours, 2 Minutes, 2 Seconds(Wind at Walden Pond, March 12, 2007), 2007

American artist Spencer Finch is highly regarded for his aesthetic experiments in visual perception and sensory experience working with natural phenomena: light, color, windand water. In 2 Hours, 2 Minutes, 2 Seconds (Wind at Walden Pond, March 12, 2007),Finch used scientific methodology in an attempt to replicate his encounter with wind on aspring day. Forty-four box fans stacked four high are arranged in a semicircle. A computer program regulates the fans to blow air at the exact speed and from the precise direction asthe wind on March 12, 2007 during Finch’s visit to Walden Pond. Using an anemometer andweathervane, Finch scrupulously measured, recorded and calculated wind speed and intensityat the body of water in an effort to quantify sensation, and therefore consciousness.

Finch regularly fuses the scientific with the literary in his art. 2 Hours, 2 Minutes, 2 Seconds(Wind at Walden Pond, March 12, 2007) points to the American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s autobiographical account of his sojourn in the woods alongside the picturesque Walden pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau lived this isolated existence for twoyears, two months and two days. Finch’s homage to Thoreau’s simple and sincere commitment to the basic elements of life re-creates an experience Thoreau likely had, standing at the edge of the water and feeling the wind on his skin. Eschewing the Romantic literary tradition with which Thoreau was associated, Finch delved into physics to quantify sensation.

Spencer Finch (b. 1962 New Haven, Connecticut) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.He attended Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, and received his BA from Hamilton College,Clinton, New York, in 1985, and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence,in 1989. Finch’s many exhibitions include the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the 2009 Venice Biennale and the 2011 Folkstone Triennial. In 2007, Finch’s most significant survey, What Time Is It on the Sun? was organized by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams.A second mid-career retrospective, Spencer Finch: My Business, with the Cloud, was organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 2010. In 2012, the Museumof Art at the Rhode Island School of Design commissioned the monumental site-specific installation Painting Air: Spencer Finch. The Indianapolis Art Museum presented his most recent solo exhibition, Spencer Finch: Following Nature (2013). Finch also collaborated with the nonprofit Creative Time in 1999 to create an alternative audio guide for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and more recently with the High Line in 2009 to create the public art installation The River Flows Both Ways.

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Previous Spread and Opposite Page,Top: Spencer Finch, 2 hours, 2 minutes, 2 seconds (Wind at Walden Pond, March 12, 2007), 2007. 44 fans, wood and computerized dimmer board, 93 inches tall, 14 feet in diameter. Collection of Cifo-Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. Image courtesy of the artistand Lisson Gallery, London. © Spencer Finch

Opposite Page, Bottom: Wind on Walden Pond, 2007. Image courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London. © Spencer Finch

IVRoelof Louw, Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges), 1967

Roelof Louw maintains a willful irreverence toward modernist notions of the immutability of sculpture. With the exception of the Surrealists and Dadaists, sculpture prior to Conceptualism was defined by its permanence. Louw is a British artist educated in London during the late 1960s — a hotbed of groundbreaking conceptual art. Like much of the work from this milieu, according to art historian Joy Sleeman, Louw’s art represents the “transition from the constructed object to something less formally bounded and in direct dialogue with its environment.”7 Louw’s inspiration for Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges) came as he walked through the famous fruit and vegetable market Covent Garden.

The sculpture consists of a pyramid of six thousand carefully stacked oranges. Louw selected the orange because of two qualities: each unit is small enough to hold in one hand and the similar spheres are capable of being shaped into a larger structure. Although the sculpture bears no clear directive, visitors are welcome to take and eat the oranges. As the fruit disappears, the solid geometric configuration of the pyramid transforms into new and unpredictable shapes. The visitor’s perception of the oranges — their surface, texture, color, weight, smell and taste — is heightened by the subversive act of removing a piece of artwork from a museum and consuming it. Louw acknowledges the hippie ethos of the 1960s informed the project. Accepting a gift from a stranger enables the visitor to participate in the creation of the artwork and engage in a personal exchange with the artist.

Roelof Louw (b. 1936 Cape Town, South Africa) lives and works in London. He studied and later taught at Central St. Martin’s College of Arts and Design, London, subsequently dividing his time among Cape Town, New York and London. In 1969, Louw’s earliest works were featured in the seminal exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Forms at The Institute of Contemporary Art London, as well in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, United Kingdom. In 1970, Louw represented England at the Tokyo Biennale. Later group exhibitions include the Göteborg Museum of Art, Sweden (1970);the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts (1980); and London’s Whitechapel Gallery (2000). In 2009, Louw delivered a paper at the symposium “United Enemies: Rethinking Sculpture in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.” His art criticism has appeared in Artforum, Studio International and Tracks: A Journal of Artists’ Writings.

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7 Joy Sleeman, “Like Two Guys Discovering Neptune,” in Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945 –1975, ed. Rebecca Peabody (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), p. 156.

Previous Spread: Roelof Louw, Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges), 1967. 6,000 oranges, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Richard Saltoun, London.© Roelof Louw

Opposite Page: Roelof Louw, Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges), 1967. 6,000 oranges, dimensions variable. Archival images courtesy of the artist andStudio International. © Roelof Louw 17

Ernesto Neto, Cai Cai Marrom, 2007

Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto designs interactive sculptures and architectural interventions that engage smell, touch and sight. His beautifully chimeric work is a hybrid of anthropomorphism, minimalist form and the conceptual, sensory-driven sculptures of the Brazilian avant-garde in the 1960s. “I’m not trying to make design-based works. I try instead to create a kind of fantasy of nature, and a hypothesis about a structure of a body.”8 The word “organelle” is often used to describe Neto’s sculptures. The lumpy, globular and sagging nylon forms resemble the internal structures of living plant and animal cells.

Cai Cai Marrom is a beautiful example of Neto’s spice works. The delicate netting holds pounds of the sensuous spices turmeric, pepper and cinnamon. The pungent smells waft through the gallery, allowing viewers to encounter the artwork before they see it. The rigid structures necessary to suspend and support the biomorphic forms are easily visible. Neto asserts, “If you look at my work, you see there’s nothing hidden. I always want to be very honest. I want everything to be very transparent.… [I] wanted to develop things so you could see the structure.”9 However, despite the straightforward materials — spicy-sweet aroma, rich colors and pliable nylon — and formal composition, the artwork is nonetheless dependent upon each unique visitor’s perception.

Ernesto Neto (b. 1964 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) lives and works in his hometown. He received his education at the School of Visual Arts Pargua Lage, Rio de Janeiro, and Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, Brazil. Neto’s work first came to international prominence during the inaugural Liverpool Biennial in 1999. He represented Brazil at the 2001 Venice Biennale. He realized his largest installation, anthropodino, at the Park Avenue Armory, New York (2009). The following year, the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, presented Ernesto Neto: The Edges of the World, an exhibition that involved every gallery. Ernesto’s Tongue: Works 1987–2011, presented by the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City, brought together sculptures, drawings, photographs and objects in one exhibition. Neto is also the recipient of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, an award bestowed by the government of France in honor of the artist’s 2006 sculpture Léviathan Thot, installed at the Panthéon, Paris.

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8 Ralph Rugoff, “An Interview with Ernesto Neto,” in Ernesto Neto: The Edges of the World, p. 22.9 Ibid.

Previous Spread: Ernesto Neto, Cai Cai Marrom, 2007. Polyamide, wood, turmeric, pepper and clove, 196 ¾ × 118 × 118 inches. Collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds from the PAMM Collectors Council. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.© Ernesto Neto. Photo: Sid Hoeltzell

Opposite Page, Top; detail: Ernesto Neto, Cai Cai Marrom, 2007. Polyamide, wood, turmeric, pepper and clove, 196 ¾ × 118 × 118 inches. Collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds from the PAMM Collectors Council. Image courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.© Ernesto Neto. Photo: Jean Vong

Opposite Page, Bottom: Turmeric spice

THE FIVE SENSESJanet Cardiff I Olafur Eliasson I Spencer Finch I Roelof Louw I Ernesto Neto February 1 – May 4, 2014

Organized by and © 2014 Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art

Claire C. Carter, curator and essayistEdited by t. a. neff associates, inc. Tucson, ArizonaPublication designed by Ravance LanierAll artworks © the artists

7380 East Second StreetScottsdale, Arizona 85251www.smoca.org

All rights reserved. No parts of the contents of this brochure maybe reproduced without the written permission of the publisher.

The Scottsdale Cultural Council, a private, nonprofit 501(c)(3) management organization, is contracted by the City of Scottsdale, Ariz., to administer certain City arts and cultural projects and to manage the City-owned Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts and Scottsdale Public Art. The programs of the Scottsdale Cultural Council are made possible, in part, by the support of members and donors and grants received from the Arizona Commission on the Arts through appropriations from the Arizona State Legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts.

10 For a basic progression of this art-historical dialogue, see Dewey, Art as Experience; Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Contemporary Sculpture: Arts Yearbook 8, ed. William Seitz (New York: The Art Digest, 1965); Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2002); and Claire Bishop, “But is it Installation Art?,” in Tate Etc. 3: Spring 2005., ed. Bice Curiger and Simon Grant. (London: Tate Gallery Publications), http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/it-installation-art, accessed April 21, 2013.11 Nicolas de Oliveira, Installation Art in the New Millennium (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), pp. 16 – 17.12 Ernesto Neto, interview by Ralph Rugoff, “An Interview with Ernesto Neto,” in Ernesto Neto: The Edges of the World, ed. Cliff Lauson, et al. (London: Hayward Publishing, 2010), p. 24.“THE DELICACY OF THE WORLD.”12

It is tempting to consider the sculptures in The Five Senses from a strictly dualist position: does one experience the artworks or encounter the art objects? An early attempt to describe the in-between or transitional space between individuals’ distinct (perceptions of) reality is metaxy, a concept from Plato’s philosophical symposiums. More recently, this prescriptive line of questioning has become deeply rooted in the tussle between modernism and postmodernism. And yet somehow, the works by Cardiff, Eliasson, Finch, Louw and Neto resist categorization within the argument between the primacy of subject versus object.10

Instead, these sculptures resonate with what art historian Nicolas de Oliveira argued was the viewer’s contribution to an artwork as one of many essential components in its meaning:

The perceived absence of apparent control mechanisms or the lack of an explicit message in these works suggests an understanding shared between the artist and

the audience. The audience is encouraged to choose its own interpretation without relying on that of the artist. Artists and curators are indeed motivating spectators to experience works in an open-ended manner and become authors and generators of

their own meanings.11

In each of the works comprising The Five Senses, the hand of the artist is not obscured, but absent. In the sincere effort to abolish any obstruction between the action and the participant, the artists removed themselves from the relationship between viewer, sculpture and experience.

The playful artworks inspire a sense of awe and wonderment, curiosity and imagination. The 18th-century Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term “esemplastic”to signify the way an artist’s active imagination weaves together the commonplace — words, images, emotions, thoughts — to create a unified composition. In fact, words are an essential framing element for each sculpture in The Five Senses. Finch and Cardiff assigned their artworks titles drawn from other works of art. The title of Ernesto Neto’s sculpture,Cai Cai Marrom, evokes the syncopated rhythm of a poem. Eliasson assigned the fundamental definition of aesthetic pleasure to his work Beauty. Roelof Louw’s title, Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges), gently refers to the individual and the larger city, which in turn also references the formal organization of each orange within the sculpture’s larger geometry.

The ability to assign, dissect and define sensory experience does not alter the fact that the senses remain inextricably interconnected. One cannot taste an orange without seeing its bright color, touching its pitted skin, smelling the oils as it is peeled. Similarly, objective definitions of aesthetic encounters are thwarted by the fusion of visceral input, philosophical inquiry, emotional response and creative imagination that lies at the core of art’s expressive power. The five seminal sculptures in The Five Senses render mute the traditional static presentation of the aesthetic object. Instead, they transform the museum into a place to be exposed to art that draws on imagination. Each work extends an invitation of welcome: Please explore with us. Listen, touch, see, taste, smell the world around you. Embrace...