For the second of his four-part Cram Sessions series of month-long group shows, the Baltimore Museum of Art’s contemporary art curator, Chris Gilbert, has assembled a collection of cultural artifacts typically ignored by the art establishment. The interior colonnade of the museum’s main building is filled with amateur efforts by Sunday painters, a zine reading room, experimental musical instruments, soft weapons used by fantasy war-gamers, and even a makeshift pasta factory.
The most immediately evident characteristic uniting the objects in Cram Session 02: Dark Matter is their improbable place in a museum, though Chris Gilbert claims he’s not interested in beating that dead horse of an issue, not even with a foam mace from the imaginary land of Darkon.
“This is not a show about art, and there is no claim made that what we are presenting is art or should be considered art,” Gilbert writes in an e-mail. “I am not interested in the question of what art is—a tired and outdated question, which is best ignored for the simple reason that it is exhausted.”
Gilbert, who was hired last year to revive the BMA’s moribund contemporary department ("The Fast and the Curious," Art, March 10) , is mindful of the difficulty of avoiding the question that has both fascinated and fatigued several generations of artists, art historians, and museumgoers.
“There’s a certain kind of Hegelian mind-set that says even in negating something one is engaging it,” he says in an interview. “But I also think it’s possible to refuse things.”
Indeed, Gilbert adheres to a strict policy of coy refusal with regards to much about the exhibit. He declines to evaluate the quality of the pieces (“To be true to [the show’s] idea, we must bracket the idea of quality”), declines to describe his curatorial selection process (“It should be obvious that Dark Matter is not a show about connoisseurship”), and refuses to speak about himself. What he will gladly discuss is refusal itself, or, more specifically, a politics of productive dissent that is the show’s underlying theme.
Just don’t call it a theme. “There is no common thread that runs through the material, no theme,” Gilbert tells a small group of journalists during a brief tour of the gallery on the opening day. “The show brings aspects of production into the space that have no commonality to them. They’re what I call radically heterogeneous.”
Apart from being united by their disunity, all of the items on display are examples of what Gilbert broadly defines as “production.” “In making, creating, doing, farming, even consuming, one is engaged in a political act,” he explains.
All of these unlikely museum pieces, then, have a practical dimension. Some are explicitly utilitarian, such as Marjetica Potrc’s “Power Tools,” a collection of technologies the Slovenian artist and architect has come across in Third World communities, such as a hand-powered radio, a solar oven, and a lawn mower-like device designed to efficiently transport water in rural Africa. Other items in the show are examples of hobby art (the “dark matter” of the art world, the work of those unheralded amateurs whose consumption creates an affordable market of art material—such as paper, paint, and fabric—for professional artists) like the 400 members of the Darkon war-gaming tribe, who create elaborate costumes, armor, and play weapons for use in fantasy role-playing.
The point of bringing these different hand-made objects together, the curator goes on to explain, is to promote a dialogue that will result in political activism. The show will be a success, Gilbert says, “if political activists benefit from some of the techniques of production and creation on display, and deploy them in their struggles.”
If it sounds like Gilbert believes the proper role of a museum curator is as political organizer, it’s because he does. “I see the show as an organizing agency,” he says. “The exhibition aims to have a kind of agency that is more often associated with political party building or coalition forming, rather than that of an art exhibition.”
To that end, the centerpiece of the show is the “Radical Information Center,” a foldable, portable tent proposed by Gilbert and designed by students from the Maryland Institute College of Art, which will display and disseminate political literature supplied by museumgoers and others.
Heady ambitions, these, though it’s safe to assume that the only act of dissent practiced by the vast majority of BMA museumgoers will be to refuse to slog through the theory-thick texts that accompany and explain the exhibit. To these bourgeois dilettantes, Gilbert makes no concessions. “A viewer who does not engage the ideas of the show will not engage the show,” he says.
Maybe, maybe not. Despite the curator’s rather limited interest in contemporary art as being primarily practical, there’s plenty here to please those who think good art can also be, well, pleasant. Take the “Countercultural Knitting” segment, which displays the productive output of a group of artists calling themselves the Subversive Knitting Society, founded in New Orleans but which found a home at Baltimore’s Ottobar between 2000 and 2003. It appears that Keri Jowers, Stefanie Japel, Dan Breen, and Laura Cherry started by knitting brightly colored beer cozies, and then moved onto more playful outlets for their stitch ’n’ bitch sessions, designing cold-weather wear for parking meters, condoms, and dried shrimp. Cherry’s contributions abandon even ironic pretensions and become pure sculpture: soft syringes for heroin addicts, a knit vulva, knit toilet paper and poop (the knit shit, according to the wall card, is filled with baked beans).
While Gilbert might prefer that experimental musicians John Berndt, Neil Feather, and Michael Johnsen apply their resourcefulness to combating globalization, or the corrosive power of Capital, it’s possible to simply admire the ingenuity of their turning a pool cue into a guitar, or inventing an intricate stringed instrument powered by bicycle pedals.
In fact, the most subversive approach to Dark Matter may be to take defiantly decadent pleasure in the considerable aesthetic achievements on display here. If you will it to be, this is an art show after all. Anyway, it’s getting too cold out there for rallies and riots. Much nicer to curl up with a knit vulva on a chilly fall night.
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