‘Dependent Objects’ at the Busch-Resinger

Perhaps the clearest lesson I drew from my visit to the show, Dependent Objects, at Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum is that one of the more humorous, if often unintentional, side effects of conceptual art has been to make the museum-going experience unprecedentedly uncomfortable. As I walked into the gallery the first thing I saw was “Wave,” a 1964 sculpture by the artist Hans Haacke. The piece consisted of a thin rectangular slab, almost five feet long and a little less than a foot high, which was suspended from the ceiling by two thin cables. The slab was hollow and half full of water, and as its name implies, you can pull one end and let go to make it rock back and forth so the water inside will splash around, creating waves. Or, rather, I was pretty sure that’s what the name implied—but I couldn’t figure out was whether or not I was actually allowed to do this. I eventually noticed a bolded postscript on the piece’s label: “Visitors may touch this object.” So, gingerly, I reached out and gave “Wave” a gentle nudge. The water inside heaved a little and rocked back and forth in gentle undulations. Uh, Cool.

Then I heard footsteps behind me, and a voice said, “Here—if you go like this you really get a good one.” It was the gallery guard, and before I could really tell what was happening she pulled Wave way back, let it go, and whoosh, a hurricane-force wave crashed around inside the clear plastic slab. Much more impressive.

I didn’t quite know what to say. “Oh, thanks…I see.” I flashed her a sheepish smile. “You play with these things a lot?”

She gave a nervous laugh, surprised, I think, that I was talking to her. “Yeah, well. You know.”

“Yeah, I mean, I can imagine.”

The conversation clearly wasn’t going anywhere fast. I edged away toward another sculpture. As fate would have it, this happened to be “Head Body Limbs,” a 1967 piece by Franz Erhard Walther made up of a large rectangular piece of cream-colored canvas with its two back corners hooked into the wall and the rest of the cloth piled in an untidy heap on the floor. The label said this was another piece I could touch, and I tried to determine what I was supposed to do with it. Only this was ten times worse than looking at “Wave;” now I was self-conscious because of the guard watching me from across the room. What a ludicrous situation: Just me in an art gallery making a fool of myself in front of a stranger as I tried to play with a “sculpture” of totally indeterminate purpose. I felt like I was in a scene from Mr. Bean.

I reached down and grabbed one of the corners of cloth, lifting it up. “Is this what you’re supposed to do?” The guard came over to help, grabbing the opposite corner. “Yeah, like this,” she said, lifting up her corner to form a U-shape. “But I think you might need more people.” “Oh, right. Of course…”

So what kind of art show was this, anyway? It was a show of the early work (most of the pieces in the show date from the early to mid-1960s) of five German artists: Franz Erhard Walther, Hans Haacke, Charlotte Posenenske, Gerhard Richter and Thomas Schütte. They all might loosely be considered sculptors but are perhaps better described as “conceptual artists.” Their work can be generally characterized as having two main objectives. In one sense, it amounted to an explicitly political attack on traditional notions of sculpture and of the role of the museum in displaying it. They rebelled against the idea of sculpture as precious object—and the commodification of art by museums implied therein—by using cheap, everyday materials in their work. They stripped down their creative process to a kind of deadpan manufacturing, with little craftsmanship, no complexity of form and utterly straightforward construction. But this did not mean that they wished to destroy sculpture altogether. In fact, they seemed to think that some aspects of the viewer’s experience of sculpture were inherently valuable, and that the viewer-sculpture encounter should be celebrated. To this end—and also to conveniently complete the destruction of the sculpture-as-precious-object—these artists began creating objects that are, as implied in the title of the show, literally dependent on the viewer’s active participation to complete the work. Hence my interactive encounters with “Wave” and “Head Body Limbs.”

I am pleased to announce that, in my experience, the artists were modestly successful on both counts. As far as their political agenda of subverting the traditional museum-going and sculpture-viewing experience, they got me to touch the sculptures and talk to the museum guard, experiences prompting me to think about the structure of a museum as a social institution in ways that more traditional sculpture certainly does not. And on the experiential side, I did genuinely enjoy interacting with some of the pieces; “Head Body Limbs,” in particular. There was something strangely satisfying about becoming part of the sculpture’s structure, gripping the cloth and standing there with arms akimbo, feeling my body share the tension of the canvas as I actively gave form to the object. Perhaps the closest I can come to describing it is to say that I felt a little like I imagine a tent pole might feel—assuming that the pole is vaguely aware that it looks ridiculous but still finds a kind of dumb self-satisfaction in holding the tent up.

Which is exactly the reason I say only “modestly successful.” The main problem with participation-oriented work such as this seems to be that the value it offers to the viewer begins and ends in the participation. You wouldn’t be surprised to find a miniature version of a piece like “Wave” in a Sharper Image catalog or sitting on the desk of some executive. Which is not to say that playing with “Wave” isn’t fun, but rather that it is, ultimately, dumb. At its best this work offers a very immediate satisfaction, but they are more diverting than enlightening. The artists might have done well to remember that to offer the viewer meaning worthy of contemplation is also to invite him to participate in the work, if not quite so ostentatiously.

Not to mention the utter failure of the art’s most radical political ambitions. Most of the sculpture was explicitly conceived as anti-traditional, objects to be set out on the floor and played with rather than fetishized on a pedestal underneath a glass box. But for some reason (liability? security?) the show’s curator, Kirsten Weiss, chose to display most of the sculptures in exactly this fashion. Several other fabric pieces related to “Head Body Limbs” are shown neatly folded and under glass; to do this to a piece that was explicitly meant to invite viewer interaction and thereby undercut traditional modes of displaying sculpture is the ultimate curatorial irony.

As an ardent promoter of the arts at Harvard, I would like to be able to say to my readers that they should go to this show. And of course in an ideal world, they certainly should. The work is historically important and mildly interesting—they might learn a few things about art history, and we’d all be that much more cultured as a result. But, honestly, I doubt most of you reading this column would care about this work. And I wish I could tell you that you should care, but I’m honestly not sure that this art is worth caring about.

Perhaps this is why several of the artists featured in this show moved on soon after the period from which this work is taken. By the late 1960s, Hans Haacke had largely retreated from the experiential issues explored in works like “Wave” and began to use his work to launch a much more powerful political critique that reached far beyond the museum context to engage broader social issues. And as Weiss points out in her essay in the exhibition catalog, Charlotte Posenenske stopped making art altogether in 1968 and began studying sociology because, in her own words, “art could not contribute to the solution of urgent social problems.”

Do I agree with Poseneenske’s implication that these kinds of dependent objects are largely useless? I can’t say. But I can tell you that on my way home from the exhibition, I stopped to look at the shadows formed on a patch of grass as the afternoon sun slanted through the branches of a young tree in the yard. The grass was still wet from a morning rain and the sunlight sparkled as it hit the water drops. I watched for a few moments as the branches shook and the shadows shifted. Then I reached up, grabbed a low-hanging branch, and gave it a tug. The lacy pattern of sunlight and shadow leapt and danced and the branch swung wildly. I think I could have stayed there pulling on that branch and watching those shadows dance until the sun went down. I liked playing with “Wave” and “Head Body Limbs,” but I don’t think both of them combined really held my attention for more than five minutes.