Contextual Play in MIT Show

One of the pieces in Thoughts Unsaid, now Forgotten, a show of the artist Cerith Wyn Evans’ work currently up at the MIT’s List Visual Art Center, is a black chandelier hanging from the ceiling that blinks poetry in Morse code while the same poetry is simultaneously displayed on an LCD screen hanging on a nearby wall. Another piece is a looped playback of a recording (found by Evans in the MIT Museum archives) of a man engraving students’ names on their slide rules, and yet another is the original 1960s console from MIT’s first student radio station.

One’s first instinct upon entering the gallery might well be to ask if the displayed objects have any meaning at all, or if they are just a postmodern pastiche of whatever has recently caught the artist’s fancy. And this is a perfectly legitimate question, given the bewildering array of sights, sounds, and experiences that Evans presents to the viewer, a pastiche that seems almost impossible to make sense of. But the truth is much more complicated, and potentially even more insidious, than mere meaninglessness.

In fact, the objects in this show are laden with meanings, and fairly particular ones at that. Take the chandelier, for example. It may seem nonsensical at first, but think about it: a chandelier blinking poetry in Morse code speaks about language, translation and the poignancy of obsolete technology. Likewise, the recording of slide-rule engravings presents us with the ghostly sound of forty year old writing—paradoxically highlighting language’s status as both a visual and sonic medium and questioning its extension through time. And the radio console is half celebratory monument and half nostalgic relic—both a commemoration of the leading role MIT radio played in exploring revolutionary music in the 1960s and 1970s and a reminder that thirty or forty years ago the internet did not exist, and radio was one of the key media of mass communication.

It is not fair, then, to say that the work in this show is meaningless, but I do think that it is fair to say that its meaning is highly problematic. The meaning I described is purely contextual, relying more on associations attached to the objects than innate properties of the objects themselves. It is highly speculative, requiring extensive extrapolation on the viewer’s part.

Now, this type of contingent meaning may or may not be a problem in and of itself (that depends on your taste for meaning in contemporary art), but I think more to the point here is the fact that because this kind of meaning is not what we usually associate with or ask from art, very few people (myself included) have yet developed the critical tools to talk about in an interesting or in-depth way. Go ahead and reread my paragraph elucidating the meaning of these objects—I’m sure you’ll notice (if you didn’t already on your first pass) that my descriptions are a both slick and insubstantial. I freely admit to my own shortcomings, but I also assure you that most other writing about this art is as bad or worse. I found the small catalog booklet published to accompany the exhibition almost unreadable; the talk of the “sad poetry” and “certain poignancy” which Evans is able to cull from “atavistic technology” and the identification of the broad themes in his work as “information, poetry, art, science, and communication,” would have been silly had I not found them so frustrating. It’s all too clear that at the moment there is no reliable framework against which we can begin to evaluate the meaning of work like this.

But I think that the greatest danger is that rather than admitting their inability to evaluate it, many writers and critics attempt to evaluate it anyway by resorting to an implicit (and therefore all the more dangerous for being so) quasi-formalism. While I doubt anyone writing about art today would feel comfortable saying that a work of art is good just because it looks cool, there seem to be plenty of writers who don’t know what to say and so slip into poetic statements of how cool that object looks: hence the “exquisite…visuality” of the chandelier piece touted in the show’s catalogue.

So, what do I really think about the work in this show? I think I don’t quite know what I think. As much as I dislike the way they were described in the catalogue, I have to admit that I found several of the pieces quite affecting—I can still close my eyes and see that absurdly overwrought chandelier flashing poetry like an SOS. So I’m not saying that visual or experiential qualities are not grounds for evaluating art, I’m just saying that if we are going to use them as criteria we might as well admit it so that we can talk about and refine our approach. More or less the same goes for the meaning of the work. I think it may actually be uncannily appropriate to have an art show that reminds us of the poignant nostalgia at MIT, an institution which clearly plays a major role in the never ending technological revolution of our time. But this kind of deeply contextual meaning isn’t something we’re used to talking about in art, and if nothing else Thoughts Unsaid, now Forgotten is a reminder that it may still be a long time before critics and viewers alike are comfortable with it. In the meantime, though, you might as well head down to MIT to check things out for yourself.