Lessons From an Art Carnival

Peter Schjeldahl, the New Yorker’s mustachioed art critic, describes the ideal museum as “a place where we can go en masse and be alone.” When I first read those words, I thought that they extended to the practice of art-viewing in general. Possibly because nearly all of my meaningful experiences with visual art have taken place in museums, or possibly because I always appreciate justification for my introversion, I took Schjeldahl’s comment to heart and determined that I would need to be alone, or at least feel alone, to achieve a deep connection with a piece of art. Illuminus, a locally organized nighttime contemporary art event, forced me to question my reliance on solitude. For if the museum is pushed into the street, its walls torn down, and thousands of non-museumgoers ushered in, can one still expect to be alone with the art?

In its second annual iteration, Illuminus is Boston’s contribution to the increasingly popular “nuit blanche” movement, featuring “installations and performances by artists who manipulate light, sound, and projection to create an immersive, multi-sensory spectacle.” The 30 “projects”—predominantly large-scale art installations—are geographically centered on Lansdowne Street, the corridor sandwiched between two of Boston’s most prominent venues of spectacle, Fenway Park and the House of Blues. Indeed, the nocturnal festival seems to take spectacle as its starting point, primary medium, and ultimate goal.

As I first made my way down the asphalt stretch, skirting behind the Sausage Guy cart to break through the mob of visitors, signs of just how un-museum-like this event was became apparent. A festival worker turned DJ belted “Happy Birthday” through loud speakers, several spotlights roved the sky, and even some of the art projects themselves appeared superficially extravagant. “Waking the Monster,” a performance project in which 15 percussionists banged on the steel girders of Fenway’s “Green Monster,” had the potential to expose the living identity of the iconic institution but instead came across as a Bostonized “Stomp” better suited for the seventh-inning stretch. Yassy Goldie/gjyd’s “i want to sox yu0,” a dystopian take on the souvenir shop, seemed to function as the requisite haunted house of a theme park. Within minutes I assumed the pretension that only a young Harvard art history concentrator could muster and scrawled “ART CARNIVAL” diagonally into my notebook.

In the past several years, an expansive critical discussion on what Schjeldahl calls “the art world’s prevailing values of commerce and spectacle” has emerged in newspapers, magazines, and art journals, especially with regards to the spectacularization of museum programming. Artist and former New York Times art critic Brian O’Doherty describes “the museum as spectacle, the museum as entertainment, fun,” Going as far as to ask, “But what draws people to these museums? Why aren’t they going to the zoo?” SUNY Stony Brook professor Donald Kuspit remarked that “Postmodern art events are not much different than postmodern sporting events.” In 2013, Cornell even offered a summer session course entitled “Museum as Spectacle.”

At first, “Touch This”—a massive structure entirely encased in tin foil onto which “confusing, disruptive, and addicting videos” were being projected to “create an overall sense of unease”—seemed to be just another of the many participatory, environmental installations (selfie-fodder) that characterize Illuminus. Nearly all of the 75 visitors crowding up against the work had taken the piece’s title to an extreme and were violently stripping the foil off of the installation to fashion crowns and hats. I saw the artists, Jesse Kaminsky and Isabella Koen, watching from a distance and asked them for their reaction to the destruction. “We didn’t expect people to rip it to shreds like this, but you have to go with it,” Kaminsky explained. “Maybe that’s an interesting direction to go with for the next piece. You can learn a lot from what people want to do.”

Illuminus initially seemed to be the culmination of the phenomenon of entertainment-driven curating, having turned a platform for contemporary art into an outdoor extravaganza with the word “spectacle” in its mission statement. Or at least that was my impression until I began to appreciate that Illuminus was not trying to create a museum in the streets but was actually intentionally distancing itself from museum conventions by placing itself in the public arena. The event did have curators and did present art for viewing, but its carnival-like atmosphere, rather than solely exemplifying the triumph of meaningless spectacle, might have been intended to bring contemporary art to those it was unlikely to reach in a museum—and to force traditional museumgoers out of their jaded habits and into experiencing art in a wholly new, contemporary setting.

I did not have any personally meaningful experiences with art at Illuminus, partially because I was largely unwilling to wait in the hour-long lines to access most of the art. But in seeing the informative impact that a spectacle-driven show can have on everyone from infrequent art viewers to the artists creating the works, I came to understand the importance of occasionally leaving the white cube for the carnival tent.