Carnegie Ramble

Art in America, March, 2000 by Edward Leffingwell

In which the author, map in hand, threads the labyrinthine passages of the Carnegie International to find, among other things, aquarium reflections, shacks, furniture mazes, steam vents and visual echoes of MTV.

With the referential apparatus of a hall of mirrors and the intellectual ambitions of a vanguard film festival, the Carnegie International 1999/2000 places special emphasis on the art of the new as celebrated by the moving image. The lively and rambling host to this 53rd installment of the Western Hemisphere's oldest ongoing project of its kind, the Carnegie Institute consists of the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, along with a library and music hall, in an architectural embrace of old and new, a vast pastiche structure. They are a gift of Andrew Carnegie to the citizens of Pittsburgh, and are joined by mission and administration as well as by the curatorial fiat of this project.

On an architecturally dignified campus also occupied by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, the natural history museum is guarded at its Neo-Classical extremity by Diplodocus Carnegie (dedicated 1999), a full-scale bronze replica of a dinosaur discovered by museum anthropologists early in the century and subsequently named for the founder. At the other end of a long, mixed facade, a Richard Serra sculpture stands sentinel to the Institute's modern wing. It is a match for the dinosaur in its mass, volume and significance. A purchase from the International of 1985, the Serra identifies one of the principal entrances to the Museum of Art, the primary venue of the International. It also celebrates the objects of art the International has made available through purchase to the collections of the Carnegie and other important museums west of the Alleghenies since its beginning in 1896. This installment was organized by curator Madeleine Grynsztejn with the counsel of an advisory committee composed of Okwui Enwezor, artistic director of Documenta XI; Susanne Ghez, director of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; and Lars Nittve, director of the new Tate Modern at Bankside, London.

Outfitted with a map and a spirit of adventure, the visitor chooses--or happens upon--one of several entrances to the scattered exhibits of the International. In keeping with the vocabulary of the museum as temple on the hill, they lead to variously dramatic flights of stairs. One treks through labyrinthine passages to discrete galleries and courts, even to the stacks and aisles of the Carnegie Library within the complex.

An expanse of glass along the fountain facade faces the Serra and an avenue beyond. For much of their length, the high glass panes are covered by red, green and blue panels of gel, the colors of video projections and a hint to the nature of the work within. A 10-by-20-foot Alex Katz painting, Autumn (1999), is immediately visible from the entrance to the main hallway that connects the original great halls and galleries of the art museum to the modern ones. A signature Katz landscape and a key element of the artist's contribution to the International, its overall patterning of yellow leaves and tree limbs reflects the day outside. It also appears to be saturated with an eerily intense hue, the modulated effect of daylight through the red gel along the inclined hallway. Leading to the museum's cafe beyond, the tricolor panels focus attention on two large projection screens looming above a scattering of tables and chairs at the terminus of the hallway. The underwater passages of Delphine (1999), Diana Thater's installation integrating video and museum architecture, transforms the hallway cafe into the food court of a public aquarium, with what appears to be a living tableau of divers and dolphins beyond glass walls. As a source of visceral and retinal stimulation, it also serves as an introduction to the companion video installation Thater designed for a gallery of the Museum of Natural History, one of many engaging infiltrations that characterize this International.

Further along the hallway, almost hidden by the anonymity of its simple entrance, lurks Gregor Schneider's Haus ur, a removal and reconstruction of a suite of interconnected rooms from an ongoing project begun by the artist in 1985. The rooms provided for the International are slightly scaled-down replicas of the rooms of his house in Rheydt, Germany. They were constructed within the house like a box within a box, and then removed for reassembly, a process recalling the creation of a David Belasco theater set or Beuys's removal of plaster from the walls of Rene Block's gallery in Aus Berlin (1975). A few visitors at a time are admitted to explore the monastic, barely furnished and somewhat claustrophobic suite of chambers, with the two-by-four armature that supports the walls visible at various passages along the way. A simple video monitor recalls Schneider's rooms in their furnished state, perhaps reflecting the Carnegie's history of archeological digs, while reasserting Beuys's pronouncement that culture is happening here and now and not in the museums.