Carnegie Ramble

Art in America, March, 2000 by Edward Leffingwell

The Hall of Sculpture itself is similarly chockablock with the elements of the Kippenberger installation, The Happy End of Franz Kafka's "Amerika" (1994/99). This work sufficiently resembles a nearby educational entertainment attraction, Planet Golf, to cause some confusion about its status as art, rather than link it to its intended target, Kafka's nightmarish fable. The Salvation Army store of a collector's dreams, Kippenberger's installation of hundreds of tables and chairs, many of them numbered, some of them valuable in themselves, includes the odd Le Corbusier chair, a nest of Thonet tables, a bit of Gehry bentwood, a collection of hotel ashtrays, and a carnival ride with two chairs under umbrellas endlessly revolving on a track around an axis of a gigantic, Paul Bunyan-sized, sunnyside-up plastic egg. There are accumulations of tables, a silver-painted desk with drawers for art storage, a lifeguard's chair, and a pair of high, rectilinear wooden towers, like tree houses or forts from a children's game of battle. Video images and sound are projected onto jars of organ specimens, giving a pickled heart the mouth with which to ask the rhetorical question, "What's the difference between a cartoon and the real thing?"

There are two more stops on the way to the more formal International galleries worth the diversionary route, both of them signaled by the yellow, black and white exhibition logo. Diana Thater's Delphine reprise necessitates a trek through the Kippenberger court, on to the Museum of Natural History, past dinosaurs and banks of interactive computer stations, educational theme-park digressions and a fast-food cafe appropriately named Fossil Fuels, up by elevator or flight of stairs to the rather funky dioramas of Botany Hall. Here, the videos that simulate the effects of an aquarium take on a more baroque appeal, projected on the vaulted ceiling above the coves surrounding a gallery featuring such attractions as a Lake Erie Beach, a Kitchen Garden of Herbs with a picket fence, and displays of simulated fruits and nuts native to the region. The projections overlap in kaleidoscopic fashion in the darkened room. On the floor at the hall's center, Thater installed a group of large video monitors, facing up at the projections, each monitor displaying a generous fraction of what appears to be an incomplete filtered image of the sun.

To finish this section of the tour, the plucky visitor moves on to the Carnegie Library far away, in search of Janet Cardiff's In Real Time (1999), something truly Kafkaesque, a new wrinkle in the development of the interactive acoustic guided tour and a step away from virtual reality. Leaving behind the ransom of a credit card and picture identification in exchange for a handheld video monitor and headphones, the visitor sets out on the trail, led by the image on the tiny screen and Cardiff's guiding voice. Follow along the stacks. Stop here. Turn right, cross this room, rest on this window seat, watch some non-sequitur boudoir scene in a jump-cut personal aside, move down a narrow aisle, look out into this inner courtyard, go down these stairs, a dizzying sequence. In fact, the experience is near to breathtaking, if not actually conducive of a panic attack, as the video connecting each location is bracketed by the location itself in real time, engaging the physical plant of the Carnegie in a direct and commanding way.