Empty hands, silent mouths - installation art, Juan Munoz, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, Massachusetts

Art in America, March, 1996 by Ann Wilson Lloyd

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has been described as a "Bostonian's dream of Italy." Mrs. Gardner herself has been called Boston's first installation artist for having flamboyantly assembled the artifacts and styles of various cultures and eras in her ersatz Venetian palace. The Spanish artist Juan Munoz, who was in residence at the Gardner Museum last fall, has in the past made spare tableaux of architectural elements such as columns, balconies, parquet floors and handrails, peopled with clumsy wood or terra-cotta figures. He thus was a promising candidate to make an exhibition responding to the collection, which remains just as it was at Mrs. Gardner's death in 1924.

Munoz's installation in the temporary exhibition gallery, a small white cubic space separated from the museum proper, was on view from Sept. 12 to Dec. 31, 1995. Surrounded by the Gardner's wealth of out-of-context columns, balconies, decorative flooring, etc., Munoz devised a presentation of the utmost simplicity, one that specified little but suggested much. He fastened on a work probably bypassed by most visitors--an exquisite little drawing in the richly detailed style of a Persian miniature, attributed to Gentile Bellini. Portrait of a Seated Turkish Scribe or Artist, ca. 1479, depicts in profile a richly robed and turbaned man seated on the floor, tablet on lap, pen in hand, seemingly mesmerized by the blank page in front of him.

Munoz responded to the image in two separate but related manifestations: a photographic narrative published in the exhibition catalogue, and a sculpture and drawing installation titled Portrait of a Turkish Man Drawing. In the gallery he placed a cast-bronze three-dimensional version of Bellini's Turkish scribe, roughly half life-size, its surface treated with silver nitrate to create a gunmetal finish. The figure sat on the floor, its back turned to entering viewers, facing and so close to a back gallery wall that visitors had difficulty getting a full, frontal view of it. The statue's hands, though placed in positions corresponding to those of Bellini's drawn figure, were empty; the tools of his trade were missing and he stared intently at empty air--an artist contemplating the void.

The figure also had his back to eight black oil-stick drawings mounted on the wall. These depicted disembodied mouths, closed or slightly open. Another mouth drawing hung just outside the gallery. Each mouth, roughly twice life-size, floated in an expanse of white paper, under glass rimmed with a stark black frame--an elegant treatment.

In the exhibition catalogue, Munoz offers a suite of color photographs that starts with the original Bellini in situ. Then, in successive shots, the camera cuts away to an adjoining window, passes through the window's old, rippled glass to the outside, to Boston's Muddy River, which flows through the park across the street from the museum. Final closeup photographs of the water's glassy surface reveal a floating object that appears to be an audio speaker.

Like Munoz's previous work, his installation and his catalogue presentation were laconic. He managed to tread the line between the conceptual and the sensory, making the work as inexplicit as possible although it commands space and provokes thought. Both the installation and the catalogue visuals could lead each viewer to identify tentative relationships and construct possible narratives. The various components--the original Bellini, small and precious, under glass; the catalogue's juxtaposition of fragile window glass and the glossy water beyond with its absurdly protruding speaker; the glazed drawings of mouths; even the silvery, cold sculpture--created a sense of a gravid silence barely contained beneath a thin and brittle surface. Yet the aloof, inaccessible figure, its empty hands, the silent chorus of mouths, the soundless speaker in the river--all spoke volumes to the receptive listener.

Munoz, who is also a poet and a writer in the metafictional manner of Borges, Calvino and Eco, described, in a lecture delivered at the museum, how he initially walked through the chambers of the museum as if through a library. The little Bellini, one image among "an endless throng," provided a means for him to enter Mrs. Gardner's immutable tableau. In his choice of the work by Bellini, Munoz, deliberately or not, invoked her original source of inspiration--Venice. His photographic reference to the adjacent Muddy River could have been a sly parody, since Boston's swampy fens are a far cry from the Grand Canal. But for Munoz, flowing water has metaphoric associations with flowing time and far-flung places. He also played upon themes of representation and dislocation: a Spanish artist in America, re-creating a Turkish artist originally represented by an Italian artist. (Bellini was sent from Venice to Constantinople to paint a portrait of Sultan Mohammed II in 1479.)

The nine silent mouths may have connoted both the futility of language and the multitudinous voices lost within these premises. Or perhaps they represented another parody. In the Gardner collection is John Singer Sargent's elegant, but oddly smudge-mouthed portrait of Mrs. Gardner, a painting that allegedly took Sargent nine frustrating attempts to complete. It is one possible story among many in the library of images.