NEW YORK — On a torrid afternoon in June, Emma
Enderby, chief curator of the Shed, and Cecilia Alemani, director and chief
curator of High Line Art, walked side by side between their respective bailiwicks
on the West Side of Manhattan, plotting the configuration of their first
collaborative exhibition.
اضافة اعلان
They were exultant.
“No night install,” Alemani said. “No cranes. That’s the
best.”
Nothing would be decided until right before the opening. “We
didn’t have to think about engineering or weight loads,” Enderby said. “You can
just spend a leisurely day placing them.”
The exhibition, “The Looking Glass,” which runs from
Saturday through August 29, is a show in which all of “them” — the sculptures
on view — are virtual, existing only in augmented reality, or AR.
Using an app developed by Acute Art, a London-based
digital-art organization, a spectator can point a phone at a QR code displayed
at one of the sites — the giveaway of where a virtual artwork is “hidden.” The
code activates a specific sculpture to appear on the viewer’s camera screen,
superimposed on the surroundings. (Unlike virtual reality, or VR, in which a
viewer wears a device, such as goggles, AR does not require total immersion.)
Most of the virtual art will be placed on the plaza surrounding the Shed, on
West 30th Street at 11th Avenue, supplemented by three locations on the nearby
High Line.
Acute Art is supervised by the third curator of the
exhibition, Daniel Birnbaum, who, because of the pandemic, could only be
present remotely. “The Looking Glass” is an updated and expanded reprise of
another Acute Art show, “Unreal City,” which opened on the South Bank of London
last year and then, in the face of new lockdown precautions, resurfaced in a
monthlong at-home version. A teaser, with three of “The Looking Glass” artists,
was presented in May at Frieze New York at the Shed.
“There is something charming about it being secret or not
completely visible,” Birnbaum said in a phone interview. “It is a totally
invisible show until you start talking about it.”
If “The Looking Glass” duplicates the sensation of Pokémon
Go in 2016-2017, the search will be as exciting as the find. Whereas the title
of the London iteration alluded to T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land,” in New
York, the show gets its name from Lewis Carroll. “In today’s ‘Alice in
Wonderland,’ the phone is the new rabbit hole,” Enderby said.
Birnbaum, a respected curator who was the director of the
Moderna Museet in Stockholm for eight years before leaving to run Acute Art,
enlisted the participation of 11 artists, including household names — Olafur
Eliasson and KAWS — and such art-world favorites as Precious Okoyomon, winner
of the 2021 Frieze Artist Award, Cao Fei, Nina Chanel Abney, Koo Jeong A and
Julie Curtiss. Some of their works unfold over time and incorporate sound,
while others are as unchanging as traditional sculptures.
Released from plinths, they can acquire new meaning from
their unconventional contexts. Abney’s piece, “Imaginary Friend,” is a
hovering, bearded Black man in high-top sneakers and banded crew socks, reading
a book, with a halo around his head. “It’s a Black Jesus, I guess,” Birnbaum
said. He observed that it would have a different impact if it appeared in a
Washington political demonstration rather than on the High Line.
Eliasson, whose “Rainbow” in 2017 was a pioneering
virtual-reality artwork, contributed a cluster of five pieces, from a series
collectively titled “Wunderkammer”: a buzzing ladybug, a floating rock, a
cloud, a sun and a clump of flowers that push up through the pavement.
“Very often, these digitized platforms are presented to us
as if they are the opposite of reality, but I saw it as an extension of
reality,” he said in a phone interview. “I’m a very analog artist, interested
in the mixture of the mind and the body, and my first thought is, ‘This is
taking away your body.’ It seems like escapism and open to hedonism.” On
reflection, though, he concluded that since people are tethered to their phones,
he would aim to reach them through the device in ways that are “sensitizing”
rather than “numbifying.”
“Maybe we can get a message into the phones that the world
is amazing,” he said. “In terms of what I hope to achieve, in what is left of
public space — and the High Line is such a good example — there is the
potential of the imaginary, the unexpected encounter, meeting someone you don’t
expect to know and becoming friends. I think it’s about adding plurality and
other stories onto the public space.”
Tomás Saraceno, the Argentine artist based in Berlin who
worked in Eliasson’s studio early in his career, is even more determined to
blend augmented reality with real life. Obsessed with ecological concerns,
Saraceno is particularly enamored of spiders, and he has founded a research
organization, Arachnophilia, to study them and the architecture of their webs.
For “The Looking Glass,” he created two virtual spiders.
One, which will be on the plaza of the Shed, is a re-creation of the
spectacular Maratus speciosus, known as the Australian coastal peacock spider.
The other will be at a secret location in Manhattan. If you send a photo of a
real spider to the Acute Art app, the team will respond with the location of
the other virtual spider, which will also be transportable to your home. “It is
at the center of the whole thing,” Birnbaum said. “He likes the look of the AR
spider, but he cares more that you pay attention to real spiders.”
In the aftermath of the pandemic, Birnbaum suggested, the
popularity of virtual representations may accelerate. “Can they ever do fashion
shows again?” he said. “Will people travel? I see this as possibly another
model for exhibitions. I could imagine that the AR and VR and mixed-reality
thing will be part of a global and local future art world. I will be surprised
if the art world doesn’t change a little after the lockdown. We may be a little
bit early.”
One thing seems certain: Virtual and augmented reality are
still in their artistic infancy. Acute Art acts as a technological guru,
providing computer coders and engineers to bring the virtual creations of
artists into being. “There is a little storyboard thing written, then we do a
trial version, and they will come back and say, ‘The texture is too small,’
and, ‘It should be more red,’” Birnbaum said. “They get a test app, and they
can play around with it and place it.”
“My interest is to see what we can do with this technology,”
he continued. “Once there was photography and everyone thought it would kill
painting. Then cinema and the video camera and the internet came along. In our
own time, AR and VR are the new media. There is a period before it is
commercialized when one can do experimental things. We are there now.”
Read more
Trending stories
.jpg)
.jpg)
