“Sensory Overload” is audacious. It’s more an installation than an exhibition and sprawls over 10,000 square feet in the east lake level galleries at the Milwaukee Art Museum. It’s up for two years, compared to the usual run of several months, and declares a goal of covering “Light, motion, sound and the optical in art since 1945.”
Most of the work is from the museum’s permanent collection. Chief curator Joe Ketner has reshuffled the museum’s collection, creating not just an exhibition, but what will stand as the museum’s basic presentation of contemporary art for two years. That’s an eternity considering all the venerable works of art once on display in the museum and now displaced by this exhibition.
It’s a long list. The Robert Gober sculpture (the bottomless suitcase), without question the museum’s best sculpture of the last 30 years, is no longer on view. Gerhard Richter, the preeminent painter of his generation, is gone. The decades of the 1980s and ’90s are mostly missing, including Julian Schnabel, John Currin, Jeff Koons, Anselm Kiefer, Kiki Smith and Sigmar Polke. There is no photography, leaving out influential contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman, Roni Horn and Andreas Gursky.
It’s going to be harder to teach contemporary painting in local colleges while this exhibition is up. Imagine the furor if the Museum of Modern Art in New York couldn’t find a place for Picasso, Matisse and Jackson Pollock. Better have a good game plan if you bench your best players for two years.
Ketner certainly has an original one, a view of the way art evolved since the 1940s that does not line up with any conventional history of art. It takes a lot of nerve to take a museum so far away from the known world of art.
His title is provocative. Sensory overload happens when a cacophony of conflicting stimuli overwhelms the senses. It is often associated with autism. Sensory overload is also the headache that Paul Valéry wrote about in his famous essay “The Problem with Museums” (1925). “This stroll I am taking … distracted at every moment by masterpieces right or left compelling me to walk like a drunk man between counters. The ear could not tolerate the sound of 10 orchestras at once.”
If Valéry found 1920s art museums overwhelming, what would he make of this show? “Sensory Overload” amps up the dissonances. Ketner’s remedy for Valéry’s stupor is to drown him in alcohol.
The altar of “Sensory Overload” is an overflowing mound of old TVs. Nam June Paik got most of the credit for being the first artist to make a television into a work of art. But his greatest virtue turned out to be his greatest vice. Paik never took his TV idea anywhere. He just repeated and embellished a successful prank.
Ketner traded in a modest, earlier Paik owned by the museum and paid a half-million dollars for this later work, Ruin.I was skeptical. Overdoing a good thing is an occupational hazard for famous older artists, and usually a red flag for museums.
But in this exhibition, the Paik fills a room and shines. An overwrought glittery heap of old TVs with silly graphics feels just like cable news today. Ruin could be a graveyard, an elegiac, yet prophetic work of art.
Next, Ketner looks back to an important part of Milwaukee Art Museum history – Stanley Landsman’s Walk-in Infinity Chamber (1968). It’s been refurbished and is back on view for the first time since 1988. Before I cared about art, I went to the museum just to be in this box, with its dots of lights reflecting to infinity. The Landsman rivaled the psychedelic ending of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now it looks like a charming special effect from of an old movie. It’s good to have this friend back for a while.
The Infinity Chamber is paired with a new acquisition, Erwin Redl’s Matrix XV (2007). It’s a fiber-optic light work that fills a darkened room with bright blue dashes. It’s a trip, too. But isn’t the Redl just an updated version of the Landsman? Same idea and experience, but with dashes instead of dots.
None of this is very deep, but I don’t care. It’s wacky fun. But the exhibition really begins to unravel when you are forced, by its size, to take “Sensory Overload” seriously.
There’s a room of late-1960s and early-1970s art. Works by Frank Stella and Al Held surround a Kenneth Snelson steel cable and tube sculpture. The works rhyme. The art is clean, flat, spare and
nonillusionistic. Geometric Abstraction was a calm moment for art. In short, this is not sensory overload: The sparks fly only because Ketner jammed a big sculpture into a small gallery. What’s the point of an exhibition if it’s about what a curator does tothe art rather than with it?
In another room is an Alexander Calder mobile, a Howard Jones sound piece and some Josef Albers color studies. Calder mobiles are playful and soothing. The Jones work is a sleek minimalist steel arc that makes a popping sound when you move your hand across the surface. Albers is a reserved intellectual and formulator of color theory. Overload? All of these works would be perfect for a child’s room.
And so on for a few more rooms. All equally arbitrary and confounding. After which it is hard to imagine what is not “sensory overload.”
What does Ketner have in mind? His essay for the exhibition on the museum’s Web site traces “Sensory Overload” to László Moholy-Nagy and Albers, two Bauhaus instructors whose ideas, according to Ketner, stimulated the development of Kinetic Art, Op Art, Geometric Abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, Minimal Art, neon, Post-Hypnotic Art, beauty, and the “optical tradition,” including contemporary images, film and video.
Whew. This is the big-bang theory of art. Countless styles of a half-century or more of art, all the rambunctious generations that shunned and rejected their parents’ art, the polar opposites of blank canvases and heaps of flickering televisions – everything emanated from two Germans in 1928.
Ketner takes the notion of color and just connects the dots from Bauhaus to the present. According to his essay, Albers developed “theories using color and geometry to create optical effects.” After the war, “ideas generated at the Bauhaus about abstraction, motion and color catalyzed an international exploration of Kinetic Art.” Then Bauhaus color theories developed into Op Art, followed by art with “simple forms and pure brilliant color,” then Color Field painting and “eventually, Minimal Art.” Finally, today, artists are “characterized by their sensuousness – rich color and form.”
Enraged by this kind of simplification, Willem de Kooning wrote in 1949, “In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.”
Without any kind of gravity, ideas lose their shape and become a liquid. Insignificant correlations float to the surface. The first casualty of this kind of thinking is usually the art.
Poor Ad Reinhardt. He started making “Black Paintings” in the early ’50s and continued until he died in 1967. They were central to the Modernist adventure of refining out everything that was unnecessary, leaving, as Reinhardt put it, “a breathless, timeless, styleless, lifeless, deathless, endless” work of art.
Reinhardt blackened color until it hovered just beyond the point of apprehension. It takes a while for our eyes to adjust, as they do to a black starry night, and for the color to seep through. His paintings can take as long as 20 minutes to appear. Reinhardt kept extending the “seep time” until the work shimmered in the moonlight of the mind.
Reinhardt’s paintings “turn the lights out,” critic Harold Rosenberg once observed. The artist implored curators to dimly light his paintings. Reinhardt wanted to find light in darkness, literally.
In this exhibition, Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting(1963) is on an outside wall facing a window, next to a big, white, blinking neon sculpture. It’s a mugging. Stephen Antonakos’ neon sculpture is the streetlight that erases the Milky Way. Another Antonakos work, Double Sequence 2002, lights up the garage at General Mitchell International Airport. He has no business being in the same galaxy as Reinhardt.
Next to neon light, the Reinhardt work is erased. The art disappears.
Adding insult to injury, the Reinhardt was vandalized a few years ago and repaired. It looks OK from the front, but from the side, the first thing you see is the wound in the glare. That alone would be reason enough to put the painting elsewhere.
This is a headstrong exhibition, uncompromised by the art, or any other moderating influence or authority. You can walk into a museum and deface an art work, or sandwich this painting between a window and a neon light. Either way, it’s a crime. Ad Reinhardt is dead and so is his painting.
Elsewhere in the museum, Ketner has brought an important work of art back to life – the museum’s illustrious Donald Judd, a taut row of six brushed aluminum and orange Plexiglas boxes. It was completed just when Judd hit his stride in 1968 and acquired two years later for almost nothing. Today, a comparable work could fetch $10 million. It’s a seminal work – the right piece at the right time by an artist who has been vindicated and elevated by history.
Judd tried to take art out of its frame and out of the mind, and let it just be: “a shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself.” Minimalism was the end point of a 200-year slog from Romanticism toward pristine clarity. Today, art is a mess again, so we fondly look back at artists like Judd because at least he cleaned up his room.
The Judd used to be in the party room of the museum, where the rough concrete wall dampened its spirit, and the cavernous space turned it into a wallflower. When the festivities moved over to the Calatrava, Judd was stuffed into a standard museum bay with three other art works. The cubicle pinched and flattened the sculpture.
Ketner sprung it from jail and put Judd on a spacious wall in a gallery with Minimalist and conceptual work from the ’70s. It took 37 years for the museum to find the right place for the work. It adds to what is now the most complete and powerful gallery in the museum.
For the first time, you can see why most of the museums in the world would happily trade their Judd for ours. It’s a revelation in three dimensions. For the first time, you can walk around it. There are angles of view. This work needs room to ramble, which is why Judd bought a ranch in West Texas to showcase his art. Now you can see why this is the most important sculpture in the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Don’t take my word for this. There is another Judd in the gallery, a vertical row of blue boxes, that evaporates in the other’s presence. Two years from now, when “Sensory Overload” has run its course, the power of Judd’s masterpiece will still resonate.
