Sarah Oppenheimer at the Mattress Factory II

Continued from yesterday...

One of the great joys of visiting an art museum is the freedom to study, to look at the art as intensely as you like. The best museums do all they can to encourage quiet, prolonged contemplation: They light artworks just so. They put it on the wall at just the right height, or they place sculpture away from the wall so that you can walk around it. With any luck they provide a bench so that you can soak up any painting you like. The privilege of looking at what you want for as long as you want is such a basic part of museum-going that none of us think much about it.

But as soon as I discovered that Sarah Oppenheimer's 610-3356 went through a Mattress Factory floor, I realized how it dramatically changes the relationship between the viewer and an artwork, between the museum and the visitor, and even between the museum and it's neighborhood. Here I was, standing in a museum gallery looking at an artwork, and the artwork didn't just accept my gaze the way a painting or a sculpture might, but it re-directed it. Furthermore, it re-directed it outside the museum, into the backyard of a museum neighbor. Oppenheimer had transformed the private, privileged museum-goer's gaze into an intrusion, a violation of someone else's space.

Ever since at least Michael Asher, artists have enjoyed playing with the concept of what a museum is, and how it creates and communicates histories. Oppenheimer's work, both 610-3356 in Pittsburgh and (from what I can see on the web) her Horizontal Roll at the St. Louis Art Museum go a step further: They don't just invite us to look and then think, they decide how we look, and thus play a much more active role in determining how we think about what we're seeing. As I noted earlier this week, there's a mini-resurgence of artists who are interested in institutional critique; Oppenheimer goes further than any of them. She isn't just critiquing the institution, she's changing the way we look, the way institutions relate to their audiences, their neighbors and their communities.