Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979-2001Addison Gallery of American
Art
Fred Wilson turns museum culture inside out, giving objects on display new contexts, labels and juxtapositions, to expose both the museum’s underlying assumptions and our own. Numerous museums have invited him to examine their collections and reveal the subliminal messages conveyed through selection, placement, labeling and lighting. Wilson represented the United States in the 2003 Venice Biennale. In Mining the Museum,1992, perhaps his best-known exhibition, Wilson studied every piece in the Maryland Historical Society’s collection, and then displayed them in new combinations, questioning what is exhibited, and why, and how, and who decides. (Consider the various meanings of the word “mine.”) From that show comes “Cabinet Making 1820-1960,” a group of four elaborately carved and upholstered chairs facing a stark cruciform whipping post of black iron and wood. Another powerful and thought-provoking piece is “Guarded View,” 1991, four headless brown-skinned mannequins in actual museum guard uniforms. “Me and It,” 1995, combines a group of kitschy stereotyped “collectibles” of African Americans (Aunt Jemima, pickaninny with watermelon, etc.) with two videos. In one, a black woman with a hammer smashes a mammy figurine in an infinitely repeating loop. In the other, the artist adopts the poses and expressions of the figurines himself, in a painfully clear demonstration of how demeaning and dehumanizing such representations are. Since the work is drawn mostly from previous site-specific installations, the show is a slightly incoherent medley of pieces removed from their original contexts, another museum issue that Wilson has frequently addressed. If you haven’t experienced any of his installations as a whole, however, this is the next best thing. |
