Sean Schumacher. “Do not sit on the art,” a five-minute installation in Matt Connors’ DARK ROOMS, PSU AB Lobby Gallery (2012).
People have an odd habit of naming things in such a way that the emphasis is placed not on their forms, but on what is lacking from those forms. Cheerios are not cheery in the least and instead are an ever-more depressing reminder of mortality each time the medicinal-looking box stares out at us from the cabinet when all we want for breakfast is instead a fatty, cholesterol-laden muffin. Matt Connors’ DARK ROOMS in the lobby of the PSU Art Building, too, is not dark but for the unique shade of paint on the walls. Instead, light fills the room more readily than I have ever seen in that space, though this has more to do with the fact that there is not a gallery on this campus not comprised of at least one whole wall of pointlessly over-scaled windows.1
The dark walls Connors left in the gallery had rather another effect; they focused attention, but not on the work itself. On rainy days, the big picture window that is far more often shrouded to block some of the streetside light from entering the space becomes a huge cinematic frame for the strangely enveloping grayness beyond of Portland in winter or the positively Smithson-ian beauty of the construction yard across 5th Avenue. Within the room, the canned lighting points up rather than down onto the low-hung painted shelves, and Connors seems to be dismissing his own art to instead further illuminating the bright white ceiling. Connors’ installation isn’t about art the same way it isn’t dark; it’s about the room, and framing it as dark and art is just a way to draw your attention to how much of what isn’t either of those occupies little corner space. In the middle of the opening for the first time in my experience inhabiting the structure at the edge of the world, it wasn’t just my attention that was focused on the ceiling of the space—it was everyone’s. My immediate thought was to James Turrell, who engages architectural spaces of his own devise in a similar way—focusing attention upward—and given what happened next I’m rather certain I wasn’t the only one to approach the work from that angle.
Unlike Connors, Turrell’s spaces are custom-built and geared towards the long-form experience. The edges of his rooms are often occupied by rather large benches, unlit and low to the ground so as to direct attention elsewhere. Turrell’s works are also generally permanent, whereas Connors’ walls will again be matched with the white ceiling above in a few weeks time to take on new shows. This may not be obvious to everyone who visited, though, which is perhaps why people keep looking at Connors’ flimsy shelves and thinking they might be ideal to take in the ceiling on a slightly longer term basis. As those people (plural) rather quickly found, the shelves are roughly as able to take weight as the cinderblocks of AB are matched (which is to say, not at all).
So, after a weekend which left three puffs of gypsum dust on the ground from separate instances in which people imagined Connors had some method to defy some of the conventions of physical science to make half-inch pieces of wood with no visible support able to hold up a 200-pound man with a food-cart taquito, the signs were hung. “Do not sit on the art,” they read, and I have to say that I was simultaneously thrilled at how defiantly institutional they were in their instructions and disappointed. After all, this was a show that repeatedly told you one thing and did another giving the ultimatum that the shelves were art when every sentiment expressed curatorially told you otherwise.
What was lacking was confusion, which was itself confusing, and I am not the type of person to stand for that. Confusion is confusing, just the same way Cheerios are bland depressing rings of death. At least, that is how I might go about defending my own installation within Connors’, helpfully pre-labeled by the gallery under the guise of the instructions to children and taquito-eaters everywhere.
Do remember the next time you visit DARK ROOMS and “Do not sit on the art” not to sit on the art.
- Massive windows is but one of the many regrettable legacies to the university of the 1970s architectural firm of Dan Davis, who erected what we now call AB in 1965 as the “President’s Offices” for their many nearby campus construction projects out of what I imagine was random parts left from other buildings held together by spit and hope; the hope has long since faded, and we have only to thank the sticky spittle caused by Davis’ likely chew-tobacco habit that the mismatched walls don’t make their presence more readily known to the ground.
