Thesis - Water Exhibition at the Zimmerli

On Friday, September 10th, our thesis class went to the Zimmerli museum to see the Water exhibition. Once we were lead down the spiral stairs we approached the entrance to the gallery on the lower level. The walls were painted an intense aqua blue and the word "Water" was written in white along with the description this exhibition hoped would be understood as the viewers walked through the different rooms and encountered many different works.

View of Water gallery entrance coming down the stairs.

The first work that caught my eye was the net filled with water bottles hanging from the ceiling. This is Ross Cisneros' Ice and Ark. Without any explanation of the piece, I recognized it as "water," that is to say, if we were asked to think of something when the word "water" was mentioned it would probably be water bottles. These are our most common everyday encounters with water, a plastic bottle filled with 12 ounces of purified liquid. One might even think this wasn't much to base a gallery off of, but the way the color of the room compliments the art and displays the written definition you suddenly get the sensation of being completely surrounded by water.

Moving through the entrance doorway, I entered a room filled with several different ways of looking at water. It seemed to me that these sculptures, installations, and paintings represented a more physical, worldly way of seeing water. I got the feeling these artists were really amplifying the presence of water that occurs naturally in our world.

Hans Haacke "Condensation Cube"

Maya Lin "Dew Point"

Geoffrey Hendricks "Sky on Sky" & "Sky Boots, Tuesday"

This room's soft blue-gray color in combination with some of it's contents gave off an atmosphere of a rainy day. Especially when looking at Haacke's "Condensation Cube" the water droplets cling to the top of the cube and drip down the sides reminiscent of a rain storm. Going past the condensation box there is a corner filled with blown glass "dew drops." This is Lin's "Dew Point", a 3-dimensional piece that works well in the room by taking the small sparkling droplets from Haacke's cube and enlarges them so that we can admire the shape of giant dew drops, something normally overlooked. Hendricks' two pieces "Sky on Sky" and "Sky Boots, Tuesday" connect water as condensation into clouds on canvas as well as on a pair of boots. The colors in this entire room sit very well together and in my opinion had the most "watery" feel because of the colors and contents.

Women in Waves

Men in Boats

The room I found really stretched the usual ideas of water by delving into art history was filled with the idea that women are in waves and men are in boats. It was a fascinating display of paintings and drawings, giving the room the most historic feel. Almost all the works were hung on the walls, which did make the room seem the most crowded of all in the gallery (though not at all unpleasantly so.) We were able to talk about how when the curator had to set up the show, a pattern was noticed that most men were seen as the working force on boats. Women were always playing in the waves, this also tied into art history painting, mainly of the Goddess Venus being born of the waves.

This brought up a very good point of how the curator could work with certain pieces, taking them from their original context, say an oil painting from the nineteenth-century French art collection, and placing it into the water exhibition. The change of surroundings can completely change how the painting will be perceived and it's over-all message can be changed. This in turn, brought up a question to the curator about how a piece is handled if the artist is no longer alive to object. The curator makes descriptions based on his or her education of the piece, as well as where it will fit in best. However, is the artist is still around to have a say in their work, they can make it clear how the piece is supposed to be understood amongst viewers and where they would, or would not, like it to be seen in the museum.

Albert Bierstadt "Glen Ellis Falls"

Maya Lin "Pin River"

Another good bit of discussion came up when Gerry Beegan noted the mirror effect that presented itself in the careful placement of certain works in the exhibit. It's another part of the curator's job to make sure that the art cooperates with one another, in this case to support the theme of water. It was in some small, sometimes almost illusive, instances of the play with what simply just looks nice next to another, or how little details in a painting mimic the detail of a sculpture on the other side of the room. This creates a beautiful flow through the gallery as you follow through the different installations.

Gennady Goushchin "Sunset in the Bolshoi Theater"

A final reaction to this particular gallery was awe. The curators, artists, and other participants in setting this exhibition up made "Water" a literal experience, something exciting to gaze upon and sometimes listen to. The stated intention was that all that participated in this exhibition wanted the viewers to "reassess their relationship to water and renew our appreciation," and that is exactly my opinion when I exited the gallery and passed underneath the netted water bottle.