Also this issue: Bryan Willette -Susan Hagen Forbidden Broadway -Debra Auspitz Beauty and the Beast -Debra Auspitz The Consul -David Shengold Paul Taylor Dance Co. -Debra Auspitz John Simpson and Jesse Sheidlower of the OED -Juliet Fletcher Artsbeat -Debra Auspitz CityDance Ensemble -Janet Anderson

December 5-11, 2002

art

Designer Threads

Giorgio de Chirico, The Silent Statue, Ariadne (1913), 39 1/4 inches by 48 3/4 inches, oil on canvas.

The PMA and the art of installation.

by Robin Rice

The Philadelphia Museum of Art always offers a number of small and large exhibitions running concurrently. It makes these shows attractive and accessible through unique installations and collaborations between curators and Installations Designer Jack Schlechter. Orchestrating elements of installation art, architecture and commercial display, their combined efforts organize the visitor’s physical and intellectual progress and yield an experience which at best transcends the accumulated significance of individual objects.

A recent visit to the PMA highlighted three distinct exhibition strategies. "Gifts in Honor of the Museum's 125th Anniversary," coordinated by Alice Beamesderfer, associate director for collections, consists of tons of plums and scant pudding. The temporally, geographically and materially eclectic selection could easily become chaotic. It includes chairs from a Lutheran church, gold-embellished Indian paintings from an extraordinary collection donated by Alvin O. Bellak, rhythmically obsessive drawings by self-taught artist Martin Ramirez and "greatest hits" items such as a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington. The challenge is to arrange these objects so viewers are able to appreciate each one and still retain a sense of order. By relating subject matter and compositional elements, Schlechter and Beamesderfer suggest several types of relationships among art works.

Installation art is usually about the sensibility of one person, an approach nicely illuminated by "The Light Magic of Ingo Maurer." Maurer, who just received the Design Excellence Award from Collab, a local nonprofit collaboration of design professionals, has installed two of his halogen light sculptures in different parts of the museum.

In the contemporary gallery 170, Maurer has installed aha So-So (a German phrase expressing comprehension), a delicate constellation of small lights and mirrors arranged along stretched wires.

In the green and gilt Rococo sitting room from the Ch‰teau de Draveil (Gallery 260), 18th-century mirrors endlessly reflect the silent explosion of fragments of white bone china and pieces of flatware. The unconventional chandelier, perversely suggestive of a grand bouquet of lilies, is suspended from a ceiling medallion. Panels of iridescent mesh sketch a shimmering contemporary ghost room inside the earlier one.

In contrast to "Gifts" and to Maurer's works, "Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne" is about an artist and a story. The organizer of the exhibition, Michael Taylor, associate curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Schlechter employ a sense of narrative in their mostly chronological installation.

Beloved of Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, Athenian prince Theseus entered the labyrinth of the Minotaur and killed him. Theseus escaped only through Ariadne's aid, a ball of golden thread to mark his trail out of the monster's lair. Nevertheless, he soon abandoned the princess. Writers as diverse as Ovid and Nietzsche have considered this story from the perspective of Ariadne.

At the irregularly angled entrance to the exhibition, lines from Ovid are placed at about the level of a hand. The words unspool like a golden thread leading us into the labyrinth of de Chirico's "metaphysical" exploration of Ariadne's melancholy. Ovid tell us she "in her grief and anger found comfort in Bacchus' arms. He took her crown and set it in the heavens to win her there a star's eternal glory." Walls of burnt orange and mustard yellow are borrowed from de Chirico's numerous representations of the desolate princess as a statue asleep on a pedestal in a stark piazza flanked by illogically shadowed arcades.

Ariadne has inspired artists from classical antiquity to Andy Warhol. Painted wax statues representing a sculpture in the Vatican were commercial decorator items in de Chirico's day. One is in the exhibition, as is Warhol's print, which he based on one of de Chirico's later Ariadne paintings.

Greek-born de Chirico fled his Italian home to escape military conscription in 1911. He was living in exile in Paris when he took up the subject of Ariadne's exile. He knew many artists, and the paintings in this show influenced the Surrealists. Ariadne engaged him periodically for the rest of his life. Reuniting works from many sources, the exhibition allows us to experience uniquely the artist's treatment of the myth -- not merely as a series but as a serial reordering of "given" modules: arcades, a clock, a train (contemporary equivalent of the ship which carried Theseus away), a red tower and the figure of Ariadne herself, frozen in time. De Chirico presents her suffering as tangible and permanent, an exile from human consolation. This symbolism perhaps reflects the artist's personal exile, though his was clearly creatively rich and rewarding.