Pat Steir: Drawing Out Of Line at the RISD Museum of Art

February 19^th-July 3^rd 2010

The Chace Center at the RISD Museum of Art is currently displaying Pat Steir: Drawing Out Of Line which focuses on drawings spanning forty years of the American artist’s career. Entering from either the recently renovated South Main Street entrance or from the older galleries of the RISD Museum, the visitor’s first encounter with Steir’s work is Self-Portrait: An Installation. The work consists of anatomy studies of isolated facial features from Renaissance texts drawn onto the walls which have been gridded to give the appearance of drawing paper. In addition, “five distinct bodies of work” are exhibited gallery-style in the “main exhibition space”.[1] The press release issued by the RISD Museum categorises Steir’s work in six sections: the five sub-divisions of the gallery, and Self-Portrait. However the experience of Drawing Out Of Line is of an exhibition in two distinct parts: the divisions of Steir’s work within the main gallery are less evident given the contrast between the main gallery and Self-Portrait.

Although the effectiveness of Self-Portrait is maximised by having visitors walk straight into it, it is not immediately clear that there is more to the exhibition than the installation. A visitor may be unaware that the exhibition continues after being initially immersed in Self-Portrait. When the visitor proceeds into the gallery they encounter wall text on Pat Steir’s life and work (along with the acknowledgements to sponsors) that is usually presented to the visitor at the beginning of an exhibition. There is no wall text in Self-Portrait. Instead, a hand out is located on a plinth near the entrance that provides information about the process of installing Self-Portrait rather than on Steir’s larger corpus of work or the exhibition as a whole. Moving into the main gallery space is a return to a more traditional exhibition format, and it in some ways feels disjointed for the visitor to be ‘introduced’ to Steir in this fashion after having already immersed themselves in Self-Portrait.

The transition plays with the relationship between the viewer and the artwork and the degree to which it is mediated by the curator’s interpretation and vision. In some ways, the excitement created by being immersed in the installation was lessened with the reversion to a more formal gallery layout because the relationship that was established between the viewer and the art in Self-Portrait was not maintained. The layout of the main gallery is fairly non-linear and there is not a prescribed route through the space. However it is not as evident as it would be if it existed alone given the unmediated experience of the installation; it feels more formal than it would if it were experienced before Self-Portrait. However, having visitors walk through Self-Portrait before becoming familiar with the context of Steir’s larger body of work allows for a more experiential and less analytical approach to the work. They can then contextualise Self-Portrait within the rest of Steir’s oeuvre of drawings as they move into the main gallery space, which would not be possible if the main exhibition was presented first.

The hand out represents one way of providing information for an installation that prevents the use of wall text. However, perhaps due to the need to be concise, the hand out for Self-Portrait does not inform the visitor as thoroughly about the work as it could. As it states, Self-Portrait was originally presented at the New Museum, New York in 1987. It has been recreated at the RISD Museum in 2010 by a team of RISD students working with Steir and her assistant, who copied images from sources in Renaissance and Baroque drawing manuals projected onto the walls.[2] This addresses the consideration of authorship in the execution versus the conceptualisation of a work, and is an important issue within the genre of installation art. Gaye Leigh Green includes it as something to be addressed when teaching about installation art[3], but it also has a resonance within the narrower genre of wall drawing. Sol LeWitt, who is known for his large scale wall drawings, “stressed the idea behind his work over its execution”[4] and often invited artists and students to assist him in realising his works.

Not included in the hand out is the information that the process of recreating Self-Portrait took two weeks to complete and the exhibition was planned to open before the installation was finished to “[give] the public the rare opportunity to watch Steir...at work”. [5] This aspect of the recreation of Self-Portrait is important for how the visitor views the art work and considers the processes of art. It is especially relevant within the discourse on Self-Portrait where, according to the hand out, Steir “questions whether all art is self-portraiture, even when the unique gesture of the artist is removed”.[6] The early visitors experienced this aspect of the exhibition; however for those who visit after the installation was finished, being unaware of this part of the process affects how they receive the work.

This is not the first recreation of Self-Portrait, and information about previous recreations is also not included in the hand out. It has been adapted several times for different locations, most recently as Self-Portrait: Reprise 1987-2009 at the New York Studio School. Prior to that it was “presented, in successively modified forms, between 1987 and 1991, at the Galleria Alessandra Bonomo, Rome; Grazer Kunstverein/ Stadtmuseum Graz, Austria; Centre International d'Art Contemporain de Montréal, and the Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada; the Orchard Gallery, Derry, Ireland; and the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, France”.[7]

Each time the installation has been recreated it has morphed slightly, in part because different drawing manuals are used. The current recreation at the RISD museum, for example, uses folios from the RISD collection as well as one from the John Hay Library at Brown University. In the recreation at the New York Studio School, Self-Portrait included bodies of men, women and children copied from sketches by Dürer, as well one of Steir’s “signature” waterfall drawings.[8] These do not appear in the RISD installation, although several waterfall drawings are included in the main gallery space. This relationship between Self-Portrait and work in gallery at RISD strengthens the cohesiveness of the exhibition, and deepens the visitor’s understanding of Steir’s body of work as a whole. However it is not a connection advertised whilst in the exhibition space.

These issues raise several questions about treatment of installation work and its presentation to the public. When a work has been adapted to many different sites, is an understanding of its various manifestations important for a visitor’s understanding of the current recreation of the work? It is doubtful that the recreation at the RisD museum would look exactly as it does if Steir had not recreated Self-Portrait several times previously, but is this important for the visitor’s perception of the work? Or should the installation be decontextualised not just from the rest of Steir’s drawings but from its own development to allow the visitor to have an experience with the work completely unmediated by a curator? Omitting information about the past recreations of Self-Portrait in the print out seems to be a deliberate curatorial choice to allow this kind of experience.

Whilst Self-Portrait is not categorised as site-specific art, the extent to which the site influences the final product necessitates that it at least be viewed as a “site-oriented” art.[9] It is not known if Steir intended to recreate Self-Portrait several times when it was first drawn in 1987, so should Self-Portrait be treated more as a site-specific installation, or what Stephen Koplowitz terms a “site-adaptive” work?[10] Alternatively, Miwon Kwon’s assertion that some artists “are attempting to reinvent site specificity as nomadic practice” [emphasis original][11] through repeatability could be relevant to understanding Self-Portrait in the larger context of site-oriented work. Choosing to identify the New Museum as the first site of Self-Portrait but not including the information about the other recreations suggests that the curators are treating it more as site-specific- the context of the New Museum is seen as the most significant phase in its history.

This biases the origins of an art work over its life cycle and evolution. This may be problematic for the way that visitors view the distinction between the conceptualisation and realisation of art that is so prominent a theme in Self-Portrait and related work, such as that by Sol LeWitt. Is the original installation at the New Museum more authentic or more valuable that the recreations in Rome, Regina, Canada or Derry, Ireland? Including the information about the first and not the subsequent installations detracts from a visitor’s understanding of the long term processes of art, and of the way that an artistic concept can be manifested and realised several times over.

Several of the curatorial choices made revolve around the contextualisation of Self-Portrait: An Installation. The print out is the only information that the visitor is able to access whilst experiencing the work, but in being selective about what to include in it, there is the risk of the visitor being underinformed. Perhaps it would have been more effective to not have included any information about Self-Portrait in the installation itself, thereby providing the visitor with a thoroughly unmediated experience of the work. This would offer the chance to more fully contextualise Self-Portrait after experiencing it, and would avoid the possibility of the visitor being underinformed about the history of the work, long term processes of art, and some of the larger discourse around installation art.