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Guest blogger Patricia Briggs is an art historian, critic, and independent curator. Briggs is Associate Professor at Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her writing appears in Artforum International, History of Photography, Senses and Society, Women's Art Journal, and online at mnartists.org. She was named "Best Art Critic" for 2008 by the City Pages.

With this post I'm initiating a small viewer-response project, a kind of a "relational" experiment focused on Midway Contemporary Art. As a guest blogger for the 1000th Word I have the luxury of writing a handful of posts on a single topic. Compared to traditional print media, the blog environment--the unruly frontier of journalism and scholarship--offers relatively quick and easy access to publication. For better or for worse, there is little or no intervention of an editor with a blog, so theoretically a writer can experiment. My experiment is to turn my attention on Midway, a gallery I have pretty much neglected in the past, and to thinking about the role of the viewer.
Though this project may sound a bit like penance for past transgressions, it is actually born out of a desire to understand my own ambivalence, even skepticism, about Midway. Over the next few months I am going to take a sustained look at Midway--see all of its shows, participate, talk to other viewers, and think and write not only about the artworks but also about the practice of viewing contemporary art in that space.

This is not the sort of thing I usually write about. Typically in my writing, I perform the voice of the "critic." I don a guise of objectivity, insightfulness, and omniscience. This voice performs itself as universal, rather than specific and located within a community. This is paradoxical really; a critic is a person who is devoted to a local, who is committed to the ritual of viewing art in person as an embodied and specific experience, yet the voice of the "critic" so often acts as if it knows all, sees all, picks and chooses the worthy, then spouts forth knowing interpretation and judgment. So, with my experiment in sustained viewing and writing, instead of simply writing a few exhibition reviews, I am going to take the opportunity in several posts to think about the way that Midway addresses its audience. What sort of context does the gallery provide for viewers to engage with contemporary art?  Conversely, I am interested in what viewers do and how they respond.  It seems a little obtuse as I reason it out here, but I'm interested in thinking about the role and the responsibilities of the viewer as creative participant in the process of performing or completing art.

Why focus on Midway Contemporary Art? Midway exists oddly within the local. In an article devoted to regional nonprofit galleries in the March 2008 issue of Artforum, John Rasmussen, Midway's director, noted that the gallery might be better known "outside the Twin Cities than inside."  This sentiment rings true. Obviously, Midway's reputation outside of the Twin Cities is attested to by the fact that it was featured in an Artforum article  reaching an international audience. Midway is committed to promoting a profoundly, one might venture to say aggressively, anti-aesthetic brand of conceptual art. This makes it, anti- a lot of things: anti-representational, anti-formalist, anti-beauty, anti-technical craft, anti-modernist. Couple that with the fact that they exhibit contemporary work by national and international artists, and only occasionally exhibit the work of locals, it can seem as if the local is pretty irrelevant to Midway. Understandably then, if locals are aware of Midway, they typically love it, hate it, or feel an uneasy ambivalence toward it.

As I've said, ambivalence describes my attitude toward Midway as I have watched it grow and mature since 2001 when it first opened its doors in a cramped, second floor walk-up in Saint Paul's Midway neighborhood.  I could never find it. Was there a sign? Its intermediate home further north on University Avenue, even more difficult to find, was frigid in the winter. Now located in Northeast Minneapolis, Midway has clearly made it. It has two galleries, a project space, off-street parking, and a library and reading room stocked with magazines, monographs, and hard-to-find exhibition catalogs. As Midway staff and volunteers have tirelessly plugged away, I have only marginally participated as a viewer and have only reviewed a single Midway exhibition.

Ishtar at Midway, 2003

Of the shows that I have seen at Midway--and I have missed many--certainly some have left me cold.  Still, as I look back on it now, I realize that, of the shows I have seen there, a few have been really very important for the development of my understanding of the most current trends in contemporary art today. A case in point was Ishtar, a 2003 exhibition curated by Bruce Hainley. I remember Cady Noland's Untitled (1994), an aluminum tube standing upright from the center of a rubber tire rim. There were small paintings of familiar cartoon characters, lots of inelegant found object assemblages, and I remember feeling particularly puzzled by the little figurative paintings by Brian Calvin that looked like illustrations. I honestly didn't know what to make of it at the time, but with this exhibition Midway gave me my first up-close look at the paired-down aesthetic that has overtaken the contemporary art scene. Although I didn't write about the show--I wouldn't have known how to do that at the time-- Ishtar made me pause and really take note.

Omer Fast, Godville, 2005

Looking back, I realize that seeing Omer Fast's video piece Godville (2005) at Midway was big for me. Stunningly exhibited on a diagonally hung screen, this piece--featured last month on the cover of international edition of Flash Art--is made up of remixed digital video footage of costumed historic re-enactors who live and work in the Disneyfied town of Historic Williamsburg in Virginia, a place I have, incidentally, visited and actually really liked. In this uncanny piece the boundaries are blurred between the idealized past--Colonial America--and the ideology of the present--the cultural conservatism that characterizes the rise of the Christian right. Godville was a powerful and memorable introduction to this now very prominent genre of documentary and performance work that mixes fact and fiction, past and present, reality and ideology. Although I have hardly been Midway's advocate, in retrospect it seems important to note how productive being a viewer there, in that place, has been for me.

Anthony Pearson, Untitled (Three part flare), 2008

Last month, I happened to stop by Midway and found an exceptionally interesting exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Anthony Pearson. Hung vertically on the wall were large glossy digital photographs, each featuring an abstract circular form. These purely abstract works had a real presence--the phenomenological charge you might say--of minimalist "specific objects."  We find that these Untitled (Flare) pieces are enlarged images of lens flares, the small flashes of light that pop up in photographs randomly, the product of light waves reacting in unplanned ways to film or digital sensors. This is rich. These works push the viewer to consider the sensual power of the purely abstract at the same time that they press us to think about the abstraction and chance located at the heart of photography rather than its seeming inherent realism.

Anthony Pearson, Untitled (Pour Arrangement) 2008

Pearson's installations made up of polished bronze "table-top" sculptures exhibited on pedestals coupled with framed photographs were even more interesting. These installations--each with one sculpture and two photographs--push the viewer to think about the foundation--the ontology, really--of photography by framing the now archaic darkroom "wet" processes of pre-digital era. In order to highlight the notion of their preciousness as objects, Pearson framed highly abstract silver gelatin prints in thick white mats surrounded by slim black modernist frames. The staging of the photographs in these frames and the placement of the bronzes on pedestals is as meaningful here as the objects presented within and on them. Placed adjacent to the polished bronze sculptures, the silver in the silver gelatin process (accentuated by the processes of solarization which silvers the image even further) becomes visible in its literal, physical, object-ness. Here, the indexical nature of photography--the literal physical connection between a photograph and the object it represents--is referenced by Pearson's juxtaposition of these abstract photos with the poured metal bronze sculptures he placed beside them. Photography is likened here to the lost wax sculpture technique --where a wax model is used to form a plaster mold, which in turn is poured with liquid metal that hardens to form the sculpture. Yes, it is true that this highly physical casting process can be seen as an appropriate metaphor for photography.

What an intellectual workout.  There is so much going on in Pearson's work that is interesting. In fact, the strategic use of frames, mats, and pedestals in Person's work directed my thoughts straight to the history of institutional critique carried out by artists like Daniel Buren, who highlights the materiality and ideological baggage of the gallery in which his work is displayed. It is this exhibition that got me thinking about Midway as a material space and started me thinking about my role and the role of viewers more generally. Hence this project.  An art community is made up of productive artists, plenty of exhibition venues, and an audience of viewers willing and able to engage. It takes all three.  As viewers, writers, critics, of course we look at and write about art on display. Periodically we remind ourselves of the role played by institutions that mediate our relationship to art. But what sort of questions can we ask ourselves about viewing and the viewer's role in all of this?

More on this issue in my next post...

Anthony Pearson, Untitled (Solarization), 2008