Floral design by the Hopkinton Garden Club, Flora in Winter, Worcester Art Museum, 2009. Image via the museum website. Interpretation of “Untitled” by Ilya Bolotowsky.

As a visitor walking around an art venue, it’s refreshing and pleasing to stumble across green spaces. Open-air and enclosed courtyards featuring lush vegetation and bubbling fountains, outdoor terraces and cafés, rooftop and sculpture gardens – these snapshots of nature have become de rigueur inclusions in the physical layout of museums and galleries. But how are these spaces used? What are new and creative ways in which museum staff are utilizing these natural areas for events, participatory programs, and exhibitions? Can we foresee the direction of their evolution? To try and answer some of these questions, I have asked Nina Simon, author of The Participatory Museum (2010) and founder of design consultancy Museum 2.0, for an insider’s take on enhancing the visitor experience in these spaces.

Meg Floryan: Art museums are often seen as cold, white-walled institutions with strictly defined areas and rules of behavior. Are you seeing these attitudes and approaches relaxing? That is, do you see it as advantageous for museum layouts to become more or less compartmentalized?

Nina Simon: I definitely see it as advantageous to design museums for diverse use — but I don’t see that being different now than it was ten or twenty years ago. The best museums have always provided people with a range of settings, flooring, and stimulus. For hundreds of years, for example, German art museums have interspersed galleries with window nooks where people could sit and rest their eyes between viewing artworks. The need for a multifaceted experience is nothing new.

MF: What are some of your personal favorite programs or exhibitions that have been staged in museum green spaces? What are your least favorite?

NS: One of my favorite museums in the world is the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, north of Copenhagen. The museum is an incredible retreat, a fluid indoor-outdoor experience that takes you through winding galleries and rolling hills with incredible views across the sea to Sweden. There’s even a secret garden with installation works carved into the woods — a wonderland for a few intrepid visitors willing to open a nondescript side door. Yes, the Louisiana has great art, but more than that, it’s an inspiring, relaxing experience due to its natural setting and the integration of green spaces into the whole art experience.

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Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2009. Image via Flickr. Photo by Andrew Ciscel.

It’s hip to be high-minded these days. In the cultural spheres, showing awareness of environmental concerns can prove to be a savvy PR move, and architectural firms and museum committees have taken note. Eco-friendly design in natural history and science museums is not, in this day and age, surprising at all, and art centers are increasingly taking their cue from construction successes across the country. The planners, designers, builders, check-writers — all have a keen eye toward fusing the architecture with the land, and for decreasing ecological impact through cutting-edge green technology.

On the aesthetic side, there is a rising push for integrating the walls of museums with the natural elements of their physical site. Diller Scofio + Renfro’s previous projects — notably their daring design for Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, which takes full advantage of harbor waterfront views — seem to have paid off, as the firm is the rumored frontrunner for masterminding has been selected to design Eli Broad’s new museum. Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which just broke ground in Arkansas, features sweeping panoramas of the surrounding ravine, or what architect Moshe Safdie calls “responding to the essence of place.” Shigeru Ban’s proposed design for the new Aspen Art Museum will similarly react to and highlight the natural landscape setting. Continue reading »

“Elephant Parade,” London (2010). Image via Flickr. Photo by Mark Pether-Longman.

We’re accustomed to porticoed Greek temple-style museums, white-walled galleries, conspicuous label texts, a high level of organization, and clearly-defined thematic spaces. For those of us who are city-dwellers, we expect outdoor public art to remain confined to our meticulously landscaped parks. When art projects unexpectedly seep out of these borders — which they increasingly do — the result is often surprising and delightfully engaging, redefining our environment as the ultimate museum, and promoting creative efforts as approachable and fun exercises to be found around any corner.

Here I consider the natural world as the physical setting for art. “Natural world” need not necessarily mean, however, the untamed wild, but any site upon which humans build the basis of their lives. Cities are prime hubs for inventive initiatives: whether it be in the form of waterfalls, icebergs, or elephants on parade, art has the unique magical power to transform our mundane man-made environment into that of an urban jungle.

Some open-air art exhibitions can reflect social concerns and encourage change, as did the many eco-focused projects — from Angela Palmer’s Ghost Forest, to Mark Coreth’s Ice Bear, to Millennium ART’s CO2 Cubes — planned around last winter’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The event inspired a virtual explosion of art, practically converting the country into a cultural institution capable of city-wide curation, and featuring an impressive array of work both official (the RETHINK: Contemporary Art and Climate Change exhibition at the National Gallery of Denmark) and unofficial (Banksy’s I Don’t Believe in Global Warming graffiti). Other projects are less morality-based, and involve a more light-hearted, whimsical approach; notable examples include tracking designer chair envy (the Blu Dot Real Good Experiment) and Luke Jerram’s ongoing Play Me, I’m Yours venture in impromptu musical performances. Continue reading »

Waldemar Smirnov of the Fraunhofer Institut Angewandte Festkörperphysik, Germany, “Squaring the Circle,” 1st place winner of Materials Research Society “Science as Art” competition (2009). Image courtesy of MRS. Crystalline diamond grain anisotropically etched by spheres of molten nickel.

Popular opinion concerning the relationship between technology and the environment is of great interest to me; my own graduate research focused on its treatment in mid-century American children’s book illustration.

If you think about it, the junction between science and nature in fine art – that lovely gray area blending mechanical precision with mysticism and ambiguity – actually makes perfect sense in our current world. Contemporary art has always served as a solid podium for creative voices looking to hold a mirror to social conventions and lifestyles, to reflect the modern mind. Never have our lives been so dominated and guided by the progress of technological advancement; just note how most of us are fully armed with Steve Job’s arsenal of Apple products. We’re constantly plugged in, tuned in, streaming, uploading, and downloading, and tech offers ever-expanding platforms through which to express ideas and experiment with new ways of looking at our environment.

Perusing science and medical journals, one might think it surprising that the stunning high-definition images do not qualify as works of art. In fact, they do, at least to some, and the mounting interest in the art of such research has led to an array of contests founded to reward these aesthetic accomplishments – veritable art fairs for the scientific community. The Materials Research Society launched their Science as Art competition in 2005, offering prizes to winning entries on a biannual basis. The MRS website sums up the thinking behind such contests:

Occasionally, scientific images transcend their role as a medium for transmitting information, and contain the aesthetic qualities that transform them into objects of beauty and art.

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Matthew Albanese, “Salt Water Falls,” 2009, mixed media. Image courtesy the artist.

Get to the root of the matter. Plant an idea. Sow the seeds.

Call it what you will — the environment, biosphere, landscape, wilderness, terra firma, mother earth, etc. — but nothing is as synonymous with the beginning of life as the flora and fauna that surround and support us. Often we equate the idea of nature with that of a primal past, the origin of all life, a time idealized as pristine and pure in addition to uncompromising, wild, even cruel. Yet simultaneously, discussion of our ecosystems connotes growth, progress, and the future. Using such oft-touted terms as “sustainability” and “renewability,” those individuals concerned with eco-friendliness and “going green” are deemed forward-minded thinkers with their fingertips on the pulse of our modern society’s ongoing evolution. Continue reading »

Antony Gormley, "Blind Light," 2007. Image via BBC Online.

“Our advanced art approaches a fragile but marvelous life, one that maintains itself by a mere thread, melting into an elusive, changeable configuration, the surroundings, the artist, his work and everyone who comes to it.”

When Allan Kaprow wrote these words in 1961, he was describing the tendency among the postwar avant-garde to physically and intellectually invite the audience into the art itself. Though he was speaking specifically in the context of Happenings, his quote could easily describe the nature of art produced by many of the earth artists, minimalists, installation, and performance artists of later decades. Furthermore, it can aptly reference the output of contemporary artists of today — those creative minds who defy any particular label but have enjoyed remarkable success at recent exhibitions in America and abroad.

Debates of nomenclature aside, the art considered here is that which allows for (or necessitates) the visitor’s physical action, manipulates his/her sensory encounters, and/or showcases his/her creative expression. In such art, it is often the experience of the audience that becomes the true object or subject of the work. Of course, art that reaches completion only through audience participation has been around for years, ranging from those conceptual pieces that feature relatively passive involvement (think treading upon Carl Andre’s sculptures), to mild interaction (taking and consuming Félix González-Torres’s cellophane-wrapped candies), to a more dynamic, total immersion of the public into the art (in 1964’s Cut Piece audience members cut off Yoko Ono’s garments until they left her completely naked).

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)," 1991. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

And what of more recent manifestations of this trend? Olafur Eliasson’s various projects have ranged from creating a venue for visitors to play with the effect of their own shadows (The Weather Project, 2003) to constructing a man-made island on which students gather to socialize and debate (The Parliament of Reality, 2009). For This Progress, Tino Sehgal lured visitors to the Guggenheim to exercise their intellectual muscles through philosophical dialogue with trained guides. If exploring your emotions is more your cup of tea, then you may have lost yourself – quite literally – in the disorienting light and darkness, respectively, of Antony Gormley’s Blind Light (2007) and Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is (2009). In his controversial One & Other work last year on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, Gormley left the burden of the performance entirely in the hands of the audience members, each of whom applied to win the spotlight for an hour. Currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Doug and Mike Starn’s Big Bambú presents a more corporeal experience, offering visitors the chance to walk through a maze of pathways erected on the rooftop. All of these examples earned, or are earning, significant attention and considerable traffic, and only serve as the tip of the participatory art iceberg.

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