Chris Sauter: Museum
DiverseWorks
Michelle White
Museum, Chris Sauter’s recent installation at DiverseWorks, is a sheetrock construction completed during a two-week residency. It functions as a space within a space: a white box within a gallery that viewers must enter from its unfinished rear. Exposed two-by-fours form a path wedged in the gap between the preexisting gallery wall and the artist’s version of the proverbial white-walled gallery. Sauter accentuates the theatricality of this artificial space by the meticulous removal of portions of the wall. He then ingeniously rearranges these severed, geometric drywall pieces, using them as building blocks for “museum” benches. Placed directly in front of his modernist compositions—negative forms cut out of the walls—the seats become a suitable place to ponder the artist’s incisions.
Chris Sauter, Museum, 2005
Installaion view, DiverseWorks, Houston
Sauter has played with similarly deconstructive processes in past works. Notably, in 1999 at Artpace San Antonio, he used decorative fragments of sheetrock sliced from existing gallery walls to construct a domestic interior complete with a gracefully assembled dining-room table set. Sauter has also previously addressed the nature of the “art space,” such as in works like the aptly titled installation Gallery at Art Basel in 2003. By naming his new endeavor Museum, the artist reaches farther, reflected in both the scale of the work and the implied and equally monumental task of tackling the so-called ivory tower.
I was initially skeptical, however, of the seemingly audacious and perhaps outmoded gesture of taking aim at the white cube. Don’t we already have a healthy skepticism of the neutrality of museum and gallery spaces? As Brian O’Doherty articulated in his canonical text Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Artforum 1976), the theoretical basis of institutional critique that emerged in the 1970s exposed the fact that Modernist spaces for viewing art establish their mythology through rhetorical devices. O’Doherty argues that things like white walls and the omnipresence engendered by a hermetically sealed feel endows any object on display with a certain degree of importance and masks socioeconomic factors involved in its promotion.
Chris Sauter, Museum, 2005
Installaion view, DiverseWorks, Houston
To be sure, by literally puncturing the seal of the art world, Sauter does let a breath of fresh air into an old argument and effectively demonstrates the penetrability of a cultural bastion. But is the relevance of this action a bit too late? Has the artist revised his approach enough to make his critique significant—or significant again?
Even if Sauter is rehashing a project characterized by a heady and emphatically intellectual agenda, at least he is dong it with flair. Museum is fantastic in its genuine sense of play and near irreverence. Sitting on a bench, looking at the patterns punched out of the walls, viewers cannot help but delight in figuring out how the holes correspond to the sturdy seats beneath them and marvel at the level of craftsmanship. There is an authentic vitality in the powdery dust left by fresh cuts of drywall. Light flickers through each Mondrian-like grid, and as people walk behind these punched-out patterns, eyes and noses peek through offering an inside-out vantage point. So, while Sauter may be inverting space as a conceptual project in order to question the solidity of “the institution,” unlike Gordon Matta-Clark’s violent slashes in domestic architecture that confront notions of social stability, Museum quietly relies on the resourceful and humorous use of discarded fragments to disrupt and poke fun at a familiar environment.
In light of recent interest in turning institutional critique into an art historical movement, Andrea Fraser argues in Artforum (October 2005) that we should not see artistic confrontations to systems that display and define art as a defunct practice—that in a moment of expanding mega-museums, the need for dialogue about the political and economic mechanics of the art world is required now more than ever, especially when elitism seems to be superseded by the populist façade of blockbuster exhibitions and skyrocketing museum attendance. Sauter’s ability to have fun in a culturally loaded space is thus not only refreshing but offers a way to keep pushing the institutional envelope. As his ironic title suggests, Museum’s apropos location in an alternative art space speaks to the importance of perpetually reflecting on the hierarchy of who and what constructs our understanding of art.