Exhibitions: On All Sides

• Share

When visitors walk into the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale next month, they may have trouble believing their eyes. There before them will be a crazily tilting, garishly colored mock-up of Chicago (see color opposite), including a 14-ft.-long Michigan Avenue Bridge crowded with traffic and pedestrians, a view of Michigan Avenue itself with gigantic figures of Playboy's Hugh Hefner and Mayor Richard Daley towering above the skyscrapers. Before visitors are done, they will be expected to stoop, sidle and squirm through and around painted plywood installations representing the Loop's elevated trains and a mock "Historic Arch" decorated with a shimmying Little Egypt and Skyscraper Pioneers Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler.

They may be baffled—Abraham Lincoln, for instance, looks confusingly like a Marx Brother and the only well-known Italian is Al Capone. But judging from an earlier Chicago gallery showing of Red Grooms's work, they will leave delighted. And why not? The whole construction is a cross between a set from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Disneyland. Is it art? Directors of museums and owners of art galleries insist that it, and similar installations, are. The general term for them is "environments"; their aim is to box the spectator within a micro-universe and bombard him from all sides with wacky sights, weirdo sounds and otherworldly sensations, ranging from the feeling of weightlessness to hopped-up, psychedelic hallucinations. So popular with the general public have they become that dozens of contemporary museums and galleries feel obligated to display at least one major environment a year.

Sex-Murder Cave. Not all environ ments contain figurative art. Buffalo's recent "Second Festival of the Arts Today," staged at the Albright-Knox Gallery (TIME, March 15), included five abstract environments. Drollest among them was the Pneumatic Garden of Eden, created by M.I.T.'s Otto Piene, in which huge, air-filled plastic tubes waved in the air like undersea coral growths in a darkened room lit at shin level by slowly flashing lights. Delicately disturbing was Lucas Samaras' Mirrored Room No. 2, part of the Albright's permanent collection. The room (see overleaf) was plated with mirrors on the walls, floor and ceiling. Looking up, festivalgoers could see themselves, standing on their heads a thousand times; looking down, they could see themselves again, plunging like a jack-in-the-box into the abyss.

Samaras traces back his fascination with rooms to youthful visits to Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum, where he used to stand entranced in the period rooms. "There was no reference to today," he recalls. "You were overwhelmed, even seduced, into a past age." His mirror rooms fulfill a similar function today by allowing the viewer to experience weightlessness and the expanding universe of tomorrow. Red Grooms traces back the genesis of his Chicago to his boyhood efforts in Nashville to duplicate the Ringling Bros. Circus in his own backyard and to his student days in Italy, where he toured with his own puppet show. For Grooms, the progression was from canvas, to collage, to "stickouts," to full-scale environments, which he likes to call simply "installations."