The bill

Installation continues apace. This morning we unpacked, condition-checked, and hung the great self-portrait by Sir William Orpen entitled Myself and Venus that comes to us from the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At once I realized I have made an error in the relevant catalogue entry. The picture is very close to the artist’s nearly contemporaneous Self-Portrait (Leading the Life in the West) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which unfortunately cannot travel any more, and it contains the same conceit of the large, framed mirror facing the window of Orpen’s studio. In the New York painting Orpen showed various invitations, letters, opened envelopes, and other pieces of colored paper slipped between the vertical edges of the mirror and the wall, but in the Pittsburgh picture there is only one—which I took to be a newspaper clipping, perhaps a positive notice in one of the weeklies, or some such. That would be consistent with his steadily growing self-regard.

Instead I see now that this large piece of paper is a sizeable bill from The Café Royal, an itemized check, quite a long one, to which Orpen has added his notional and, I suppose, actual signature at the top, the souvenir of a bibulous evening spent with artist friends in that glamorous establishment at the bottom of Regent Street, hard by Piccadilly Circus, presumably in the opulent surroundings of the Domino Room. As it happens, we will have Charles Ginner’s view of the interior of that very room in the next bay but one, so this could not be a happier state of affairs. As well, the plaster cast of Orpen’s Venus is also present in his collegial group portrait from the Manchester City Art Gallery entitled Homage to Manet, but because in the Pittsburgh picture it is seen by Orpen reflected in the mirror with which he also sees himself it is naturally reversed. These two paintings will hang side by side, which is a rather neat curatorial stratagem, if I do say so.

Hello Dolly

These last stages of the process of putting on a big exhibition are by far the most enjoyable. The book has arrived from the printers in all its splendor. The construction of plinths, pedestals, cases, and other items of bespoke furniture is complete. There is a rich array of power tools, trolleys, dollies, tape-measures, spirit-levels, extension cords, fresh light bulbs, and carts laden with all sorts of screws, nuts, bolts, washers, hooks, and other carefully organized fittings. Such smooth wall surfaces as are, in this High Modernist building, permitted a color are now painted the necessary number of coats, and our choice of a powdery, dry pale blue produces exactly the effect we had hoped for. The signage, object labels, and wall texts have been edited, designed, and are now in production—their careful arrangement around the galleries has been decided. The illuminated vitrines outside the front door are almost done. The sound program is finished, thanks to the efforts of our colleagues in Yale Media. The films have likewise been chosen, and await the installation of the monitor and DVD-player at the end of the exhibition. Templates defining the exact position of every object in the show have now been placed around the galleries, together with stickies that indicate the correct orientation of the accompanying labels. All that remains is for the nearly two hundred objects to arrive, one by one, or in groups according to lender. And then we shall open, and start talking about it to our visitors, non-stop.

Hanging a loan show is for the responsible curators somewhat different from re-hanging the permanent collection because under the terms of most if not all loan agreements the placing and installation of other institutions’ works of art must be carried out in the presence of their representatives, and obviously to their satisfaction. That responsibility almost always rests with the couriers who accompany the shipments. To that end much advance planning is necessary, and very little last-minute adjustment is possible. Still, there are decisions to be made when we go ahead install a borrowed object, once they have been condition-checked: an inch or two up or down, left or right. The unexpected or unforeseen effects of sight-lines or adjacencies and even the friendliness or otherwise of neighboring picture frames sometimes require a little attention. Other small problems inevitably arise, and can usually be solved to the contentment of all. The director must be kept apprised of progress, and her views naturally also taken account of. Certainly we are greatly assisted by the expertise and judgment of our out-of-house exhibition designer the excellent Stephen Saitas; by the meticulousness and indomitability of our registrar, together with the professionalism, steady hands, and shrewd opinions of our installation crew. Their views are always worth soliciting and usually right.

So, four weeks from now we will be up and running. The opening week’s festivities will be behind us. The exhibition will have taken on a life of its own. There is already an enormous 15-second advertisement running roughly every half hour or so on the CBS David Letterman screen at Times Square and Forty-Second Street, with an estimated audience of 1.5 millions. I wonder whether this will generate more than average foot traffic from New York. I hope so. Yale University Press, meanwhile, has high hopes for the publication, which in so many respects seems just now to converge strangely with the recent Downton Abbey phenomenon. It seems that something in the zeitgeist is focusing some attention on my beloved Edwardians. What a very satisfactory state of affairs!

Matej Andraž Vogrinčič

What is this work of art? Is it a very large sculpture, a piece of landscape architecture, or civic design? Is it an event, a memory, a 3-dimensional visual poem, or simply a place?

In the short-hand jargon of the current contemporary art world, the work of Slovenian artist, Matej Andraž Vogrinčič is usually called ‘site specific’ or ‘installation’ art. This has developed out of a remarkable transformation in the range and type of locations that artists sought out in the past 50 years. American ‘earthworks’ or ‘land art’ of the 1960s, for example, is one of the most striking of those recent movements. In common with many other kinds of large-scale ‘installation’, these projects, which were sometimes even created for places where few if any people might actually see them, defied the conventions of the modern art market that have arisen over the past 300 years. It is often impossible to ‘own’ an installation, to collect it, or to corral it into a larger collection of art by other people. It insists upon its own autonomy, and frequently takes advantage of unique features of the surroundings, whether it is a stretch of open country or a disused urban space. And the artist asserts his right to shape and determine every aspect of our experience of the work of art. It can never exist in quite the same way anywhere else, or at any other time, except in our memories.

Matej Andraž Vogrinčič has created installations in Ljubljana, the capital City of his native country, Slovenia, as well as in Venice, Italy; Adelaide, South Australia; the isolated opal-mining community of Coober Pedy in the desert of far outback Central Australia; Perth, Western Australia; Christchurch, New Zealand, Liverpool in the north of England, and elsewhere. This installation in New Haven is his first work in the United States.

In each case, Matej Andraz takes advantage of the unique environment in which he works, often alluding to the history of the place, bringing to the task not merely hard physical work, but wry wit, and a no-nonsense, non-argumentative accommodation of the concerns of local people, the requirements of the civic authorities, even the weather. One of the most important features of his work is its capacity to interest and stimulate children, and while his works range widely in format, they have in common a basic clarity in the choice of simple motifs with local resonance, and a capacity to harness those motifs with intelligence, and gentle humor.

This text was drafted for public information by a private group of individuals in New Haven, who made possible Matej’s recent, 2007 Farmington Canal ‘Erector Set’ project, part of which is illustrated above. The text, which was aimed at the general public, was used by the group in various ways along with an interview I videotaped with Matej.