I’m standing in a quiet room, looking at a brick wall. There’s a soft clunk behind me, a sound like a warped piece of machinery. My eyes track downward to a video in which a curly-haired woman in a grassy field is buttoning and unbuttoning a pink housedress. Tracking left, they catch curves of salmon and ultramarine at the edge of something enormous. I hear the clunk again—this time it happens just as the woman finishes the very top button. [...]
[...] Give yourself at least a good 30 minutes in Spatial Poems, ideally more. It’s one of the most extraordinary art experiences I’ve had in Tulsa this year, curated by Cassidy Petrazzi in response to a performance score by the video and installation artist Mary Lucier. A score, in this context, is a set of instructions that can be performed by anyone anywhere.
This one reads as follows: Select an image of an environment. Concentrate on this image, discovering all the circles, squares or triangles in it, until either the original scene is obliterated or an entirely new landscape emerges, or until your mind can no longer hold all the information. — Mary Lucier, Media Sculptures: Maps of Space #1, published in Womens Work (1975).
Lucier is affiliated with an art movement called Fluxus; go down the YouTube rabbit hole on Fluxus and you’ll find the likes of Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, as well as other influential figures like Alison Knowles, Simone Forti, and George Maciunas (its “official” founder). I highly recommend that rabbit hole. Launched around 1960, Fluxus was a radical, playful, convention-subverting movement, informed by the work of John Cage, and its legacy is still making heads spin with questions about “what is art” and “what is non-art,” etc. (Knowles' piece called Make A Salad—which is exactly what it sounds like—has been performed around the world.)
But knowledge of it isn’t necessary to appreciate Spatial Poems. Actually, it might be more in the spirit of Fluxus if you don’t know anything about it: just show up and have the experience. Petrazzi notes that "Lucier’s score is both a curatorial methodology and a viewer prompt"—in other words, a guide for the curator herself and a suggestion about how to engage with the work in the show. "Art doesn't ‘happen’ on the page or canvas—it happens in the encounter," Petrazzi writes. "The works in this exhibition activate a sensory dialogue between viewer and environment, allowing new landscapes—real and imagined—to emerge." [...]
[...] Once you’re no longer there—once you’ve left the gallery—you’ll still sort of be there, too. Spatial Poems is a personal as well as a spatial activation, inviting you to carry that Mary Lucier score out with you (or even invent your own) as a new way of experiencing the world.
