MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES
Using augmented reality, Clyfford Still Museum exhibit reveals paintings invisible to the naked eye
The odd question at hand: Are paintings there if they’re not really there?
The Clyfford Still Museum balances conflicting obligations as a rule, and it’s a tricky bit of museum- making.
On one side, it must work hard to enhance its namesake artist’s reputation and establish him, in the public eye, as the 20th century master that academics and critics know him to be. That means staging exciting exhibitions that draw people into its Denver galleries for repeated visits, so they get to know and understand the late, abstract expressionist painter’s unique and challenging way of seeing the world.
But that’s not so easy, even though the Still’s curators have had historic, world-class art objects to dangle as bait for repeat customers.
That’s because the museum’s other job is to respect the rules that the notoriously cranky artist left behind on how his work can be exhibited — rules that have been interpreted strictly into the institution’s charter. The stingiest of all Still’s demands: The museum may not hang works by any other painters on its walls.
So, how does a curator put Still in the context of other artists and movements when it can’t show the other artists’ work? Year after year? There’s always a threat that the Still Museum will get repetitive or fail at its primary mission or, worse of all, become boring.
But what if visitors could see the paintings of those other artists, even if they were not there? If the museum could somehow make the work of Still’s peers, his influencers and followers visible without actually bringing them into the museum?
Would that be breaking the rules, or would it be a clever solution around them?
That question lingers over “Still & Art,” the current show at the museum, which uses augmented reality — the technology known popularly as AR — to virtually pair a dozen paintings by outside artists with Clyfford Still’s work. It’s also the thing that makes the exhibit intriguing, irresistible and of the moment. The museum worked directly with Google, the app developer GuidiGO, and augmented-reality pioneers RYOT to make the show happen.
As they enter “Still & Art,” visitors are handed a smartphone, specifically a large-screen Lenovo Phab 2 Pro. As they wander through the galleries, the device alerts them that there is an unseen painting hanging on the wall. Visitors point the phone at a marker and there it appears on-screen, right next to the Still painting it provides context for.
With this little bit of help, visitors can see Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 moonlit masterpiece “The Starry Night” right beside Still’s 1951 “PH-1071,” which uses similar blues, blacks and yellows and mirrors — in Still’s mysterious, abstract way — the jagged lines and craggy forms that van Gogh pioneered in his day.
(Just for clarity, Still did not name his paintings; they are catalogued with letters and numbers, mostly starting with “PH.”)
Or they can see an image of Théodore Géricault’s 1819 “The Raft of the Medusa,” that so-famous scene of shipwrecked sailors clinging to life on a makeshift raft, directly next to Still’s “PH-401,” a primarily red and black, 1957 abstraction that — while it doesn’t mimic the pure visuals of Géricault — reflects the earlier painting’s “imposing scale, awesomeness, and complex counter-point between breadth/minuteness and light/shadow,” as the exhibition’s wall text puts it.
In other words, Still’s work is full of the sort of drama, conflict, contrast and bigness that marked the Romantic era of painting that Géricault defined.
The exhibition moves forward by placing Still’s paintings among the work of his 20th century peers. The most startling comparisons come from the augmented juxtaposition of Still’s most popular work, “PH-247,” affectionately known as “Big Blue,” beside Barnett Newman’s “Cathedra.”
Both paintings are massive, horizontal fields of dark blue interrupted by thin vertical stripes. Newman’s work is much more geometric — his painting appears as a pure rectangle sliced in two by a crisp white line. Still’s is messier, less certain, and his blue field is interrupted by a turbulent black.
It’s hard to know what these abstractionists were actually depicting. A viewer gets the sense that Newman’s subject was the wide blue part and Still’s was the narrow black part; their perspectives are very different.
But the similarities in color, texture and emotion are potent, and the fact that both were created in 1951 indicates there was a lot of sharing of ideas back in the day. These geniuses influenced each other.
The exhibition ends by using augmented reality to reveal Still’s influence on those who followed. Phillip Taaffe’s 1988 monoprint collage “Quadro Vesuviano” bears a striking resemblance to Still’s 1954 oil “PH-161.” Both make their point in fiery reds and smokey blacks. Taaffe’s work appears to be an homage, and it borrows liberally.
“Still & Art” is one of only 10 museum shows around the world to have used augmented reality. It took a considerable effort from developers, starting with Google, which sent a team to the museum to map it digitally, so that GuidiGO’s 3-D models of the visiting paintings can be viewed in their proper place adjacent to the Still works.
The mobile phone uses geolocation to find and display the material. It’s not the exact same technology employed by the popular game “Pokémon Go,” but that’s a good way to think of it.
The real surprise is the tactical brilliance of the virtual paintings, which in real life hang in places like Paris’ Musée Du Louvre or New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. It would be nearly impossible to get them on loan to a city like Denver, and it would cost a fortune.
But the renderings are terrific and do an effective job of presenting the work. Viewers can move about them like real paintings, getting close up or far away, and the surface textures — mounds of paint and scratches on canvas — can be seen and felt.
The museum, wisely, treats these visions as real-life objects. It actually leaves large spaces on its walls blank, giving credibility to things that aren’t actually there.
It also brings us closer to Still and understanding his ideas — and not always in favorable ways. If Still was copying van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, Joan Miró or Georgia O’Keeffe, as the exhibit’s varied media implies, does that make him less original? And these works that are copies — are they actually studies or exercises rather then the complete, full-fledged works we assumed they were before this comparison shattered our ideals?
What if the treasured “Big Blue” was just part of a casual conversation between Newman and Still and not a true masterpiece?
“Still & Art” raises those questions — and doesn’t answer them. It’s a brave show, intellectually parsed by curator David Anfam, that simply passes on to visitors as much unfiltered information on Still as it can find and lets them decide for themselves.
Some of the comparison’s hold up, some are dubious. It’s easier to buy the instances where Still was influenced by the predecessors and peers with whom he was obviously familiar than to accept his influence on generations that followed. During Still’s lifetime — he died in 1980 at the age of 75 — he kept his work so closed off and inaccessible to the public that it’s doubtful a lot of the painters who came in his wake saw or thought all that much about it. How vast could his presence be?
The Clyfford Still Museum generously leaves the answer up in the air, rather then pretending its in-house artist is a superhero with mysterious powers. That is admirable stewardship of the city-owned Still art collection.
As for whether the museum is breaking the rules of its governance or merely bending them, a good lawyer probably could argue either way. But if the museum is going to move forward, augmenting the reality of its imposing restrictions by any means necessary will be welcome and truly justified.
“Still & Art” continues through Jan. 21 at the Clyfford Still Museum, 1250 Bannock St. Info at 720-354-4875 or clyffordstillmuseum.org.
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