Smaller museum seems smaller
Aspen Art Museum puts Filmmaker in Residence

Sept. 23, 2008
by Terry Talty

Snow Falling, Aspen Museum of Art 2008, Unknown PleasuresPhoto of actual snow. Imagine the sound of it falling.

ASPEN —Upstairs in the Aspen Art Museum this summer and fall is a show about the intersection of music and art. Several International artists’ work lined the small rectangular gallery surrounding a machine hung from the ceiling that mechanically produced shredded white paper and dispensed it with a sound like falling snow. And a lovely sound it is, brought to you by artist Ugo Rondinone, called Thank You Silence.

Another artist, Tim Lee, showed two life-size photographs dominated by a very black shadow of a musician, on a black and white background made more magically beautiful by the photo process than the concrete it is in real life. The black form appeared dramatically clear, humanoid, maybe a little awkward, but vivid. To recognize the smaller color figure of a guitar player huddled around his instrument took more looking.

The hanging of these two piece, one upside down compared to the other, was an unnecessary move. Seeing and comparing the two grand shadows would have been more thought provoking in this group show.

Euan MacDonald shows a small video of the illustrated covers of sheet music. A stack of this music is being held in the hands of someone, who shows one, then another, turning each one away from view, back into our history, back with all the other pages we've seen, like the turning of a page. When you put on the adjacent headphones, you notice that the music changes as the pages of music were turned. I chuckled.

It the large main floor gallery was a 28 minute film. It was a parody of a Mexican TV soap opera with ridiculous melodramatic dialogue and was supposed to be a play about the immigrant laborers in the Roaring Fork Valley. The concept took a minute to comprehend and wasn’t benefited by 27 more minutes of watching, and the devotion of the entire main floor gallery.

The Aspen Art Museum has put on some very fine shows, but this one was forgettable.

Terry Talty is an Art Tourist, traveling to see art exhibitions as if they are the new Seven Wonders of the World.