The Art Tourist celebrates a birthday

Temp. Contemp. installs a red room in a square, white warehouse

DENVER – It was my birthday, in a city where I dont know many people. I asked my few friends in town to meet me at the Temporary Contemporary for the opening of a new installation by a German guy I also didn’t know.

It was a cool, but not cold, November night in Denver, and the Museum of Contemporary Art had just moved to Delgany Street, down by Union Station, into a cheesy one-story warehouse built in the 60s in a neighborhood that was great old brick industrial building but is in the process of being taken over by expensive new lofts (new, so how can they be called lofts?). The place is called the Temporary Contemporary because the Museum had just moved there to watch over the construction of the permanent Museum of Contemporary Art across the street.

The sad little Temporary was festively accompanied by a tent that made a place for drinking, eating and hitting a piñata. No friends were there when we walked into the tent, and so it felt a little intimidating. Inside the museum it was just a line. My companion and I joined the line, and eventually were allowed into a dark hallway with what felt like a red nightlight at the end. After a moment of visual adjustment, we took baby steps down the hall until an opening appeared on our right and gave us sight of a round red room.

Of course we stepped inside. We were enveloped by redness, ribs of LED lights running ceiling to floor like a vertical tickertape where every part of every letter is always on.  Another person walked away from the red wall and one of the lines started moving. I was a eerie instability in the red room. I walked over and flicked one of the columns of lights and it started vibrating. Then I started talking to a guy who had helped the artist, Erwin Redl, install the red light. He was looking past the round wall to a dark corner of the room. As I adjusted my eyes to see the outline of the corner, I could make out a pipe running up the wall, electrical conduit, little ugly details bathed primarily in black. After a minute the light columns in front of me became so bright, I couldn't see the unsightly details of industrial spaces. I finally stepped back and realized that the lights in front of me were getting brighter and weaker as I stood there staring; the brightness was moving around the circumference of the circle. I remembered the title of the piece, “FADE.”

A light went off in my head.

The Next Day

The whole experience was very cool and I had whispered to two of my friends in the red room that wed see them back at my house, and never saw another soul Iąd invited to the show. People did show up at my house, so I didn't have the Stella Dallas birthday party, and all were significantly impressed by their mostly solo visit to the red room. I volunteered to take my 6-year-old niece and even younger nephew to the museum the next day. We rode the inaugural day of light rail from the suburbs of the Republicans to the downtown to the museum, a little late because of the turnout on the free lightrail. In our pockets were trinkets  the museum asked us to bring that could be thrown into the forms and embedded in the concrete foundation of the museum. “When are we going to get to do the cement thing?˛” my nephew asked as we were wedged with thousands on the platform waiting for the train. We were the last to throw in our talisman, my nephew and I, while my companion and niece were eating pumpkin pancakes from a beautiful open-air buffet. We all went into the dark hallway and saw the red room. The museum was the best part of the day, said the 6-year-old, and I refrained from probing her criticism further, fearing disappointment.

Terry Talty is the art tourist. You can read about the new addition to the Denver Art Museum in the article titled, The Art Tourist Communes with Crumpled Paper Building.