Installing a major new work at the Phoenix Art Museum

PHXated went down to the Phoenix Art Museum today to see the final laps of a three-day marathon of art installation in the contemporary wing.

The work is Peter Wegners “Guillotine of Shade, Guillotine of Sunlight.” Here’s a shot of how it looked as of about 8:30 this a.m.:

This is just one side of it: The work consists of two walls, each fronted with colored card stock—no fewer than 1.4 million individual cards set upright and perpendicular against the walls. A total of nearly three dozen people have been working on the piece since Monday.

Wegner achieves the spectacular color effect by slowly altering the ratio of red to yellow cards in each successive row.

The cards are specially cut to hang on brackets:

Each row uses four boxes of cards; there are 22 rows on each wall, or 44 total, meaning 176 boxes, if I’m doing the math correctly. Peter Nelson, who with Adan Mendoza is in charge of the installation, told me he figured the boxes were 80 to 100 pounds each … meaning the whole thing might weigh more than seven tons.

Indeed, the wall itself is 18 inches thick; Sara Cochran, the museum’s contemporary art curator, said the museum considers the work permanent.

Here’s the other side:

Peter Wegner’s web site is here, incidentally. And here’s a pretty good interview with him.

The work will debut before the public Dec. 4, which is not only First Friday but the museum’s 50th anniversary. Wegner’s piece is one of more than fifty new works donors have come together to give the museum for the occasion, all of which will be on display for the first time that day.

Cochran pointed out one other new work, a large-scale painting by Kehinde Wiley, from a series on young men from the favela slums in Brazil posed in heroic positions taken from famous works of art in that country. Here’s a detail of it:

A few words with the Phoenix Art Museum's Sara Cochran

One of the more interesting local museum exhibitions in town recently has been “Locals Only,” a selection of works by a dozen Valley Chicano and Latino artists, now in its last days at the Phoenix Art Museum.

Besides being a tour de force display of local talent, the show was significant just for what it isóthe first major PAM exhibit of local artists.

When the museum agree to host a local viewing of “Phantom Sightings,” a raucous sampling of work from Latino artists originating at the LA County Museum of Art, PAM’s point person for the project, Sara Cochran, decided that the local scene had talent enough to hold its own in conjunction with it.

So she rounded up a slew of local works from artists like Annie Lopez; Hector Ruiz; the grafitti artist who goes by the name DOSE; and Claudio Dicochea, and created a companion show. It was dubbed ìLocals Only,î and given a distinctive logo that included the various Valley area codes.

She is the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary artóa newly prominent role at the museum after the opening of a lavish new contemporary wing four years ago.

The works ranged from the grafitti-flecked collaborations of Ruiz and DOSE to a very pointed series of small works by Lopez that mocked what she saw as the Valley art establishmentís historical condescension to local artists.

“Phantom Sightings” packed up and left some time ago, but ìLocals Onlyî continues to draw interest. As the show finally draws to a close, PHXated checked in with Cochran to reflect on it. Cochran is Scots by birth and grew up in Sweden; she got her Ph.D from the Courtauld Institute in London. After years of postgrad work at the Sorbonne she did time at the Guggenheim, the Getty and, most recently, LACMA before coming to Phoenix last year.

PHXated: The Locals Only show leaves the museum October 26. From this perspective, how do you feel about it? Was it a success? What’s changed?

*Sara Cochran: *I’m incredibly sad to see the works leave. It really feels like the end of the summer holidays when you have to say goodbye to new friends and go back to school and the everyday. They were a fresh and joyous intervention within the permanent collection galleries and the museum. I very deliberately installed the pieces through-out different spaces in the museum because I wanted the visitors to have a sense of discovery. I think it allowed them to see things they may not have seen before and also to see works they know well in a new context.

There were just so many interesting conversations going on. Fausto Fernandez’s painting Demographic Fabric of America was a compelling juxtaposition to the abstract composition of Al Heldís Pisa II, which is part the Phoenix Art Museumís permanent collection. Hector Ruizís bronze tire Super Swamper was a great foil to Margarita Cabrera soft Volkswagen Vocho from the summer temporary exhibition Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement.

Even within Locals Only, it was fascinating to look at all of the works and see the different styles and personal preoccupations that it encompassed. This was especially true in the work of Martin Moreno and Luis Gutierrez — two generations of Chicano painters whose work confronts social issues and older and newer traditions of painting but in very different ways.

Over and over one hears how novel the show was for the museum. Indeed, some of the works made direct reference to that. What do you see happening going forward?

As someone who has worked on the bad-boy of modernism Francis Picabia, I am very aware of the fact that art history is an ever changing dialogue that is greatly influenced by newer generations of artists who are search out new figures and works to serve them as different models and examples. Nothing is set in stone. It is all a negotiation of ideas and forms. I hope the exhibition went some way to opening up the discourse about art in the Valley and allowed visitors to see the museum in a new light. It was tremendously important to have Annie Lopez’s cyanotypes series The Almost Real History of Art in Phoenix here. I want the museum to be at the centre of a vibrant conversation within the arts community. I want to bring more of this excitement into the museum.
Installers on the third day of preparing Wegner’s “Guillotine of the Sunrise”