Art, artifacts and excess collide in a combustible energy exhibit at Denver's MCA

by Kyle MacMillan

Denver Post

August 6, 2010

With words and phrases like "sustainability," "environmentally conscious" and "carbon-neutral" all the buzz these days, most exhibitions that have anything do with energy inevitably deal with the themes of conservation and new technologies.

But an intriguing, provocative and potentially controversial show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver takes a decidedly different tack — "Energy Effects: Art and Artifacts From the Landscape of Glorious Excess."

As its evocative title suggests, it explores and, in some ways, celebrates excess energy in an array of guises, from the enthusiasm of a rock-concert mosh pit to the destructive power in a nuclear bomb.

"For millennia, civilizations have been defined by their use of this excess, uses that span a spectrum from war to art," writes co-curator Paul Andersen.  "Our civilization also receives more energy than we need . . . and like those civilizations before us, our identity is more closely linked to how we choose to spend that energy than how we save it."

While probing these issues, "Energy Effects" also raises fascinating questions about the nature of contemporary art, the function of art exhibitions and the role of art museums in the 21st century.

Many of the objects in this exhibition are artworks by almost any conventional definition of the term, even if they stretch the boundaries of traditional forms.  A good example is "Reg," an imposing 6-by-9-by-8-foot block of knotted climbing rope by New York artist Orly Genger. Set at an angle so that it blocks a wide corridor, it challenges viewer perceptions of space and scale.

But what are we to make of "Chaussures" (1991-present), a display of more than 125 pairs of sandals crafted and worn by Denver artist Viviane Le Courtois over nearly two decades — the history of each carefully documented?

As unexpected as it is to see these shoes hung along the exterior walls of the museum's second floor, there is nothing especially aesthetic about them. This undertaking is as much anthropological as artistic.

And as the exhibit's title makes clear, several of the show's offerings are artifacts and not art, however visually compelling they might be. Most notable are a Titan IV Stage II rocket engine and two B61 thermonuclear bomb casings on loan from the Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum.

Art-museum exhibitions of the past were artist-driven, focused primarily on movements, influences and styles. But in today's art world, concept trumps all, and that is certainly true at the MCA Denver.  Since becoming director of the institution in March 2009, Adam Lerner has made ideas — in this case, the notion of excess energy — the driving force of the museum's offerings, with artworks, artifacts and whatever else playing a supporting role. 

It's not surprising, then, that "Energy Effects" would not be at all out of place at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science or a similar organization.

An unvoiced but certainly evident theme of this exhibition is obsessive-compulsiveness, one of the extremes that drives many human pursuits, especially art. How else to explain the undersized and oversized work of Willard Wigan of London and Jim Sanborn of Washington, D.C.?

Wigan invests an enormous amount of energy to create his quirky micro-sculptures. His "Statue of Liberty in the Eye of a Needle" is so tiny that it has to be viewed through a microscope.

In "Terrestial Physics," Sanborn spent three years meticulously re-creating the first particle accelerator to split uranium atoms in 1939 — a room-size group of oddly old-fashioned machines that are at once alluring and disturbing.

Whatever else can be said about "Energy Effects," it is the most thematically and visually cohesive exhibition to be presented at the MCA Denver since the 2007 opening of its first permanent home in the Central Platte Valley.

The building was designed with five discrete main galleries that were intended to function essentially autonomously — a concept that never made much sense.  Lerner has urgently sought to make the building work as an integral whole, and this exhibition fulfills that goal for the first time, with pieces in the atrium and corridors that tie everything together and achieve a continuous flow.