The Aspen Art Museum has unveiled a colossal exhibition that plays with the public’s perceptions of space and objects.
Museum visitors connect with each other over cocktails on the Roof Deck Sculpture Garden as they look out at a lush green Aspen Mountain, providing a backdrop that affirms it’s summertime.
These white wall sculptures by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and his late partner David Weiss now frame the view. A painting with a large black "X" on it hangs from one wall sculpture, as if waiting to embrace the elements. It was created by American artist Wade Guyton.
The museum’s building-wide exhibition, titled “Wade Guyton Peter Fischli David Weiss” contemplates objects and spaces as learned in society, and how they can be displayed in unconventional ways.
Guests migrating to the level below are greeted by an untitled collection of digital paintings that have been created by Guyton over the last few years.
“My login is in it, and it’s addressing the New York Times, and the New York Times is addressing me as a consumer, a fantasy reader” said artist Wade Guyton. “And so, in a way, they’re even more strangely personal because it’s like this algorithmic idea of like what an individual is or who I am.”
Anyone with a faulty printer at home can picture these digital paintings on canvas, with sharp lines down the middle distorting different home pages from The New York Times’ website. When Guyton first saw the start of the museum’s new building a few years ago, he said he saw a grand opportunity.
“I think mostly about exhibitions rather than individual pieces so we set the bar high,” he said. “The show is kind of ambitious.”
Heidi Zuckerman is the museum’s CEO and executive director. She said this exhibition is bold.
“Allowing the artists to kind of permeate the entire structure both physically and intellectually with their ideas and their objects is an incredibly unusual thing to do,” said Zuckerman. “And I think it’s super productive too because it’s immersive in its magnitude.”
A long row of light tables stretch diagonally across the center of this particular gallery, displaying 3,000 photographs taken by Fischli and Weiss as part of a collection titled "Visible World." Their partnership spanned over three decades before Weiss passed away in 2012.
“I was not willing to do just another Fischli and Weiss show,” said Fischli. “I felt tired.”
Fischli said working with Guyton has been mutually productive for the both of them. Zuckerman, who was working closely with the artists as curator, said it became routine for her and the artists to take hikes while in Aspen, creating much of the site-wide exhibit. The conversations had on those hikes, Zuckerman said, have come to inform the show.
“After you get past a small talk of what everyone wants to talk about, then after kind of a pause, a time of quiet during the walk, that then the real conversations start,” she said. “The joking about productivity or how work gets made or what the intentions of an artist or their objects are. How do you want to exist as a person in this world?”
Tucked away in the nooks and crannies of more wall sculptures are recreations of studio utensils by Fischli and Weiss on the Street Level floor. Around one corner, five stacks of paintings from Guyton are on display. The 59 other paintings in the stacks are only visible from the sides, evoking intrigue, desire and disappointment from visitors.
“I don’t think of myself as a creative person,” said Guyton. “And I never became interested in art because I thought I had some kind of internal something that had to get out in the world.”
All of the pieces in the museum-wide exhibition ask the viewer to interact with the museum differently than they otherwise would. The opening reception for Wade Guyton Peter Fischli David Weiss had everyone--from the guides to the visitors--focused. Because, as Fischli said:
“This is not like a stable thing. It stays in a kind of life, and it changes in the time.”
A gong was rolled into the lower level gallery. When Guyton would stretch or rework his paintings, his assistant would play recorded gong music, as they believe it makes the paintings easier to work with. As the gong is played, it symbolizes new heights for the artists and the museum.
