More than sixty five thousand people have visited the Aspen Art Museum since it opened last August. That’s more than the heavy-weight nonprofit expected. And about two hundred and sixty-two of visitors have taken the Museum up on free tours… to make the contemporary art a little more approachable. Aspen Public Radio’s Elise Thatcher tagged along this Wednesday, and has this story
Tour guide Michelle Dezember is ushering our small group into a large, quiet gallery. The exhibition is by Italian artist Roberto Cuoghi. He’s an Italian artist, and this is one of his first major exhibitions. The room is filled with dozens of sculptures and prints. One gigantic, darkly colored piece fills the back half of the room. Our group gravitates towards a cream and clear colored sculpture near the front, with better lighting.
“This one will be called ‘Untitled.’ Not super helpful, but, what is going on here? You cannot tell what materials there are. If you had to guess what would you say?”
The sculpture is about four feet high. There’s a column on the bottom that’s calcium-like in color and texture, then frothy, dripping-looking mounds on top. AlliMenscher is on the tour.
Alli Menscher: “It looks like sugar. Like spun sugar.”
Michelle Dezember: “What makes you say that?”
Alli Menscher: “Just this, this sort of porous looking thin, material here.”
Michelle Dezember: “So there is kind of a feeling like maybe there was some reaction happening, or maybe there is some materials, that maybe it’s plastic. Not only bubbling and percolating also maybe seems to be melting and dripping onto this coral like structure, and also the coral-like structure, instead of maybe having the bubbling up has a sense of eroding in.”
This and other pieces in the exhibition were commissioned in part by the Aspen Art Museum. Today three other people are on this tour. No visitors signed up. These are museum employees, catching up on what they’re supposed to know about the exhibitions.
Michelle Dezember: “What about the shape of this sugar, or plastic, white plastic material?
Shannon Dick: “Oh wow. There’s his, there’s the face! I just noticed the face— there’s his fangs, and his eyeballs.”
Alli Menscher: “And his tongue.”
Shannon Dick: “And his other eyeball…”
Michelle Dezember: “Yeah, so it took us a little while to kind of decipher this, or to make this out. This is a deity named Pazuzu. A really important in Assyrian and Babylonian mythology. Which is a sort of ancient culture which is where current day Iraq is.”
A rounded, doglike face appears in the other sculptures around the room. It’s one of the few common themes in the works, which vary in their materials. Again, Michelle Dezember.
“The artist became really fascinated with ancient Assyria and Babylon, with some of the kind of end times of the these civilizations, whichwas 8th to 6th century BC. There are a lot of material artifacts. if you go to the MET, or the Louvre, you see these really incredible, like, big human animal hybrid creatures that maybe you’ve seen before, that are part man, part horse, part angel. One of those figures is of Pazuzu, the sort of good and evil deity that was responsible for negative aspects like drought and famine. And the original source of this face that we see comes from a very small amulet that comes from the collection of the Louvre in France. That he found as one of the only objects left of Pazuzu, today.”
“He” is the artist, Roberto Cuoghi. The deity had good powers, too, like keeping the worst kind of evils away… and preventing things like miscarriages.
“So there’s that sense of good and evil not being quite so separate like we in kind of modern Western tradition are used to. This kind of like black or white, good or bad. And that’s, I think, really that’s at the heart of Roberto Cuoghi’s practice, is really an interest in liberating us from our need to fix something into one identity. Like you are from Colorado, therefore you must look and act and think like this.”
We head toward another sculpture, that shows the deity's face in a totally different way. By the end of the tour, one of the museum workers says it’s her favorite exhibition so far. Another describes how it’s more accessible than other contemporary art… especially for museum patrons. The Roberto Cuoghi exhibition continues through June.
