In light of The Herald's extensive coverage of the recent opening of the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, it seems appropriate to examine the new building in a way its makers might appreciate — as a piece of art. It is fitting to the center's mission that its design — as well as its current exhibit, "Loop: Works by Julianne Swartz" — resists conventional artistic distinctions: technicality vs. creativity, utility vs. aesthetics, art vs. reality, observer vs. observed.
In the interior, it is impossible to determine what is a piece of art and what is a piece of the structure itself. The most visually striking features are the furnishings that sit at junctions: the set of chairs intricately dressed in acrylics and Sharpie ink that appear to be waiting for the fourth-floor elevator and the retro lounge areas greeting visitors each time they descend a staircase.
Installation artist Julianne Swartz's exhibit, currently housed in the first-floor Cohen Gallery, is similarly frustrating in its refusal to reveal itself. This resistance comes from Swartz's use — and perhaps invention — of novel mediums.
"Camera-Less-Video," a set of black sculpture boxes, turns the room inside out by showing the viewer an inverted image of the Walk outside the window. If you pass the west side of the building off Angell St., you might show up on the projection.
But once you enter the building, you are no longer under surveillance — instead, you become the surveyor. Viewing the room's miniature, internal representation of the outside world feels like living inside someone's head, peering into the mind's eye.
The exhibit transforms the Granoff Center into a sentient being. The windows are eyes, the Cohen Gallery a brain, the gallery's inhabitant an observer privy to its perceptions.
If a room with eyes would enjoy the view of the greenery outside the window, what would a room with ears hear?
"Loop," the exhibit's eponymous piece on the opposite wall, takes the gallery-as-mind metaphor a step further by boldly displaying electric currents, the connectors within the brain.
The speaker-embedded web of multicolored wires lining the wall illustrates Swartz's "interest in the internal mechanisms and circuitry of our human pathway systems — both physical and emotional," according to the exhibit's pamphlet. The three-dimensional, splatter-paint-like network recalls a diagram of nerves in a biology textbook.
The various speakers emit sounds that could be taken as this strange creature's inner voice. The cumulative sound shares several qualities with that unrelenting dialogue inside your head: multiple tracks playing at once, tunes as well as language, nonstop chatter. But the disembodied voices vary in pitch, texture and volume, and they speak in multiple tongues. Most are foreign, doubly disguised with whispering. When the installation reaches out to the average listener by speaking English, it offers reassurance in the midst of the unfamiliar sounds: "You don't have to be afraid. I'm going to make some noises, okay?"
The most difficult piece to make sense of, "Floor to Ceiling," consists of two long, cylindrical magnets suspended from the ceiling and floor, one hanging directly above the other, nose to nose. They look as if they ought to fall over, but instead they stay aligned in the air.
Perhaps, to stick with the biological theme, the structure of the magnets mirrors that of a human being. It seems illogical that the objects not fall to the ground, and with the slightest disturbance to the delicate balance, they would — hence, a very visible "do not touch" sign. Likewise, the thinking, feeling mind, which possesses an inner voice and an inner eye, seems an improbable, if not impossible, product of mere electrical force. But the intricate design allows the forces to balance just right. One who did not know better would call it a miracle.
"Loop" is running through March 18. The Cohen Gallery is open Wednesday-Friday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
