Dan Graham at the Inhotim Institute of Art and Botanical Gardens

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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2013 Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: Dan Graham at the Inhotim Institute of Contemporary Art and Botanical Gardens Bryan Barcena

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATER & DANCE

EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE:

DAN GRAHAM AT THE INHOTIM INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART AND

BOTANICAL GARDENS

BRYAN BARCENA

A Thesis submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2013

Bryan Barcena defended this thesis on March 22, 2013 The members of the supervisory committee were:

Lauren Weingarden Professor Directing Thesis

Robert Neuman Committee Member

Adam Jolles Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to begin by thanking the members of my thesis committee, Drs. Lauren Weingarden, Robert Neuman, and Adam Jolles. I would like to recognize my thesis director, Dr. Lauren Weingarden, for inviting me to journey with her to a far-away and magical place. Her enthusiasm, encouragement and wisdom were invaluable to the process of writing this thesis. I am beyond grateful that our interests coincided and that I have benefitted from her mentorship throughout my graduate studies at FSU. I am also especially thankful to Dr. Robert Neuman for offering his warm and thoughtful support during my graduate studies. It was through his guidance that I was able to develop as a scholar and I am eternally grateful. I am also thankful to Kathy Braun for providing much- needed technical support and guidance to the thesis-writing process. I would also like to thank my Brazilian colleague Adriano Gomide for his contributions to the thesis. I am particularly thankful to Rodrigo Moura and Roseni Senna, as well as the various staff members at Inhotim who aided my study. I am forever in debt to my parents, Lorenzo and Ofelia Barcena, for offering me unflinching support, generosity, and, of most value, the drive to pursue my passions. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to acknowledge my partner and best friend, Erick Lopez, for his wholehearted support despite the many barely-intelligible conversations about mirrors, site-specificity, and Brazilian jungles.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ...... v ABSTRACT ...... vii INTRODUCTION ...... 1 CHAPTER ONE: INTO THE MIRROR ...... 12 CHAPTER TWO: BETWEEN THE MIRROR AND SOLID GROUND ...... 30 CHAPTER THREE: EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE...... 47 CONCLUSION ...... 67 APPENDIX ...... 70 A. FIGURES ...... 70 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 84 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 88

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Dan Graham, Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve, 2002, mirrored glass and stainless steel, 7’ x 23’ x 16’...... 70

Figure 2: Inhotim Institute and Botanical Gardens (Aerial View), Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil...... 71

Figure 3: Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981, COR-TEN Steel, 120’ x 12’ x 2.5”, Federal Plaza, New York City...... 71

Figure 4: Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument (Partial view), 2001, mixed media, dimensions variable...... 72

Figure 5: Dan Graham, Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve (Installation View), 2002, mirrored glass and stainless steel, 7’ x 23’ x 16’. Brumadinho, Brazil, Inhotim Institute of Contemporary Art and Botanical Gardens...... 72

Figure 6: Dan Graham, Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve (Detail), Source: Fernanda Ribeiro, Belo Horizonte – Inhotim. 2007...... 73

Figure 7:Rikrit Tiravanija, Untitled 2002 (he promised), 2002, chrome and stainless steel, approximately 116” x 472” x 236” ...... 73

Figure 8: Liam Gillick, Fluctuation Screen, 2000, anodized aluminum and white opaque Plexiglass, 8’ x 12’ x 1’...... 74

Figure 9: Lacaton & Vassal, Palais de Tokyo (Interior), 2002, Paris, France...... 74

Figure 10: Dan Graham, Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve (Installation View)...... 75

Figure 11: Dondel, Aubert, Viard and Dastugue, Palais de Tokyo (Exterior), 1937...... 75

Figure 12: Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970, indigenous rock and sediment, 1550’ x 15’ ..... 76

Figure 13: Richard Serra, Tilted Arc (installation view at Federal Plaza, New York), 1981, COR- TEN Steel, 120’ x 12’ x 2.5” ...... 76

Figure 14: Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument (Partial view), 2002, mixed media, dimensions variable, Kassel Germany...... 77

Figure 15: Dan Graham, Octagon for Münster (Installation view), 1987, Stainless steel and glass, 104” x 144” ...... 77

Figure 16: Dan Graham, Two-way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube, 1991, stainless steel and glass, 8.5’ x 36’ x 36’, Dia Center for the Arts, New York...... 78

Figure 17: Dan Graham, Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve (Installation view at Madison Square Park, NY, 2002)...... 78

Figure 18: Bernardo Paz de Mello (b. 1949) ...... 79

Figure 19: Cildo Meireles, Red Shift, 1967-1984, mixed media...... 79

Figure 20: Janet Cardiff, Forty Part Motet, 2001, sound installation in 40 channels, 14’ x 7’. ... 80

Figure 21: Map of Inhotim with location of Dan Graham’s Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve marked...... 81

Figure 22: Claude Glass...... 82

Figure 23: Olafur Eliasson, Viewing Machine, 2001, stainless steel, 12’ x 6’ x 2’...... 82

Figure 24: Matthew Barney, De Lama Lâmina, 2004, forest tractor, ficus, high density polyurethane, polyvinyl and nylon screen 52’ x 25’ x 18’ ...... 83

ABSTRACT

My thesis explores the relationship between Dan Graham’s installation (b. 1942) Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve (2002) and its location at the Inhotim Institute of Contemporary Art and Botanical Gardens in Brumadinho, Brazil. Visitors who encounter upon Graham’s installation are confronted by a reflection of their own image set within an idyllic, even artificial, garden landscape. The triangular structure refracts and transposes the viewer’s reflection through layers of semi-translucent glass thus creating an increasingly distorted and confusing vision whereby the bodies of its visitors seem to collide, overlap, and become kaleidoscopic amalgamates. By engineering this disconcerting visual encounter, Graham invites viewers to share in a communal experience set within the unique environment at Inhotim. This thesis inserts Graham’s installation work into new conceptual and historical frameworks that prioritize the viewer’s experience over the artist’s intention. In this light, I detail the psychological effects experienced by visitors within Graham’s mirrored Pavilions, and I then explain how these effects are altered by Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve’s environment at Inhotim.

Graham conceives of the large glass and steel installations as site-specific works. As such, the artist designs these structures to respond to the characteristics of the environment in which they are installed. However, Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve was relocated from its original location at Madison Square Park in New York to Inhotim. This thesis explores how the experience associated with Graham’s Pavilion is altered by the larger historical, communal, and topographic framework provided by its adopted site at Inhotim. Inhotim, which opened to the public in 2007, is the first museum in the world that focuses almost exclusively on the exhibition of large-scale, site-specific installations. My thesis contends that the isolated and idyllic environment at Inhotim limits the effectiveness of works by artists such as Dan Graham. Although these artists claim that their works are engaged with socially conscious site-specific practice, I argue that the work’s presence at Inhotim invalidates these claims. By existing as a site which was built explicitly for the exhibition of this genre of work, in essence a site for site- specificity, Inhotim neutralizes the local histories necessary to create the charged environment of interaction with site-specific installation art.

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INTRODUCTION

Dan Graham’s installation Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve (2002; fig. 1) occupies one of the most serene and picturesque corners of the Inhotim Institute of Contemporary Art and Botanical Gardens in Brumadinho, Brazil. Visitors who stumble upon Graham’s installation are confronted by a reflection of their own image set within the idyllic, even artificial, landscape of Inhotim (pronounced In-yo-chim). The triangular structure refracts and transposes the viewer’s reflection through layers of semi-translucent glass, thus creating an increasingly distorted and confusing vision whereby the bodies of its visitors seem to collide, overlap, and become kaleidoscopic amalgamates. As the viewer looks through the walls of the confined space of the installation, they are meant to experience a sense of spatial misperception. By engineering this disconcerting visual encounter Graham invites viewers to share in a communal experience set within the unique environment at Inhotim.1 What I have just described constitutes an account of the experience of Graham’s installation and not a description of the object itself. Approaching the work in question in a manner which prioritizes the visitors experience will inform the direction of this investigation. The goal of this thesis is to explore the experiential dynamic of Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve within a larger historical, communal, and topographic framework. A secondary goal of this thesis will be to create a fuller understanding of how the concepts of site-specificity and communal engagement are problematized when considered within the unique exhibition program at Inhotim. My thesis will contend that the isolated and idyllic environment at Inhotim in fact limits the effectiveness of works such as Dan Graham’s which claim to be engaged with socially conscious site-specific practice. By existing as a site that was built explicitly for the exhibition of this genre of work, in essence a “site” for site-specificity, Inhotim neutralizes the local histories necessary to create the charged environment of interaction with site-specific installation art.

State of the Question

Since 1978, American artist Dan Graham has been producing architectural installations that he terms Pavilions.2 These large installations are comprised mainly of reflective glass and reinforced stainless steel. For Graham these structures have served as a vehicle with which he forces his visitors to confront a vision of their embodied self. Graham simultaneously presents the viewer with a vision of their own body while beckoning them to recognize themselves as active participants in a dynamic social system. By manipulating the viewer’s visual perception of both their own bodies and their environment, Graham’s installations function as arbiters, mediating the exchange between a site and its visitors. This study will examine Graham’s installation in terms of its product, namely by inspiring democratic social interaction between its visitors within the spaces he provides. This reading of Graham’s work allows my scholarship concerning his installation to tread new and conceptually-fruitful territory. Once it has been established that the product of Graham’s work is indeed social in nature, it then becomes necessary to understand how the installation mediates these interactions by manipulating the viewer’s senses. What psychological processes are being activated through the design of the installation? My study will seek to answer the question of how Graham employs Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve to create a transformative psychological effect in the viewer. The design of Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve does not differ significantly from that of any of the Pavilion pieces created during the last two decades in Graham’s career; however this instance creates an ideal opportunity to examine the social relationships created by Graham’s conceptual strategies in terms of their intention, execution, and effect. Visitors who have travelled to Inhotim (fig. 2) have described the experience as “theme- park like,” even often suggesting that the park shares many visual qualities with Disneyland.3 These associations between Inhotim and the artificial environment of a theme park, one commonly considered to be dissociated with reality, seem to belie the museum’s goal of exhibiting installation art that relies on an interaction between a visitor and a specific site.4 Since opening to the public in 2007, the Inhotim Institute and Botanical Gardens has almost spontaneously emerged as a significant repository for the exhibition and collection of the works of the twentieth- and twenty-first century’s most innovative artists. The vast complex encompasses over five thousand acres and houses more than five hundred works within fifteen

2 galleries. Inhotim is the only museum in the world of this size and because of this its program can focus exclusively on the exhibition of large, site-specific installation art.5 Inhotim’s development in a relatively isolated geographic region suggests that its directors have sought to envision the Institute as a destination for a kind of artistic pilgrimage. Inhotim exists as an exotic transitory destination. The lush botanical gardens and serene water features inside Inhotim contrast starkly with the world outside its parking lots. Brumadinho, the adjacent small town, suffers from inadequate infrastructure and can easily be classified as a community of limited means. How does the dramatic difference between Inhotim’s interior and exterior inform the experience of its visitors? How does the visitor’s passage through these differing environments inform their perception of site-specific installations? Contrary to other sculptural garden environments such as the Laumier Scupture Park in Sunset Hills, Missouri or the Storm King Art Center in Mountanville, New York, Inhotim makes little use of the natural or urban environment that would have existed prior to the construction of the park.6 In “Sculpture and Garden: A Historical Overview” Marc Treib describes the function of the sculpture garden as “expressing the distance between the natural and the fabricated world, emphasizing human presence in its configuration or selection.”7 However Inhotim has existed only as a sculpture park and therefore the distance between the natural and fabricated is thus effectively zero. The gardens of Inhotim are hermetic; the site only exists as a built environment, different from the surrounding landscape, transformed to represent an ideal natural environment. Inhotim’s marketing goes as far as to promote its botanical garden as a sort of laboratory where the mission is to “To keep, to propagate and to promote studies involving the largest possible number of botanical species, emphasizing the threatened ones, conserving genetic resources and displaying such biodiversity following aesthetic guidelines.”8 This manicured botanical garden is the setting for visitor’s interaction with Dan Graham’s Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve. Given that Inhotim’s exhibition program is the only one in existence which focuses exclusively on the exhibition of large-scale installation work it becomes necessary to investigate how the works within the collection function in relation to each other. How is the visitor’s experience shaped by the serial interaction with installation art within a lush botanical setting? My study will explore how the psychological processes of viewing Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve become altered by the unique environment at Inhotim. I seek to answer the question of

3 how the experience, and thus the product of Graham’s installation, is altered by its environment at Inhotim.

Methodology

In order to fully explore the experience of Graham’s Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve I will insert the work into conceptual, psychological, and historical frameworks which emphasize the experiential dynamic of interaction with installation art. Although this study will provide a historical framework with which to understand the development of site-specific art as it developed in the latter half of the twentieth century, it will also cull from more recent theories which recontextualize these practices in order to better understand Graham’s role within this history. I will begin the process of dissecting the experience of Graham’s installation by inserting it into the context of the psychological theories of Jacques Lacan. I suggest that Lacan’s theories of formative development can provide us a better understanding of how Graham manipulates the viewer’s senses to create a contemplative space for embodied viewing. Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, articulated in “The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the I” from 1939, suggests that the development of our own body-image is what enables us to perceive ourselves as an individual within society. This process can only occur when provoked through an encounter with our mirrored image. For Lacan, the visual attachment of the psyche to the body begins the process of differentiating our consciousness from that of the other. Lacan’s theories seem to inform Graham’s own use of the reflective materials in his installations. In Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve Graham activates and then subverts the psychological processes of Lacan’s “Mirror Stage.” Graham conflates the image of the self and the other through visual disorientation. Graham’s Pavilion installations therefore seek to psychologically unite the self and the other, and in doing so transform the viewer’s conception of identity. This discussion of the phenomenology of the experience occurring within Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve serves to frame the larger goal of my investigation, namely, to understand how Inhotim’s environment activates the process of identity creation on an environmental scale. My thesis will then move beyond Lacan’s theories in an effort to provide new contexts with which to better understand Graham’s socializing intentions. As I previously stated,

Graham’s work has often been erroneously categorized as belonging to the Minimalist movement. This taxonomical misnomer derives mainly from his choice of industrial materials, use of reflective surfaces, and tendency to design geometric spaces.9 I will consider Graham’s installation as belonging to a category of contemporary art within which the contemplative role of the object becomes superseded by the artist’s desire to create social spaces for inter-personal interaction. Building on Graham’s insistence that the product of his installation work be social interaction, I will re-contextualize Graham’s installations to align his oeuvre with Relational art. In his 1998 book Relational Aesthetic, French curator Nicolas Bourriard applied the term “relational” to describe the work of a generation of artists who seek to create spaces for unmediated social interaction between viewers. The association of Graham’s installation work with that of the artists practicing relational aesthetics further implicates the role that Inhotim’s environment plays in directing these social interactions. Artists creating relational works have often been limited to producing their spaces within the white walls of the gallery or museum. The historical context of the museum or gallery serves to solidify the participant’s activities as works of art. Once this context is removed and the social activity exposed to a less historically charged environment, does the activity continue to be considered an artistic production? Claire Bishop’s recent publications have formulated a critical response to the question I pose. Bishop’s critique of installation and performance artists who claim to engineer social relations is expressed most notably in her essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” from 2004. In this text Bishop questions the value of open-ended social interaction within relational aesthetic spaces. She argues that limited direction between a work and its participants can prove didactically ineffective. Bishop’s critique of relational aesthetics aids in my investigation by providing a qualifying judgment of the efficacy of these works in creating meaningful interaction. Once I have established a more suitable framework with which to understand the social dynamic of Graham’s installations I will then insert his oeuvre into the historical narrative of site-specific practice. The term site-specificity refers to the related practices of artists working in the latter half of the twentieth century who have incorporated the physical and cultural conditions of a particular location as integral to the production, presentation, and reception of their art. The goal in this chapter is to investigate the dynamic between the cultural and geographic history of a site. I seek to distinguish the varying strategies used by artists to negotiate and manipulate these

5 histories to produce artwork which claims to create experiences which transform their environments in a tangible way. To do so I will examine the work of artists Richard Serra and Thomas Hirschorn. Facing controversy regarding the installation of his site-specific work Tilted Arc at the Federal Plaza in New York, Serra famously stated that “to remove the work is to destroy it.”10 For Serra, and as much so for many of the artists found at Inhotim, the experience of a work is inextricably linked to the location of its installation. I will contrast the goals of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (fig. 3) from 1981 and those of Thomas Hirschorn’s more recent Bataille Monument (fig. 4) erected in Kassel, Germany at Documenta 11 in 2002. I will reveal how these artists have employed a location and its community as active agents informing the experience of their work. Although Tilted Arc and Monument to Bataille share few aesthetic qualities, they both alter their environment to then reframe both space and history. Serra’s work does so in order to achieve specific aesthetic goals while political activism is Hirschorn’s main concern. I suggest Graham’s installations straddle the conceptual divide between Serra and Hirschorn’s installations. Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve exhibits dual agency in attempting to both visually redefine the environment at Inhotim while also enacting a directive of egalitarian social engagement. My critical study of site-specific works will follow those of other contemporary art historians who have recently questioned how this practice relates to locational identity. The subject has most notably been explored by Miwon Kwon in One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Location Identity. Kwon posits that there has been what she refers to as an unhinging between art and site. She suggests that the pressures of a globalized art market have forced artists to adopt new site-oriented practices. These artists value impermanence and transience over location-based engagement. Her study informs my own approach in investigating the relationship between Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve and the cultural and geographic landscape at Inhotim. In light of her argument I question how Inhotim has benefitted from this unhinging of the practice. Since the experience of visitation can only be transitory, it can be argued that Inhotim cannot benefit from a specific community identity. Instead it serves only as temporary destination for its visitors whether local or international. Inhotim condenses a large group of works together and to do so must function as a neutral site. It does this in order to allow the works exhibited to produce meaning independent from each other. I suggest that the

6 neutralization of site that results impedes its visitors from connecting the works to the history of the site. My interest in Dan Graham’s Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve began as a research paper for Dr. Lauren Weingarden’s graduate seminar exploring the history of installation art via the collection at Inhotim. This seminar was taught in conjunction with Dr. Weingarden’s Fulbright Grant in 2012 to conduct research at Inhotim, which provided me with the opportunity to visit the Institute in March 2012. My presence at the museum allowed me to observe the behavior of its visitors while also conducting brief informal interviews with them to gain further knowledge of their experience. During my time in Brazil I was able to interview one of three curators of the Institute, Rodrigo Moura. During my lengthy interview Mr. Moura recounted the history of the project. Specifically he illustrated how the location developed from the private country residence of its founder Bernardo Paz into the massive park which exists there today. He also detailed the Institute’s plans for further development towards the goals of the museological and touristic programs aimed at educating the surrounding communities. During my visit I was also able to have an informal interview with the museum’s now executive director, Roseni Senna. Mrs. Senna spoke of the challenges of bringing a wide range of people to Inhotim and detailed the museum’s social goal to improve the surrounding area. She also candidly spoke on why visitors to the museum have thought of the museum first as a botanical garden and secondly as an exhibition of contemporary art.11 Mrs. Senna also expressed the difficulties she confronts in mediating the experience for Inhotim’s visitors and providing a cohesive narrative with which to guide them through the installation work.

State of the Literature

Graham’s own extensive writings regarding his work and that of his contemporaries were published collectively in Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects 1965-1990.12 This publication guaranteed his place as one of the key contributors to the genres of conceptual, video, and installation art. Graham’s writings have, however, somewhat dominated the academic study of his work. Seemingly to his detriment, these succinct and somewhat dry texts have been included in all of the major monographs of his work published from 2001 to 2011. Although these texts provide valuable insight into the artist’s vision for his works, they limit the

7 interpretation of them. The continuing emphasis given to Graham’s perspective prioritizes the artist’s intention over any alternative readings of the work’s effect. While this study will cull from Graham’s own writings, it will also move past the artist’s interpretations. As my approach to the study of his work focuses on its experiential dimension, the literature I will use to provide evidence will follow similar strategies. In this pursuit I will benefit from publications which eschew the contextualization of Graham’s practice as belonging to Minimalism and instead prioritize the experiential dynamic of the installation.13 Brian Hatton’s Dan Graham: Pavilions and Dan Graham: Architecture both examine Graham’s work in terms of their functional and experiential dynamic. Hatton approaches his study from the vantage point of an architectural historian. By doing so he emphasizes the unavoidable social context and social responsibility inherent to architecture. His two publications emphasize both the aesthetic and functional interpretations of these installations. Critical publications regarding the Inhotim Institute and Botanical Gardens have yet to materialize. The only other critical study of the park was completed in 2012 by Alice Hereen at the School of Art Institute of Chicago.14 In her Master’s thesis Hereen explores Inhotim as part of a lineage of Brazilian museum history and also as product of government support of the arts. Since opening to the public in 2007, the only literature to emerge directly concerning the museum has been Through: Inhotim.15 This volume was published by the Institute’s own press and consists mainly of an archive of the permanent collection. The only other published writings to appear have been a rapidly growing number of periodical texts published in varied travel and leisure sections of newspapers and magazines. Although most, if not all of these texts, lack a critical distance, they are however useful to this study. By providing an account of the experience from a similar point of view, and considering the interests, of the vast majority of visitors who will experience the park.

Synopsis of Chapters

The three chapters that comprise my thesis will attempt answer the question of how Graham’s installation creates meaning within the unique environment at Inhotim. The three chapters metaphorically move outwards from the center of Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve into

8 the larger environment at Inhotim and then out of Inhotim to explore its role within the greater contemporary art market. The first chapter of my thesis will introduce the object in question and then provide a conceptual framework with which to understand how the installation creates meaning for the viewer. This chapter will explain the phenomenological processes activated by the mirrored surfaces within the installation. I will then associate the disorienting experience of the viewer in the installation with the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. Once I have done this I will then suggest how the experience of Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve relates to those found in similar practices which exhibit a Relational Aesthetic as defined by Nicolas Bourriard. Finally, this chapter will question whether the practices of Relational Aesthetics are effective in creating a transformative social effect in their visitors. To do this I will examine recent texts by Claire Bishop that have critically analyzed the efficacy of participatory installation work. The second chapter of the thesis will insert Graham’s installation into the history of the practice in order to understand how site-specific art can create socially engaged viewing. This chapter will first provide a brief history of the site-specific art as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s and how the practice has evolved since this time. I will then analyze two works which, I suggest, are paradigmatic of the differing strategies site-specific artists have used to enable site as an active agent in the experience of their work: Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc and Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument. I will then explore how these works reframe the history of their sites These two site-specific installations will be examined in order to define how Graham’s Pavilion installations straddles the conceptual divide between them and how in doing so Bisected Triangle, Interior Triangle manipulates its site to create meaning for its visitors. The third and final chapter of the thesis will examine how the unique environment at Inhotim represents a new development in the history of the exhibition of installation art. I will provide a history of Inhotim and of the surrounding communities in order to suggest how Graham’s installation functions within the context provided by this history. This chapter will explore how the practice of site-specificity has changed to accommodate an increasingly globalized contemporary art market. I will explore Miwon Kwon’s concept of “unhinged” site- specific practice and suggest how Inhotim’s development is symptomatic of new concepts of the relationship between a community, a site, and contemporary installation art. Finally, this chapter will provide an analysis of Inhotim as an exhibition space which, by virtue of its remote location,

9 singular collection, and unique built-environment, problematizes the experience of site-specific installation art.

Conclusion

In addition to providing a new framework with which to understand Dan Graham’s installation work my thesis hopes to inspire further questions regarding the role of contemporary installation art in creating socially-engaged viewing. The study of site-specificity at Inhotim problematizes the relationship between a site, a work of art, and its viewers and in doing so calls into question the efficacy of contemporary art exhibitions in creating both entertaining and engaging experiences for its viewers.

1 The version of Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve at Inhotim is not the first to be created by Graham. The first was installed in Madison Square Park in 2002. It was commissioned by the “Target Art in the Park” series of the New York Public Art Fund. See “Dan Graham: Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve,” Target Art in the Park press release. New York, NY, July 12, 2002.

2 Graham’s first Pavilion installation, Pavilion for Argonne, was installed at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago in 1978. Since this time Graham’s artistic output has almost exclusively focused on the creation of site- specific outdoor pavilions.

3 See Stephen Wallis, “Brazil's Art Gardens,” Departures, May - June 2010, http://www.departures.com/articles/brazils-art-gardens (accessed February 26, 2013).

4 The term artificiality can be problematic when discussing site-specificity but my use of the term within this study and, specifically in regards to Inhotim, refers to the creation of a segregated environment which sublimates the geographic and cultural histories of its encompassing community.

5 Although the Smithsonian Institution is classified as the world’s largest museum by volume, its exhibition space is spread out over 19 individual museums and 9 research centers that exhibiting a diverse array of materials. Inhotim is the largest museum which exists as one monolithic entity which is devoted exclusively to the exhibition of contemporary art.

6 For further discussion regarding the role of site specificity in Sculpture Parks and Gardens see Glenn Harper and Twylene Moyer, eds., Landscapes For Art: Contemporary Sculpture Parks (Hamilton, NJ.: Isc Press, 2008).

7 Marc Treib, “Sculpture and Garden: A Historical Overview,” Design Quarterly, 144 (1988): 44-58.

8 “Inhotim Botanical Garden: Our Mission,” Inhotim, http://www.inhotim.org.br/index.php/p/v/124-461 (accessed December 2, 2011).

9 Authors who discuss Graham’s Pavilion pieces often refer back to their debt to post-modern architecture and the materials and forms of Minimalism. While many scholars discuss the experience of Graham’s video and performance pieces in terms of the complex social dynamic created by Graham within them, I have yet to find to this date that have explored Graham’s Pavilion pieces within a similar context.

10 Grace Glueck, “What Part Should the Public Play in Choosing Public Art?” New York Times, February 3, 1985. http://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/03/arts/what-part-should-the-public-play-in-choosing-public-art.html (accessed February 26, 2013).

11 Information regarding the visitor’s experience at Inhotim is obtained through exit-surveys regularly provided to visitors.

12 Dan Graham, Rock My Religion, 1965-1990, ed. Brian Wallis, (Cambridge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

13 Authors who discuss Graham’s Pavilion pieces often refer back to their debt to post-modern architecture and the materials and forms of Minimalism. While many scholars discuss the experience of Graham’s video and performance pieces in terms of the complex social dynamic which they foster, to this date I have yet to find any that have explored Graham’s Pavilion pieces within a similar context.

14 Alice Hereen, “The Inhotim Cultural Institute: The Museum in the Neodevelopmentalist Era” (master's thesis, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2011)

15 Allen Schwartmann, Jochen Volz and Rodrigo Moura. Through: Inhotim, (Brumadinho, MG, Brazil: Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea, 2008).

CHAPTER ONE

INTO THE MIRROR

The overarching theme of Dan Graham’s diverse body of work can be described as an attempt to make what was once private or internal, public and visible. His conceptual works, performances, videos, and installations function by mediating the negotiation between the viewer’s body, his perception of his identity, and the exhibition environment. Graham’s installation work, his architecturally-scaled glass and steel Pavilions, invite the viewer into a defined space in order to then expose these viewers to a process of negotiation between subject and object. Within the approximately eighty Pavilion installations Graham has created over the past three decades the viewer confronts an incongruous and distorted re-presentation of their bodies. Inside these disorienting spaces Graham aims to perceptually rupture the link between reflection and reality. However, the Pavilions are not meant to exist as spaces of solitary contemplation and meditation. The experience is a collective one. Thus, for Graham, the mirrored body is the locus of social identity. Only from the perspective of the embodied viewer can we construct our identities in the space between the “self” and the “other.” When the private construct of the self is subjected to the social forces of public perception, it causes re-evaluation and reassignment of our identities within the milieu. Within Graham’s Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve (Fig. 5), installed at the Inhotim Institute of Contemporary Art and Botanical Gardens in Brumadinho, Brazil, visitors experience a kaleidoscopic image of themselves, fellow visitors, and a lush garden environment, altogether inharmoniously foisted upon the flat glass walls of the installation. The exterior walls of the structure form an isosceles triangle which stands approximately seven feet tall and are bordered by stainless steel elements that provide the support for the installation. The walls of the installation are comprised of semi-transparent sheets of glass that both allow light to penetrate and are also reflective. The installation has no ceiling and is thus open to the elements. The reflective qualities of the installation are informed by climactic conditions; depending on the quality of the light on a given day the structure may either allow more light to penetrate its interior or at other times it may appear more mirror-like. However, most visitors will experience

12 a combination of the visual qualities afforded by the semi-transparent mirrored glass on a given day. When looking towards the Pavilion from the exterior it is difficult to discern visually whether the reflective images are emanating from the interior or exterior of the Pavilion. Visitors can enter the Pavilion through two sliding glass panels located on opposing sides. The door on the base of the triangle leads to the larger chamber while the door located towards the “point” of the triangle leads to the smaller of the two chambers. The interior of the triangle is bisected by a curved glass divider that exhibits the same reflective qualities as the exterior panes. The interior divider curves away from the larger of the two interior chambers and thus provides a distorted reflection of visitors who enter the installation. Those who enter can perceive each other from the vantage point of the opposing chambers of the installation, however the image will be distorted as it is filtered through the curved glass of the interior panel. The larger of the two chambers can accommodate no more than six visitors at one time while the smaller chamber may be inhabited comfortably by no more than three. Visitors can choose to either close the sliding glass doors of the installation once they enter, or leave it open to allow for more visitors to enter. Few historians have fully explored the social-cultural effects of Graham’s oeuvre from the point of view of the viewer. I would suggest that the omission of this approach is in part due to the clarity and conciseness with which the artist describes his artistic intentions. 1 Graham accompanies the majority of his works with a written component that describes his varied inspirations and intention for the viewer. Graham’s work is frequently analyzed within the conceptual framework prescribed by Conceptual and Minimalist art. This framework, while emphasizing the open and decentering nature of the works, often omits the description of possible social and psychological effects. It thus hinders interpretations which prioritize the viewer’s behaviors over the artist’s intention. The inclusion of Graham’s Pavilion installations into the canon of Minimal art derives from his choice of materials, namely glass and stainless steel, and his personal associations with other artists who worked in the genre, including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol Lewitt, among others. Graham himself describes his work as, in fact, a critique of the “static” nature of Minimal art and the movement’s failure to recognize the importance of intersubjectivity.2 This first chapter will provide an account of the visitor’s experience upon entering Graham’s installation Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve. By dissecting the visitor’s experience I aim to provide a framework for examining the function of the installation in terms of the

13 transformational effects it creates in the viewer. I will analyze the phenomenology of the experience using a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach in order to establish how Graham employs the mirrored surface to destabilize the process of identity formation. I will also suggest how the phenomenology of Graham’s installation differs from the approaches of Minimalist art. Once I have established a framework for understanding the psychological processes taking place within the individual I will then suggest how these processes function once they are subjected to a social dynamic. I prioritize this reading in order to assert that the product of Graham’s work is, in fact, the social interaction between the visitors of his pavilions. In this light, I propose a new methodology with which to examine Graham’s installation work. I will highlight the social dynamic which occurs between the visitors within Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve in order to argue that these interactions are the agents of the transformative effect for the viewer. I then suggest how Graham’s installation work parallels and, perhaps preempts, the work of the artists in “relational aesthetics” during the late 1990s and early 2000s. I will then re-examine the phenomenology of Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve as it relates to the institutional spaces associated with participatory practice. I will investigate how Graham’s installations communicate their function, and question whether a strategy based on the production of environmental spaces for social interaction is effective in creating a transformative effect on the viewer. Finally, I will interrogate how the process of identity creation that occurs in Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve is affected by the unique environment at Inhotim.

The Psychology of the Mirror Image

The function of a mirror is to provide its viewer with an objective image of his own body. The experience of viewing the reflected body has dual effects: we are at once provided with a vision of our conscious self and also become aware that we exist as an object in space. Michel Foucault recognized the transformative effect created by the mirror reflection and so theorized From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am.3

For Foucault the mirror allows us to perceive our own existence from a critical distance; his observation suggests a disruption or disagreement between the consciousness of the mind and the reality of the body. Working during the 1930s, French developmental psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used the term “mirror-stage” to define a moment in the development of our identity relating to the initial encounter with our mirrored image. In doing so, Lacan built upon Freud’s concept of ego- formation, and developed a conceptual theory to describe the process whereby an individual establishes a “unified body-image.”4 Lacan postulated that it is only when an infant is exposed to the mirror does he begin the process of creating identity through self-perception. The mirror- stage allows an individual to process their being as a limited one confined to the body. In “The Mirror-stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” Lacan writes: “The function of the mirror-stage thus turns out, in my view, to be a particular case of the functions of imagos, which is to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality—or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.”5 The term imagos is used by Lacan to describe the mental object of the individual within the psyche.6 The completion of the mirror-stage initiates the insertion of the imagos into the social realm; Lacan writes: “This moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end inaugurates, by the identification with the imago of the counterpart and the drama of primordial…the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations.”7 Once the infant establishes its imago he subjects this image to a comparative analysis, namely between the constructed self-image and the foreign body of the mother or father. The binary relationship between the I and the Other is henceforth established through the experience of the mirrored self. The I, as perceived through the reflective surface is, in turn, the version of consciousness that is the subject of a social identity. The image of the body in the mirror becomes the reality of the self. The embodied perceiver relies on a visual construction of the body in space to function as a social being. The process that Lacan describes in the “mirror-stage” can be manipulated in order to create new configurations and understandings of the relationship between the self and the other. In order for the “mirror-stage” to function as Lacan describes, we must assume that the mirror provides a pristine image, faithfully reproducing a visual reality. The mirror can, however, also function as a rupturing device by altering visual perceptive processes. As Lacan proposed, the mirror becomes the site for a transformative psychological process during the initial development

15 of the psyche during early childhood. I would like to remove the developmental limitation of Lacan’s “mirror-stage” and suggest that that the psychological process of establishing an identity is recreated each time we confront our mirrored image. The reflected surfaces alter the objective representation of the mirrored self therefore creating renewed episodes of identity creation in the viewer. In the case of Graham’s Pavilions, the viewer is confronted by a distorted or multiplied body and he then reestablishes the connection between his mental image, or imago, and his own physical appearance as visually established. Although Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories have often been employed to describe the phenomenology of Graham’s mirrored installations, I would like to build on the connection by suggesting that Graham both appropriates and then disrupts Lacanian psychology in his quest to challenge identity creation with his installations.8 Graham himself does not directly reference Lacanian psychoanalysis as an inspiration for the use of reflected surface. Rather, he states that he arrived at the idea of rupturing visual perception of the self through Sartre’s On Being and Nothingness.9 Lacanian analysis of Graham’s video and installation work frequently suggests that the mirror stage is being duplicated and reenacted by the visitor when confronting their own image within these works. My goal in treating Graham’s Pavilion sculptures in terms of their relationship to Lacanian psychoanalysis is descriptive rather than diagnostic (in the clinical sense). Instead, I provide Lacan’s “mirror-stage” as a conceptual model with which I link behavior to psychological process. I am resistive to the idea that Lacan’s “mirror-stage” can successfully describe the totality of the psychological experience of Graham’s installations. In this light, the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Graham’s Pavilions must be considered not only in terms of the unification of the psychic and physical self but also how this process is altered, and perhaps defined, by Graham’s manipulation of the mirrored surface within an environmental and social context.10 I argue that Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve exists as a viewing machine that activates, dislocates, and finally inverts the unifying principle of Lacan’s “mirror-stage” to enact Graham’s socializing intentions. It is this social factor for which phenomenological analyses of Minimalist and Post-minimalist art fail to account. The Pavilion reflects the images of its visitors but also distorts, compounds, and scatters this image by way of multiple semi-translucent surfaces and curved glass which expand or contract the viewer’s image. The visual fidelity between the viewer’s vision of their own body and their psychological conception of the self is thus ruptured

16 when exposed to the surface of Graham’s installations. Psychologist Friedrich Wolfram Heubach describes possible evidence of the viewer’s attempt to reconcile a fragmented image of the self: “The extent to which the person’s unity of self is founded in this discontinuous consciousness is evident in the way the observers in Dan Graham’s installations are virtually obsessed with trying to confirm themselves as the original, the subject, and escape the objectification pursuing them in the mirror and on the screen by acting silly, making faces and sticking out their tongues at their image.”11 Heubach’s observations of the visitor’s attempt to unify the object and subject through atypical behavior can be extended beyond the personal psychological negotiation he describes. That is, the visitor’s behavior is also indicative of their attempt to single out their own body from the multiplicity of bodies that coexist on the surface of the Pavilion. Not only is the self-image visually distorted but the conception of the self as independent of the other is challenged as the images of other visitors overlap and mingle on the surface of the installation. (Fig. 6) It becomes increasingly difficult for the visitor to define their own personal space against the spaces inhabited by other viewers. This effect is further compounded by the aural quality of the installations. Once inside ambient sounds and the viewer’s voice are amplified and refracted as they bounce around the small, rigid enclosure of the installation. As the sounds bounce around the glass installation they become muddled and unintelligible and thus it becomes increasingly difficult for the viewer to identify his own voice against those of other visitors.

Dan Graham’s Relational Communities

As I have suggested, Graham’s Pavilions cannot fulfill their intended role when experienced solitarily. Once we have perceived our own embodiment we continue to structure our identity by comparing our embodied self with the others who share the space in and around the structure. The Pavilions are social space. When they are shared by a group of individuals their image is both reflected and transposed onto one another. The Pavilion’s visitors together undergo the psychological effects created by their distorted reflections, thereby creating a micro- community. I would like to analyze this micro-community in terms of the work of cultural anthropologist Victor Turner. I suggest that the experience of the collective that is formed within, around and especially on the mirrored surface of the Pavilions is akin to those experiencing the

17 rites of passage that Turner describes in “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.”12 In this essay Turner describes a temporal and physical location within which an individual exists in an “interstructural situation.” The “interstructural situation” refers to the point where an individual or group exists between events that mark a change in cultural identity, i.e. child to adult, single to married. I would suggest that the period during which a viewer inhabits the environment of the Pavilion, he both establishes an embodied identity, and also exists in a situation similar to Turner’s “interstructural situation.” The reflective surface functions as a rupturing device, compressing the social space and creating, using Turner’s phrase, a liminal period. Turner writes “Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise.” Identity therefore becomes malleable within the liminal space. Turner states, “Liminality may be partly described as a stage of reflection. In it those ideas, sentiments, and facts that are…accepted unthinkingly are…resolved into their constituents.”13 According to Turner, because the micro-community inhabiting the liminal space is comprised of individuals without a concrete identity, the space becomes egalitarian, free from hierarchies established through rigid social identities. I adopt Foucault’s definition of the mirror as rarified space, or heterotopia, in order to provide further evidence of Turner’s suggestions. Foucault adds: “The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.”14 Foucault’s invocation of the utopian dimension of the mirrored space echoes the egalitarian qualities found within Turner’s micro- communities. It is thus possible to suggest that Graham’s Pavilions serve to create a utopian space for its viewers, a safe space where “real” identities can be challenged and reconstituted as a collective. As I have proposed, Graham’s Pavilion installations should be considered in terms of their function as objects that inspire social behavior. Although the effects of Graham’s work are often described in relation to phenomenological experience of Minimalism or Post-minimalism, I believe that the Pavilion installations exhibit conceptual concerns more akin to what art critic and cultural theorist Nicolas Bourriard terms “Relational Aesthetics.” In his book of the same title, the author describes a conceptual strategy that arose during the 1990s. Bourriard suggests that, during this period, more artists began to produce works that suggested the possibility of

18 democratic social interaction within institutionalized artistic contexts as the product of their art, exemplified in the work of artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick, and Felix Gonzalez- Torres. Speaking of the communities that are formed in Gabriel Orozco’s work, Bourriard suggests that communities are formed “in relation to and inside the work” wherein “a particular ‘domain of exchanges’ can occur.”15 These exchanges function by “exploring relational schemata…mediated by object-surfaces” and thus are spaces where “heterogeneous modes of sociability can be worked out.”16 Tiravanija’s installation Untitled 2002 (he promised) (Fig. 7) provides a suitable example of a work that exemplifies the way these artists utilize institutional exhibition spaces. In this installation for the Guggenheim Museum, Tiravanija transformed one of the galleries into a lounge-like living room. Inspired by Rudolf M. Shindler’s Kings Road House in West Hollywood, Tiravanija filled the steel-structure with modernist seating, dj booths and televisions. The polished stainless-steel floors and walls of the structure are meant to delineate an inviting space for free exchange between museum visitors. As I have suggested, Graham can be said to also use his Pavilion installations to foster these “exchanges.” Graham’s Pavilions function by providing an architectural site within which heterogeneous, democratic space is created through the mediation of the mirrored reflections. In order to further qualify Graham in terms of his relationship to other contemporary artists who prioritize the social engagement or performative participation of their viewers, I would like to introduce the work of art-historian and critic Claire Bishop. In her pivotal essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” published in the journal October in 2004, Bishop questions the efficacy of works grouped within the category of Bourriard’s “Relational Aesthetic.”17 Citing Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of democracy as antagonism, Bishop faults the work of artists such as Liam Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija for failing to “sustain the tension among viewers, participants, and context.” 1819 Bishop focuses her criticism of these participatory practices on the premise that the relations created are intrinsically democratic since they are reliant on an ideal perception that visitor’s physical proximity to each other within an institutional space is tantamount to collective integration. If, as I suggest, Graham’s work can be closely affiliated with that of the artists practicing relational aesthetics, then Bishop’s essay can serve to question if, and how, Graham’s Pavilion installations are effective in creating social interaction actuated by their reflective walls.

Interestingly, Bishop’s article does implicate Graham’s video works in the genesis of the creation of participatory practices, such as those of Liam Gillick (Fig. 8).20 However, she distances Graham from artists such as Gillick and Tiravanija by suggesting that Graham’s video installations of the 1970s were in fact “completed” by the viewer, whereas “perpetual open- endedness in which art is a backdrop to activity” serves as the hallmark of relational aesthetics.21 However, I would argue that Graham’s Pavilions can exist comfortably as “backdrops” to the visitor’s interpersonal activities. Graham himself suggests the aleatory nature of his installations in relation to the behavior of the visitor when commenting on the pragmatic utilitarianism of his works. In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Graham describes the Pavilions as “a place for working-class and middle-class people to rest on the grass with their children or lovers on weekends.” 22 He even labels these works as non-committal objects which elicit “semi-distracted observation.”23 Thus I believe it possible to imbricate Graham’s Pavilions with relational aesthetics. Superficial aesthetic comparisons can be made between Gillick’s minimal structures and Graham’s installations. However, what is key about their difference is the framework provided by the museum or gallery which hosts these participatory practices. It is the setting provided by the institution which Bishop suggests sanctions, and perhaps activates, the inter-subjective encounters produced in Gillick’s work. Ultimately, my goal within this inquiry is not to take Bishop’s exclusion of Graham from the group of artists practicing relational aesthetics to task, as she too emphasizes that “Graham’s installations…insist on the socialized and public premise of phenomenological perception.”24 Rather, I seek to use her analysis of the importance of the space in which these encounters occur. Bishop’s examination of the role institutional space plays in providing context to these works will serve to frame my own analysis of the experience of Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve. Bishop begins “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” by describing the interior spaces of the Palais de Tokyo (Fig. 9) which in 2002 underwent a large-scale renovation of its interior. The renovated spaces were specifically crafted to suit the curatorial mission of its co-directors Jerome Sans and Nicolas Bourriaud. Within the Palais bare concrete pylons bisect the gallery spaces, while overhead, ceiling rafters, electrical wiring, and lighting equipment are left exposed and within the visitor’s line of sight. According to Bishop, the raw, industrial quality of the museum’s interior represents the director’s attempt to recreate “the model of displaying

20 contemporary art as a studio or experimental ‘laboratory’.”25 This paradigm shift from the white-walled gallery to laboratory-like environment emphasizes the open nature of the work exhibited and is a conciliatory response to the participatory work being produced in the 1990s. The aesthetic of the industrial museum environment at the Palais de Tokyo could not be more distant from the lush, verdant gardens of Inhotim. However, I believe these dissimilar environments can be tied together by their inclination towards creating an experience that is more similar to those that occur within spaces of leisure and entertainment than that of traditional museums or galleries. In addressing participatory work’s resistance to closure Bishop writes: “There are many problems with this idea, not least of which is the difficulty of discerning a work whose identity is willfully unstable. Another problem is the ease with which the ‘laboratory’ becomes marketable as a space of leisure and entertainment.”26 It is this idea of the contemporary art venue as activator of a method of viewing which highlights the artificiality of these environments and their distance from the praxis of life. I believe that Bishop correctly identifies the necessity for these participatory performances to occur within spaces that are recognizably institutional (in relation to the exhibition of art) and thus function to sanction the experience as artistic and not quotidian. She suggests that once the historical institutional context or framework is removed or distanced, the work is then in danger of losing its ability to engage the viewer successfully and create transformative democratic effects. Bishop notes: “One could argue that in this context, project-based works-in-progress and artists-in-residence begin to dovetail with an ‘experience economy,’ the marketing strategy that seeks to replace goods and services with scripted and staged personal experiences.”27 This begs the question, wherein does one find the experience economy most vividly manifested? I would argue that the American theme park comes closest to approximating this experience.

Senses at Play

Although the role of site-specific practice and the built environment will be discussed more fully in subsequent chapters, I will now briefly discuss how the unique experience of visiting Inhotim contributes to the experience of interacting with Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve. As I have discussed earlier, I suggest that the space in and around Graham’s Pavilions

21 exists as a sort of liminal space where new configurations of identity can be assumed. I would also argue that the space inside Inhotim activates a degree of the same liminal quality. In order to better understand how Graham’s installations function within the unique context of Inhotim, I would like to introduce the concept that a visit to Inhotim can be likened to the touristic experience of visiting an amusement park. Visitors to Inhotim (Fig. 10) often describe their surroundings as a “paradise,” “Edenic” and containing “rare and exotic beauty.”28 Opened to the public in 2007, the Brazilian outdoor museum has become one the top touristic destinations of the region, attracting more than 300,000 visitors per year. Home to both collected and commissioned works, the park represents the private collection of Brazilian mining magnate, Bernardo Paz. Steven Walls describes the setting in his article “Brazil’s Art Garden,”: “From the moment you pass through the gates, the perfect cobblestones, the manmade lakes, and the stately allée of eucalyptus trees make it instantly clear that you’re entering a world far removed from the conspicuous poverty that surrounds it. Elegant black swans squawk at each other in manicured plantings next to a lake, oblivious to Dan Graham’s glass Pavilion nearby, its simultaneously reflective and transparent surfaces interacting with the hills, water, and sky.”29 It can be said that visitors travel to the park in order to have an experience that defies the rationality and logic of banal routine. Inhotim’s visitors are offered an ideal setting within which their senses, and therefore their construction of reality, are challenged. Once they have entered Inhotim’s gates, visitors can be assured a sort of fun-house experience, an extended period of adult play: here they can venture outside of their comfort zones within a presumably safe environment. Once visitors leave the park their senses are restored; they return to the perhaps too real world in the heart of Brazilian mining country. The relationship between exterior and interior becomes an important mediator at both Inhotim and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (Fig. 11). Originally built in 1937, the neo-classical exterior and art-deco ornamentation of the Palais presents itself as markedly different from its laboratory-like interior spaces.30 The dissonance between interior and exterior present at both Inhotim and the Palais further ruptures the visitor’s sense of continuity between the spaces of life (in the Palais’s case the urban space of Paris and at Inhotim the semi-rural mining territory) and artistic engagement. Visitors are encouraged to feel a sense of detachment from the world outside the pristine landscape of the Institute. Inhotim exists as a safe space constructed for aesthetic enjoyment of the picturesque. It offers a touristic experience, wherein its patrons are

22 free to experiment through an exoticized interaction with artworks that challenge the construction of reality. Evidence of the relationship between Inhotim and the theme-park environment, frequently surfaces in the travel accounts of the various journalists who have visited the institute. Parallels between the experience of visiting Disney World and Inhotim are often cited by these journalists.31 More importantly, the Institute’s founder Bernardo Paz specifically refers to the American theme park when describing his intentions with Inhotim. In an interview with Newsweek he remarks: “You have to think about transforming the museum into an entertainment park. You have to think of Disney World.”32 In an interview published in Brazilian newspaper O Globo, Paz again references Disney World: “[Inhotim is] like Disney, which began life as a park and expanded. Only here it is something serious.”33 These statements by Paz raise significant questions regarding how these two experiences are related. How is the visitor to draw the line between the leisure of Disney and the “serious” nature of Inhotim? And is it necessary for the visitor to alter his behavior in relation to this context in order to experience Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve as intended? I believe it is important to explore the reasons why the comparisons between Inhotim and Disney World arise with relative frequency. I suggest there are two factors that inspire Inhotim’s visitors to mentally associate the two experiences: (1) the nature of the built environment, and (2) the nature of the exhibitions program. I would like to address these factors individually to provide a better understanding of how this comparison informs the experience of interacting with Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve. The first of these factors, the nature of the built environment, refers to the striking visual differences between the exterior of the parks and their interiors. It is important to note that the built environment at Inhotim bears little resemblance to the natural landscape that surrounds it. Whereas the interior of Inhotim is verdant and lush, replete with manicured gardens and resplendent water features, the land around the park is more arid and sparse. The visual distance between Inhotim’s interior and exterior lends the park a sense of artificiality; it is immediately clear to anyone visiting the park that they have entered a built environment and not a natural landscape. As I mentioned previously, this passage from the natural to the artificial invokes a sense of otherness to the realm of lived experiences. At Disney World, this otherness provokes a

23 reading of the park that categorizes the experiences as part of the realm of fantasy. As I explain further below, I believe a similar effect occurs at Inhotim. The second factor that I suggest prompts the comparisons between Inhotim and Disney World is the nature of the exhibitions program. Inhotim is the only large, open-air museum in the world whose exhibition program focuses almost exclusively on the exhibition of large, site- specific installations. To experience most of these large installations visitors must enter an enclosed space that either comprises the installation itself or houses one. Once inside, the visitors are often confronted by a series of disorienting visual or aural effects. When they emerge from the space of the installation they return to the picturesque gardens of Inhotim. The passage from the interior space of the installation to the exterior space of the Institute echoes the passage visitors would have experienced when entering the park. This second passage further compounds the feelings of otherness, or fantasy experienced by Inhotim’s visitors. Thus, it is possible to suggest that the experience of Inhotim’s installations and Disney World’s “rides” is perhaps not so dissimilar. However, there are key differences that separate these experiences. The most important of which is the narrative, or lack thereof, that is provided by the didactic material at each park. At Disney’s theme parks the narrative is provided by Walt Disney films that in turn inspire the “rides” and the style of the built environment. Visitors traversing the park are meant to experience it as a vivid incarnation or tableaux of the predetermined narrative into which the visitors are inserted. Inhotim benefits from no such narrative that guides the experience. The open-ended nature of the experience of Inhotim is highlighted by a noticeable lack of signage or didactic information. Visitors at Inhotim are left to explore the park with the benefit of little museological mediation. Although I will later discuss how Graham’s claims to site-specificity are problematized by the environment at Inhotim, I will now return to Bishop’s critique of the efficacy of participatory practices. Contrary to Bishop’s assertion, I suggest that Graham’s Pavilions sculptures may not, in fact, be rendered psychologically ineffective by their placement within the context of the entertainment experience of Inhotim. As is alluded by Graham himself, his installations are in fact functional objects whose use value is not predicated on a specific method of viewing, nor on an “activated” or critical consciousness in the viewer. It would seem that Graham would be comfortable with his work existing within the context of leisure or entertainment. During an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist he states “I realized my pavilions

24 and gardens are for people at weekends, parents and their kids. I am thinking of working-class leisure.”34 Speaking of artist Ceal Floyer, Graham again alludes to the need for contemporary art to operate within the parameters of entertainment: “Her work is very entertaining…I think the secret to a lot of art is [that] we are compared with Euro Disney and music culture. I am not pessimistic, but I think we have to deal with theme parks.”35 Critics also often note the carnivalesque nature of Graham’s work, referring to them as funhouses or playgrounds.36 Graham himself recognizes the Pavilion’s function in creating a place of play. In an interview with Mike Metz he describes the Pavilion: “Mirrored glass made it into a photo opportunity. And the idea of an amusement park, a funhouse situation creating kaleidoscopic space.”37 Art journalist Ken Johnson goes so far to suggest that Graham’s Pavilions only function properly when inhabited by children.38 Perhaps Graham’s acceptance of the relationship between entertainment and art is most clearly evinced by his proposed, but never constructed, Skateboard Pavilion. 39 This proposed Pavilion consisted of a semi-translucent pergola mounted atop a concrete dish of the kind typically used for performing aerial skateboard maneuvers. Skateboard Pavilion is clearly meant to exist as a backdrop to the recreational activity occurring below it. The concept of artistic contemplation and production as psychological play has its origins in the late nineteenth century, proposed by theorists including Friedrich Schiller, Herbert Spencer and Karl Groos.40 Although “play” tends to be an ambiguous term that can encompass a diverse set of behaviors, Groos’ definition is most pertinent to the experience of viewers at Inhotim.41 According to Groos, aesthetic pleasure is derived from the playful use of the senses and therefore pleasure (play) is experienced as the satisfaction of the desire for multiple sensory impulses. In The Play of Man, Groos also asserts that the continuity of aesthetic contemplation is derived from childish play, occurring during a period of sensorial exploration which later develops into the contemplation and creation of adult art. Perhaps the relationship between play and aesthetic contemplation can be used as a model with which to examine the experience of Inhotim. As visitors traverse the park and encounter a varied assortment of installations pieces, their construction of reality is challenged. As visitors peer through the kaleidoscopic surfaces of Olafur Eliasson’s Viewing Machine (2001), hear the cacophony of Janet Miller’s Forty Part Motet (2001), or even feel the broken glass under their feet within Cildo Mereilles’ Through (1983–1989), their senses become the muscle with which play is experienced. As the concrete sensorial connection to the world is

25 ruptured so too is the construction of identity as an embodied viewer. As visitors traverse this “Disneyland” of contemporary art (divorced as Inhotim is from the reality of its surrounding and steeped in the concepts of play) they become part of a community of sensory explorers, prepared to submit their bodies to renewed processes of socialization. The relationship between Graham’s Pavilions and leisure can also be traced back to their conceptual origin, the garden folly. Referring to his early installation Two Adjacent Pavilions of 1978-81, Graham writes: “Typologically, the work belongs to the park/garden’s pleasure pavilion, which has been an antidote to the alienating qualities of the city as well as a utopian metaphor for a more pleasurable city of the future. These pavilions are used for people at restful play -- a fun-house for children and a romantic retreat for adults.”42 As evidenced by the statement above, Graham’s vision for the use of the Pavilion is somewhat incoherent; he intends them to be both utopian and yet grounded in the banality of the leisure space. Bernardo Paz seems to echo Graham’s sentiment when describing the ideal Inhotim experience: “We’ve lost the ability to be surprised by life. We have to regain the sense of being a child again. Here you can do this.”43 However, given Graham’s acceptance of the pragmatic function of these Pavilions, a resolution between what would appear to be oppositional modalities of interaction, between critical engagement and play, might prove unnecessary. Instead of resolving the discrepancy between the Pavilion’s non-functional and pragmatic uses, Graham allows the viewer’s behavior to be the measure by which the efficacy of the work can be judged. Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve can function as both a space which fosters micro-topian inter-subjective encounters, and also as a fun-house mirror in which children make faces. As I have described, the experience inside Graham’s Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve at Inhotim is one where the viewer is asked to both contemplate and be contemplated upon. The very construction of the self is the currency with which this transaction between object and visitor, and then between visitors, is made. Within his Pavilions, Graham seeks only to bring together diverse groups of people within an environment of sensorial manipulation; once inside, their behavior is equally valid in fulfilling the work’s function. The visitor’s time within the mirrored heterotopia of the Pavilion becomes mediated by the rarified theme-park surrounding at Inhotim. The surface of Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve reflects a pristine landscape: a paradisiacal island of lush gardens set within the sea of harsh Brazilian mining country. Inhotim

26 speaks to the viewer in the language of leisure, it asks the viewer to play, to embrace the distance between life and art.

1 The largest compendium of the artist’s writings to date can be found within Dan Graham, Rock My Religion, 1965- 1990, ed. Brian Wallis, (Cambridge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

2 Coline Milliard, “'I Don't Do Pavilions': Dan Graham Sets the Record Straight,” ARTINFO UK, March 20, 2012, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/779438/i-dont-do-pavilions-dan-graham-sets-the-record-straight (accessed February 26, 2013). 3 Michel Foucault` “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring, 1986): 22-27.

4 Cathryn Vasseleu “The Face Before the Mirror-Stage,” Hypatia 6, no. 3 (Autumn, 1991): 140-55.

5 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror-stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: a Selection (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 1-7. The term Innenwelt and Umwelt refer respectively to the psyche and the environment.

6 The term imagos is initially used by Freud is described as a byproduct in the creation of the ego-identity. Although Lacan’s mirror-stage relates to Freud’s construction of the ego-identity, the mirror-stage is more concerned with the creation of a social identity as opposed to Freud’s psychic identity. For more information see Sigmund Freud and James Strachey, The Ego and the Id, (New York: Norton, 1962).

7 Lacan, “The Mirror-stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” 5.

8 See Beatriz Colomina “Vision in Process,” October 11 (Winter, 1979): 105-19 or Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History, (New York: Routledge, 2005), 48.

9 See Violaine Bouter de Monvel, “Being and Nothingness: An Interview with Dan Graham,” Flash Art 256 (March/April 2009): 56-59, or Coline Milliard, “’I Don’t Do Pavilions’: Dan Graham Sets the Record Straight.”

10 Birgit Pilzer briefly discusses the social functionality of Graham’s Pavilion installations in “Double Intersections: The Optics of Dan Graham” in Dan Graham, (London:Phaidon, 2001). However, her analysis is very brief and only serves to introduce the topic within the context of a survey of the artist’s work.

11 Quoted in Dan Graham: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure, (Barcelona: Ediciones Pol grafa, 2009).

12 Victor Witter Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1967), 93-111.

13 Ibid., 105.

14 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24.

15 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les Presse Du Reel,Franc, 1998), 162.

16 Ibid., 164.

17 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Autumn, 2004): 51-79.

18 Ibid., 70.

19 See Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2001).

20 Interestingly Bishop begins her latest publication Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, (London: Verso Books, 2012), with the following quote by Dan Graham: “All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more collaborative, and more real than art.”

21 Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 60.

22 Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Dan Graham. (K ln: K nig, 2012), 16. . 23 Alexander Alberro, ed., Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham On His Art (K ln: K nig, 2012), 197.

24 Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History, 73.

25 Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 51.

26 Ibid., 52.

27 Ibid., 52.

28 “Inhotim,” Tripadvisor, http://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g1747395-d1743976-Reviews-Inhotim- Brumadinho_State_of_Minas_Gerais.html, (accessed December 2, 2011).

29 Stephen Wallis, “Brazil's Art Gardens,” Departures, May - June 2010, http://www.departures.com/articles/brazils- art-gardens (accessed February 26, 2013).

30 The Palais was purpose built to house art for the Exposition International des Arts et Techniques in 1937 and designed by Dondel, Aubert, Viard and Dastugue. Since its inauguration the building has undergone major renovations at least 4 times. The renovations that took place in 2001-2 of which I speak within the body of the article, along with the latest renovation occurring in 2011-12, were designed by architectural firm Lacaton & Vassal.

31 See Stephen Wallis, "Brazil's Art Gardens."

32 Mac Margolis, “Garden of Dreams,” Newsweek International, September 24, 2012, available online at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/09/16/inhotim-bernardo-paz-s-botanical-eden-of-sculpture.html (accessed February 22, 2013).

33 Translated and quoted in Tom Phillips, “Brazilian Millionaire Builds Ambitious Contemporary Arts Park in the Hills,” Guardian, October 9, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/09/millionaire-contemporary-arts- park-brazil (accessed February 26, 2013).

Interestingly, upon bringing the connection between Disneyworld and Inhotim up to the Institute’s co-curator Rodrigo Moura in an interview with the author in March 2012, he seemed to reject the comparison and remarked on his desire to create a similar kind of marketability and brand-awareness for Inhotim.

34 Obrist, Dan Graham, 42.

35 Ibid. 72.

36Andrew Gellatly, “Dan Graham: Lisson Gallery,” Frieze 63 (November-December 2001), http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/dan_graham/ (accessed February 26, 2013).

37Mike Metz, "Dan Graham Interviewed by Mike Metz," Bomb, no. 46 (Winter 1994): 24-29.

38 Ken Johnson, “Art in Review: Dan Graham,” New York Times, April 14, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/14/arts/art-in-review-dan-graham.html (accessed February 26, 2013). Also of note in regards to the activation of the installation by children is the title of Graham’s 2001 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Zürich: “A Show for all the Children.”

39 Graham suggests that the reason the Pavilion remains unrealized was “perhaps because the notion of a recreational attraction intended primarily for teenagers was not thought to be a good idea.” Perhaps this serves as further evidence of the tenuous relationship between the realms of art and recreation which Graham hopes to bring together.

40 See Catherine Rau, “Psychological Notes On the Theory of Art as Play,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 8, no. 4 (June, 1950): 229-38.

41 For a set of definitions regarding the psychological functions of play and a discussion of the role of Microworlds created during adult and childhood play see Lloyd P. Reiber, “Seriously Considering Play: Designing Interactive Learning Environments Based On the Blending of Microworlds, Simulations, and Games,” Educational Technology Research and Development 44, no. 2 (1996): 43-58.

42 Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, 175.

43 Mac Margolis, “Garden of Dreams: Bernardo Paz is creating a botanical Eden of Sculpture”.

CHAPTER TWO

BETWEEN THE MIRROR AND SOLID GROUND

The previous chapter of this study detailed the communal experience that occurs within and around Dan Graham’s Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve. This chapter will question how the artist approaches the relationship between his Pavilion installations and their sites. The connection between Graham’s Pavilions and their locations is an intrinsic one. Not only are these installations explicitly designed to occupy a specific locale, but also literally reflect their environment on their mirrored surfaces. Thus, these Pavilions are construed as site-specific works. As I will explain in this chapter, Graham’s Pavilions belong to a larger category of works which harness the unique characteristics of a specific place to create meaning for those who encounter it. My goal is to insert Graham’s Pavilion installations into the history of site-specific art. I also aim understand how the artist continues to use his Pavilions to create meaning which derives, and in fact, is dependent on their relationships to their location. I will place Graham’s work within the parameters of site-specific practice. To do so, I will provide examples of Pavilions that can provide insight into how Graham incorporates the unique characteristics of a given site into the design of the work. This study of the relationship between the Pavilion and its site will echo the themes of the first chapter by stressing the viewer’s experience of the installation over the artist’s intent. While this chapter will make greater use of Graham’s own writings and those of the other artist’s involved, I will continue to emphasize the phenomenological and psychological ramifications of interaction with the installation. Graham’s Pavilion installations have received significantly less scholarly attention than his earlier video, conceptual, and performance pieces. Although Graham‘s production since the late 1970s has almost exclusively consisted of these Pavilions they have garnered little of the critical attention given to his earlier works. This may be in part due to the limited amount of the artist’s own writings concerning the Pavilions. And it may also be partly because they have only recently begun to be commissioned in larger numbers by both private and public collections in North America.1 More so, I believe the omission of these installations from critical discourse

30 stems from the implication that the Pavilions are logical, and perhaps derivative evolutions of his earlier video work.2 To understand how Graham’s Pavilions integrate their site into the visitor’s experience I will provide a historical model based on the work of Miwon Kwon. This model will guide this study towards a better understanding of the distinct modalities that characterize site-specific practice. According to Kwon, site-specific art can be divided into categories based on the aspects of the site (formal, social, or political) the work acknowledges or harnesses. I will contrast Graham’s Pavilions with the work of two artists who have become well-recognized for their unique approaches to site-specific art. I will introduce the sculptural work of Richard Serra, focusing specifically on his non-extant outdoor sculpture Tilted Arc (1981; fig. 3). By examining the relationship between this work and its environment, I seek to insert his work into the category of site-specific practice that prioritizes phenomenological concerns. I suggest that Serra’s site-specific works function by reframing and reorganizing existent visual space in an attempt to engineer unique phenomenological experiences for the viewer. Within the dynamic between the landscape and Serra’s steel sculptures formal concerns take precedence over more social or political ones. The second artist I will introduce into my model for site-specific practice is Thomas Hirschhorn. Hirschhorn’s installations embody the kind of site-specific practice that embraces the social and political ramifications of a site. I will examine Hirschhorn’s more recent temporary work Bataille Monument (2002; fig. 4) exhibited at Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany. This haphazardly constructed installation is demonstrative of Hirschhorn’s lack of concern for the visual dynamics that define Serra’s site-specific work. Although these artists belong to different generations and although their work shares little visual resemblance, the reception of both Serra and Hirschhorn’s pieces are dependent on the context provided by their environments. My goal here is not to suggest that these differing approaches to site-specific work inform Graham’s art. Nor is it to suggest that Hirschhorn’s socially-conscious work is ethically superior to Serra’s. Rather, I contrast the work of these artists in order to suggest ways in which Graham’s Pavilions represent a combination of these divergent methods. I argue that the site-specific Pavilions exhibit both the formal concerns of Serra’s work and the social goals of Hirschhorn’s. Furthermore, I suggest that the experience associated with Graham’s Pavilions can only be understood in consideration of both methods of interactions with its site.

This chapter will conclude with a recount of the history of Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve. I explore the relationship between the installation and its original site at Madison Square Park in New York. I then bring to light the conditions which made the removal of the installation from its original site possible. I then use this history to question Graham’s categorization of his Pavilions as site specific.

Defining the Site-Specific

To begin to explore how Graham’s Pavilions function as site-specific objects it is first necessary to engineer a working definition for the practice. Although the term “site-specific” may seem somewhat self-explanatory, upon examining the critical literature the term becomes somewhat more ambiguous. Perhaps installation-artist Daniel Buren expresses this semantic loss most eloquently when he declared that the term “has become hackneyed and meaningless through use and abuse.”3The term was originally used as a way to describe artworks that were situated in environments outside the gallery space. However the rubric steadily evolved into a way to categorize any artistic production which was designed to occupy a specific locale. Art historian Rosalind Krauss began to delineate the parameters of site-specific art in her oft-cited article “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” published in October in the Spring of 1979. Krauss details the considerations of an emerging practice that opposed the “idealist space” of the Modern gallery or museum.4 Moreover, she suggests that by the middle of the 1960s modernist sculpture had lost its ability to convey new meaning and had thus reached a point of semantic atrophy. She asserts that during this time sculpture entered “a categorical no-man’s land: it was what was on or in front of the building that was not the building, or what was in the landscape that was not the landscape.”5 Krauss uses the term “site construction” to describe works by artists such as Robert Smithson, Alice Aycock, and Michael Heiser, whose practice could not easily fall into within the critical rhetoric surrounding Modernist sculpture. For Krauss, the expanded field of the title refers to any setting for sculpture which existed outside the modern institutional spaces of the gallery or museum. However, Krauss is critical of the novelty associated with these practices as she suggests that the history of sculpture in the Western world has always lent itself to practice outside the distinctly modernist realm of the gallery.6 These site constructions, which were

32 specifically created for installation within the expanded field, are defined by an oppositional binary to both the landscape and architecture. In other words, the expanded field of sculpture refers to works that exist in the crossroads between the categories of sculpture, landscape, and architecture.7 By the late 1960s the category of art that Krauss describes, which at different times was variably labeled “Land Art,” “Earthworks,” ”Interventions” or “Locational Works,” erupted in the wake of the Minimalist art of the late 1960s.8 The move into what Krauss describes as the expanded field was precipitated by the work of artists such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris who questioned the role the environment played in the viewer’s experience with sculpture. The phenomenological concerns of the Minimalist artists centered on the capacity of their sculpture to reorient the viewer’s experience outwards to the location both viewer and object shared. This reorientation of attention towards the setting for the work would eventually lead artists to intervene into the landscape itself. In short, the Environmental or Land artists such as Robert Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim sought to unite the sculpture with the space. These artists not only used earth as their literal material, but saw their interventions onto the landscape as anti- institutional gestures which critiqued both the bureaucratic and conceptual limitations of the gallery. The works produced, most notably Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970; fig. 12), were usually massive objects which were integrated into the landscape, or site, itself. Clearly these kinds of artworks were site-specific in the most concrete sense: their material was comprised of the site itself. However, by the end of the twentieth century the use of the term had expanded far beyond Krauss’s original definition. The term “site-specific art” evolved from one that described work that incorporated sculpture, landscape, and architecture into one that served as an umbrella to describe any work that referenced either the physicality or social dynamic of its environment. As Erika Suderburg points out in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, by the late 1990s and 2000s, the term had come to describe “[a] seemingly inexhaustible number of objects, environments, landscapes, cityscapes, mindscapes, and interventions [which] could be filed under the terms site specific and installation.”9 Suderburg’s own loose definition of site-specific art: “artwork…reactive to its site, informed by the contents and materials of its actual location, whether they be industrially, ‘naturally,’ or conceptually produced” offers us no resolution to the ambiguity of the term.10

In his more recent book Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation art historian Nick Kaye provides us a more complex, yet no less opaque, description of the considerations of the practice of site-specific art. Kaye suggests that site-specific art be defined by utterances related to its “local position” or in other words “by the situation of which they are a part.” 11 I quote Kaye at length to preserve the complexity of his assertion: “Site-specific work might articulate and define itself through properties, qualities or meanings produced in specific relationships between an ‘object’ or ‘event’ and a position it occupies. After the ‘substantive’ notion of site, such site-specific work might even assert a ‘proper’ relationship with its location claiming an ‘original and fixed position’ associated with what it is.”12 Again, Kaye’s ambiguous, yet alarmingly decisive, language on the delineation of site-specific practice brings us no closer to providing a suitable understanding of the unique properties of site-specific art. The authors mentioned above are but a few who have tried to crystallize a definition of site-specific art. Unfortunately, I cannot offer any more concrete definitions of this ambiguous practice. However, I believe that by exploring two examples of work which can be classified as site-specific according to all the above descriptors, we can glean a working knowledge of the experience of site-specific art. In addition, by dividing the practice into two separate categories or veins of the practice we can better understand how Dan Graham’s Pavilions belong to the continuing history of these works.

Here vs. Now

The rhetoric surrounding site-specific practice was thrust into the public consciousness following the trial and resulting destruction of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc. The sculpture was installed in the Federal Plaza in New York City 1981 and removed in 1989 following a series of protests regarding its impact on the usability of the plaza.13 Facing the removal and, thus, what he considered destruction of this public work, Serra explained his understanding of site- specificity at the Public Hearing: Site-specific works deal with the environmental components of given places. The scale, size and location of site-specific works are determined by the topography of the site, whether it be urban, landscape or architectural enclosure. The works become part of the site, and restructures both

conceptually and perceptually the organization of the site…The specificity of site-oriented works means that they are conceived for, dependent upon and inseparable from their location.14

Serra’s explanation of site-specificity is telling in that in it he prioritizes the environmental and topographic components of a given site when designing a sculpture. The site itself represents a set of static visual registers into which he then inserts a rupture or intervention which, in turn, functions by drawing attention to the visual dynamic of the site. In Tilted Arc’s case, it would seem that the Federal Plaza represented a canvas onto which his sculpture intervened to alter the phenomenological experience of those who traverse the space. In his own words his sculpture “reveal[s] the structure and content and character of space and place by…the elements that I use.”15 Serra’s conception of site-specificity clearly stems from that of the Minimalist artists. As such, the sculptures function by framing the space that they occupy, drawing the viewer’s attention towards the environment they share with the object. However, the sculpture was not envisaged as merely a visual intervention in the space. Although inserting Tilted Arc into the “space and place” of the Federal Plaza altered the visual composition, what was more significant to Serra, and to those who wished to see the sculpture removed, was that it altered the behavior involved in traversing the space (fig. 13). According to Serra, although the visual landscape of the plaza was unquestionably altered by the sculpture, visual contemplation of the site would prove an unsatisfying experience for those who traversed it. In many ways the emergence of site-specific practice was viewed as an inherently anti- institutional development. Serra’s “intervention” into the urban fabric can be construed as a critical gesture by virtue of its extra-institutional location. Notwithstanding, Serra’s desire to create new phenomenological experiences in the Federal Plaza with Tilted Arc would hardly qualify as one which seeks to interact with or alter the social or political dynamic of the space. Later artists would continue to use the practice to make more poignant and directed attempts to alter the social dynamic of the sites into which they intervened. Although I will discuss the work of art historian Miwon Kwon more fully in the following chapter, I would like to turn to her analysis of the modes of site-specific art provided in her article One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity.16 I will use her classification of the modalities of the practice to classify the work of Serra in relation to that of later artists who

35 prioritized the social characteristics of place. The brand of interaction with site embodied in Serra’s Tilted Arc belongs to the category of site-specific work Kwon describes as “phenomenological site-specificity.” According to Kwon, phenomenological site-specificity is characterized by “physical inseparability between a work and its site of installation.”17 Within this category Kwon groups works which, like Serra’s, treat the site as a set of visual relationships that are altered or acted upon on by the art object. The artists practicing this brand of site- specificity are concerned with the immediacy of the visitor’s traversal of the physical environment. However, Kwon suggests that this vein of site specificity had long been in crisis by the time of Serra’s public hearing regarding the removal of Tilted Arc in 1984. According to Kwon the controversy surrounding Serra’s sculpture was symptomatic of the regression of site-specific art to the status of modernist sculpture. The chief complaint of those who wanted the sculpture removed was that it failed to integrate into the space and was thus disruptive of the behavior that occurred there. However, when considering Serra’s intention for his work it would seem that disruption was in fact the goal. For the sculpture’s detractors, the idea of site-specific art as critical intervention was antithetical to their conceptions of sculpture as decorative element to the urban visual experience. The controversy surrounding Tilted Arc brought the conflictive nature of site-specific art practices into the public consciousness and highlighted the artworks inability to function as a tool for social engagement. Critical theorist W.J.T. Mitchell also suggests that the removal of Tilted Arc functioned as “a signal that modernism [could] no longer mediate public and private spheres on its own terms, but submit itself to social negotiation.”18 Although Serra only tacitly acknowledged the disruptive potential of his work, many site- specific artists embraced the idea that the move into the expanded field was an anti-institutional gesture. The success of their works was predicated by a desire to “conceive of the site not only in physical and spatial terms but as a cultural framework defined by the institutions of art.”19 Thus, what Kwon terms “social/institutional site-specificity” came to define the practice during the late 1970s and 1980s. Artists such as Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren and Mel Bochner saw the site not in terms of its physical qualities, but in relation to the negative (non-site) or idealist space of the gallery or museum. According to Kwon these artists viewed “the seemingly benign architectural features of a gallery/museum…to be coded mechanisms that actively disassociate the space of art from the outer world, furthering the institution’s idealist imperative of rendering itself and its

36 hierarchization of values ‘objective,’ ‘disinterested,’ and ‘true.’”20 This later generation of site- specific artists focused their attention on the work’s potential to function as critique over other phenomenological or aesthetic concerns. However, site-specific practice would pivot once again. This time the move into public sites was no longer viewed as an anti-institutional gesture, but instead as a way to connect to the social issues which plagued the non-art world. Kwon labels the social push that occurred in the 1990s and continues into the 2000s as the emergence of a “discursive” branch of site specificity. This new, socially-aware branch of the practice would envision the site as a space into which artists could insert their work as a way to create a dialogue with “non-art spaces, non-art institutions, and non-art issues.”21 Kwon suggests the practice became “concerned to integrate art more directly into the realm of the social in order to redress (in an activist sense) urgent social problems such as the ecological crisis, homelessness, AIDS, homophobia, racism, and sexism.”22 In essence, the concept of site had evolved from the pure physicality of Serra’s work, to existing as an oppositional binary to the institutional space of the gallery or museum, and finally into the “real” social spaces and issues of lived experience. In a more literal sense, site now became synonymous with public space. In the article “Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy,” Rosalyn Deutsche explains the recent conflation of artistic interventions in public space with democratic ideals: When, for instance, art administrators and city officials formulate criteria for placing ‘art in public places,’ they routinely employ a vocabulary that invokes, albeit loosely, the tenets of both direct and representative democracy: Are the artworks for ‘the people?’ Do they encourage ‘participation?’ Do they serve their ‘constituencies?’ Public art terminology frequently promises a commitment not only to democracy as a form of government but to a general democratic spirit of equality as well: Do the works relinquish “elitism?”23 The term “site” now suggests places which provide the artist access to the actors and social issues his work would attempt to highlight or in many cases ameliorate. As Deutsche suggests, these site-specific projects “encouraged audiences to recognize that the social problems of the city, often considered extraneous to art, actually constitute some of the conditions of art’s current existence.”24Thus, the artist now assumes the role of a social worker. He sees his artwork as a

37 democratizing intervention into public space; the goal being to provide critical commentary and stimulate social good using his work. It is within this discursive or social framework that Thomas Hirschhorn’s work operates. In particular, his temporary work Bataille Monument highlights the artist’s conception of site as a public space which is intrinsically tied to a social consciousness. Envisaged as the third of a four-part series of site-specific installations, Bataille Monument was Hirschhorn’s response to an invitation to take part in Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany.25 Instead of housing his work at the official venue for the exhibition, the Fridericianum, Hirschhorn chose to create a work in the Friedrich Wöhler-complex in the northern, immigrant-class suburb of the city. The artist erected a series of improvised structures built of plywood, cardboard, tape and plastic sandwiched between groups of government housing (fig. 14). These structures housed a library, snack bar, TV studio, and public sculpture. The structures were built with labor supplied by the local residents, who were subsequently responsible for maintaining them. Once inside the simple architecturally scaled spaces, visitors were met with a dizzying array of literary and visual materials related to the French theorist Georges Bataille. The goals for the project are clearly laid out clearly by Hirschhorn in his notes for the project: The project is to make a Bataille Monument in the Kassel suburbs, with the local people living in Kassel. A precarious monument in the public space, accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, free for everyone. I want to make a mental plan of and about the work of Georges Bataille. I want to make a mental plan of the city of Kassel. I want to superpose these two plans and choose intersections, crossings between these two plans, where I can work out links. These links are artistic links. Links that come from the artist’s decisions. These links can create space for ideas, reflections, for positions, for questions. 26 I do not find it relevant to discuss how Bataille’s writings relate to the socio-political realities of the Turkish community of Kassel in this study. I believe what is of import of the project is the artist’s desire to create a community within the site chosen.27Judging by the artist’s notes, what he seeks to create is a ‘democratic’ space within the community to foment dialogue inspired by the material within the Monument. Clearly, Hirschhorn evinces little interest in either the aesthetic or physical characteristics of the site chosen. 28 Nor does he express interest in the work existing as a critique of the art fair itself, although it might be perceived as such. Art historian

Carlos Basualdo reinforces Hirschhorn’s commitment to the social ramifications of communal experience provided by the site: “It is the ‘form’ of a possible community that seems to interest Hirschhorn, a form not fixed once and for all, but open to the unforeseen… here it is less a question of sculptural forms than of forms of experience. The artifact that he constructs is created by assembling relationships between a diverse group of actors and situations.”29The artist’s motivation for choosing the site is founded in his desire to harness the social realities of the community to provide a beneficial service to its disadvantaged inhabitants. Up to this point I have tried to provide a set of variables with which to consider the evolving practice of site-specific artists. By contrasting Serra’s “phenomenological” approach to the practice with Hirschhorn’s more contemporary “discursively” driven practice I have shown how artists have manipulated the concept of site to carry out aesthetic, experiential, anti- institutional or social goals. As I now insert Graham’s Pavilion sculptures into this history it will become clear that these modalities are far from mutually exclusive and, more often than not, they overlap to create multivalent experiences of site-specificity.

Translated Sites

At the time of this writing there has been little scholarly attention given to the topic of the site-specific nature of Dan Graham’s Pavilion sculptures. This lack of research is surprising given Graham’s rise in popularity in the wake of the first retrospective organized by Bennet Simpson and Chrissie Iles at The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 2009.30 Also, the public nature of the Pavilion installations themselves begs for an analysis of the sites that these objects occupy. The few scholars, such as Beatriz Colomina, Alexandro Alberro, Alain Charre, and Brian Hatton, who have broached the subject fail to introduce the installations into the history of site-specific work. Instead most have chosen to trace a conceptual path direct from Minimalism to Graham’s current practice.31 While these authors often discuss the phenomenological relationship between the Pavilions and the visitor’s experience, they have yet to contextualize said experience in terms of the influence of the site. Graham himself has repeatedly clarified that his Pavilions are conceived of as site- specific sculptures. In a recent interview with Coline Milliard from ARTINFO UK, Graham reiterated the relationship between his work and its sites: “The realized projects are always site-

39 specific. I may have an idea that you see as a model, but actually is just sketches in a notebook. Then I see the site, and may modify the work to fit the site.”32 When discussing the relationship between specific Pavilions and their sites Graham’s explanation invariably turns to architectural history. In her essay “Beyond Pavilions: Architecture as a Machine to See” Beatriz Colomina provides a list of only some of the diverse set of Graham’s architectural inspirations: “Marc- Antoine Laugier’s mid-eighteenth-century essay on architecture, nineteenth-century park gazebos, national pavilions for the exhibition of commodities in international fairs, twentieth- century temporary pavilions built by modern architects for expositions and international fairs, and even bus stops and telephone booths.”33 Speaking of his work Octagon for Münster (1987; fig. 15), Graham himself relates a long series of architectural associations and typological models to describe how the shape of the sculpture relates to the history and appearance of the site. These include the mirrored surfaces of the classical baroque period, the “rustic hut” of romantic anti-urban ideology, music pavilions, nineteenth-century gazebos, the modern bank or administrative buildings’ facades, the arcadian parkscape and, finally, a fun-house.34 Octagon for Münster was commissioned as part of the exclusively site-specific exhibition “Skulptur Projekte” that took place in the summer of 1987 in public sites around the city. The site for Graham’s Pavilion was a public park which was surrounded by the “eighteenth-century palace of the ruling king.”35 According to Graham, the shape of the Pavilion echoes the shape and role of the garden pavilions that would have existed “when the park was still classical.”36 Speaking of the project again in an interview with Mike Metz he stated: “I was trying to coalesce different time periods.”37 Thus, the shape of the Pavilion is meant to anchor it to the structures long gone from the park by way of contemporary interpretation. The authors who have analyzed Graham’s Pavilions often mimic the artist by invoking the architectural history of the site as the activator of site-specificity. While I find that considering Graham’s installations as architecture is useful in understanding the functionality of the work, I argue that this approach may lead to an unsatisfactory examination of the relationship between the Pavilions and their site. I suggest a reading of the Pavilions that deemphasizes the architectural history of the site. I wish to exclude these architectural associations because although they serve as Graham’s inspiration, I believe they may be lost on the visitor.38 In light of this, I believe it more fruitful to consider the relationship to site in terms of the categories of

40 site-specificity described by Kwon, namely the phenomenological/discursive dialectic exemplified by the work of Serra and Hirschhorn. Turning now to Graham’s installation Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon: Rooftop Urban Park Project for Dia Center for the Arts (1991; fig. 16), I hope to make evident the connections between Serra’s sculpture and Graham’s installation. The large- scale glass-and-steel pavilion was installed atop the Dia Center of New York. It consisted of a square boardwalk bordered by semi-translucent, mirrored glass and a steel wall within which was a smaller circular wall comprised of the same mirrored glass. The cylinder was meant to echo the shape of the water tower situated above the sculpture and was designed to precisely mirror the tower’s circumference. The site-specific structure was envisioned by Graham as a way to bring museum visitors onto the previously unused rooftop and to exhibit his work within a more socially dynamic context. He writes of the project: “The interior spaces of the DIA building had previously been used as meditative and ‘ideal’ exhibition spaces for ‘great’ artworks or installations…My work necessitates a large public audience aware of each other’s, as well as their own, gazes at the artwork under continually altering outdoor solar and sky conditions.”39 What is important here is his consideration of the way the visual appearance of the installation will respond to its changing environment. However, the environment refers not only to the climatic effects but also to the installation’s relationship to its elevated rooftop position. According to the Dia Center’s press release regarding the project, Graham’s Pavilion “integrates aesthetic and utilitarian functions, and visual experiences, bringing the cityscape into the roof and extending the roof into the cityscape.”40 Thinking back to the language surrounding the function of Serra’s Tilted Arc, similarities become clear. Again, Serra’s sculpture “reveal[s] the structure and content and character of space and place by…the elements that [he] use[s].” Is the goal of Graham’s Dia Pavilion not the same? Both Rooftop Urban Park Project and Tilted Arc were designed to alter both the appearance and the use of the existing space to draw the viewer’s attention to the larger urban cityscape and the way it was traversed. Thus, the similar approach taken by both Graham and Serra can be classified within Kwon’s “phenomenological site specificity.” This similarity aside, the relationship between Rooftop Urban Park Project and its environment can also be analyzed according to the considerations of “discursive site specificity” and Thomas Hirschhorn’s work. Recall that what was of interest to Hirschhorn in creating

Monument to Bataille was the creation of a democratic space suitable for social interactions. The creation of the structure would provide an arena in which dialogue was fostered, and, eventually would aid the underprivileged community, in some unspecified way, by exposing them to the writings of Georges Bataille. Although Graham’s Pavilions may not seek to exploit a certain subset of the population of the site it is installed in, it shares the common goal with Hirschhorn’s Monument of creating an urban space which fosters communal relationships. As detailed in the first chapter of this study, Graham’s ultimate goal with these Pavilions is to create intersubjective meetings mediated by the disconcerting phenomenological effects produced by the mirrored glass. In turn, this democratizing experience produces positive social effects. Graham writes of his desire to create social relationships at the Dia center: “The total work is an open-air, rooftop performance space, observatory/camera obscura/optical device/video and coffee bar/lounge, with other multi-use possibilities. [It] requires a large, socially self-aware public audience.”41 Thus it becomes clear that with his Pavilions Graham is providing a democratic space for use by the community much in the same way that Hirschhorn’s monument functioned as a library, snack bar, TV studio, and lounge. Both these artists envision themselves as providing a service beneficial to the site. As I have suggested above, the Pavilion’s relationship to site does not prioritize one reading over the other. In this light, I argue that Graham’s Pavilions serve as a bridge between the phenomenological and discursive branches of site-specific practice. The Pavilions are designed for two functions: as experiences which reflect and attenuate the aesthetic of their sites and also as socially-enabling interventions that react to the needs of the communities into which they are inserted. How does this multivalent reading help us to understand how Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve relates to its site at Inhotim? How does the work’s triangular form relate to the organic forms of the lush tropical gardens at Inhotim? What list of architectural associations does Graham invoke when describing the history of the location? Answering these questions becomes problematic when considering the history of Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve. In the summer of 2002, the New York Public Art Fund commissioned a series of public works by well-recognized artists, including Nam Jun Paik, Norman Ballard, and Mark Dion.42 Known as The Target Art in the Park series, the works were part of a three-year initiative to punctuate the New York metropolitan area with site-specific works available to the public.

According to The New York Times the “highlight of the show, and one of the smartest, subtlest sculptures of the summer” was Dan Graham’s Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve installed in Madison Square Park between 23rd and 25th Streets (fig. 17). Although no texts by Graham have surfaced that discuss why he chose this shape to complement this specific site, the press release for the project provides clues to a possible connection. According to the press release, the Pavilion “will be [Graham’s] first work for a New York City public park. Situated at the northwest end of Madison Square Park, Graham’s pavilion will be a triangular form that integrates into the wedge-shaped geometry of the nineteenth-century park.”43 The Pavilion was installed at the park and was there for a period of three months, after which it was removed. Based on information provided by a representative of the Lisson Gallery, Graham’s gallery for over twenty years, the installation was bought by Inhotim’s founder Bernardo Paz following the conclusion of its exhibition at Madison Square Park and was immediately sent to Inhotim.. The gallery itself was not involved in the purchase and thus the transaction was overseen solely by Graham’s studio. However, at the time of the sale, Inhotim was not the public museum which exists today but, instead functioned as Paz’s private summer cottage. According to Inhotim, it was one of the first installations Paz purchased for the park.44 Given Graham’s assertion that all his realized projects are site-specific and that he does not produce multiples of each distinct design, we are left asking why Graham allowed for the relocation of his work to Inhotim?45 Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve was not commissioned by Paz, and thus was not created to respond to the environment in which it was installed. Instead, it was relocated to Inhotim. If Graham prioritized the public accessibility of his Pavilions then how would its environment at a remote private summer villa do justice to the work? Moreover, if the connection between the Pavilion and its environment is so weak, then why suggest that the Pavilions are in fact site-specific?46 One explanation for the relocation is brought to light in an article by Josh Thorpe. In it, the author describes his attempt to organize a worldwide tour of all of Graham’s Pavilions. According to Thorpe “Graham himself wasn’t sure of the status of certain works or, since it had been a while in some cases, how to find some of them.”47 Although ignorance hardly constitutes a defense on Graham’s part, I believe the relocation of the installation brings to light some of the idiosyncrasies of the unique project taking place at Inhotim. The third chapter of this study will discuss how Inhotim complicates the practice of

43 site-specific art in relation to the themes and modalities explained in this second chapter and will address the problematic nature of Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve’s site.

1 Graham’s Pavilions, and in fact most of his work, has found more viewership and collector’s in the European market. The artist states that to this date the majority of his private collectors can be found in Germany and that most of his public commissions have come from Europe. See his comments in Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Dan Graham, (K ln: K nig, 2012), 16-7.

2 Many authors, including Beatriz Colomina and Alexander Alberro, view Graham’s Pavilions as objects which achieve the same conceptual goals as Graham’s earlier video installations and performance pieces. See Colomina, “Double Expore: Alteration to a Suburban House,” and Alberro, “Specters of Utopia,” both published in Alex Kitnick, ed., Dan Graham: October Files. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

3 See Erika Suderberg, ed., Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 3.

4 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring, 1979): 30-44.

5 Ibid., 36.

6 Krauss suggests the need for a term to describe this kind of work is a distinctly Post-modern phenomenon. All sculpture prior to the emergence of the gallery system was, in fact, site-specific. It is only in the period following Modernism that this reversion back to site-specificity must be posited in relation to the move into the gallery. Also see, James Meyer, “The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificity” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, 23-37.

7 Krauss uses a semiotic argument to discuss the relationship between landscape, architecture and sculpture. To illustrate her argument she uses of a Klein group diagram, a logic structure involved in mapping operations within the human sciences. The diagram is reproduced on pg. 37 of “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.”

8 See Brian Wallis, “Survey,” in, Land and Environmental Art, Jeffrey Kastner, ed (London: Phaidon, 1998) for a more complete explication of these terms.

9 Suderberg, Space, Site, Intervention, 3-4.

10 Ibid., 4.

11 The author’s emphasis is maintained here. Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 1.

12Ibid.

13 The sculpture was commissioned in 1979 and built in 1981, but it wasn’t actually removed from the site until 1989.

14 Quoted in Harriet F. Senie, The Tilted Arc Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 80.

15 Quoted in Lynee Cooke, “Thinking on Your Feet: Richard Serra’s Sculpture in Landscape,” in Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years, ed. Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 84. 16 Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October, 80 (Spring, 1997): 85-110

17 Ibid., 87.

18 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Introduction: Utopia and Critique,” in Art and the Public Sphere, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University Press, 1992) 4.

19 Ibid.

20 Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” 88.

21 Ibid., 89

22 Ibid., 91.

23 Rosalyn Deutsche, “Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy,” Social Text 33 (1992): 34.

24 Ibid., 42.

25 Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument was preceded by Spinoza Monument. The installation was exhibited Amsterdam in 1999 and was followed by Deleuze Monument, installed in Avignon in 2000. The series will conclude in the summer of 2013 with Gramsci Monument, which is to be installed in a New York housing project.

26 Reproduced in Carlos Basualdo, “Bataille Monument, Documenta 11, 2002,” in Thomas Hirschhorn (London and New York; Phaidon, 2004), 97-109.

27 For a more complete exploration of Hirschhorn’s use of the writings of George Bataille see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “An Interview with Thomas Hirschhorn,” October, 113 (Summer, 2005): 77-100.

28 For a discussion of the style of Hirschhorn’s sculpture as an anti-aesthetic see either Benjamin H.D. Buchloh “Detritus and Decrepitude: The Sculpture of Thomas Hirschhorn,” Oxford Art Journal, 24.2 (2002): 41-56 or Simon Sheikh, “Planes of immanence, or The form of ideas: Notes on the (anti-)monuments of Thomas Hirschhorn,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry 9 (Spring/Summer 2004): 90-8.

29 Basualdo, “Bataille Monument,” 100.

30 “Dan Graham: Beyond” travelled from the MOCA in Los Angeles to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and finally to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2009-10. The exhibition was received positive reviews from both The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. See the accompanying exhibition catalogue for more information, Dan Graham: Beyond (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009)

31 Allain Charre’s text provides a good example of this tendency to associate Dan Graham directly with the history of Minimalism. See “Dan Graham’s Unplaceable Architecture,” trans. Brian Holmes, in Alain Charre, Marie-Paul Macdonald and Marc Perelman, Dan Graham, (Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1995), 5-27.

32 Coline Milliard, “'I Don't Do Pavilions': Dan Graham Sets the Record Straight,” ARTINFO UK, March 20, 2012, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/779438/i-dont-do-pavilions-dan-graham-sets-the-record-straight (accessed February 26, 2013).

33 Beatriz Colomina, “Beyond Pavilions: Architecture as a Machine to See,” in Dan Graham: Beyond, 203.

34 Ibid., 205.

35 Dan Graham, “Garden as Theater as Museum” (1989) in Dan Graham: Beyond, 238.

36 Ibid.

37 Mike Metz, “Dan Graham,” Bomb, 46 (Winter, 1994): 28. 45

38 As I explored in the first chapter of this study, I believe that Graham’s installations are working on a more basic sensorial level, which in turn activate a period of social play for the visitor. I believe that this understanding of the experience is the one that prevails over other authors suggestions, namely in that the Pavilions activate associations with complex, obscure, yet invisible architectural histories.

39 Quoted in Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge: MIT Press), 166.

40 See New York Public Art Fund, “Dan Graham: Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve,” Public Art Fund Target Art in the Park Press Release (June, 2002). The shape of the cylinder in the middle of the structure precisely matches the circumference that of the overhead water tower also on the roof and visible to viewers.

41 Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power, 165.

42 See Holland Cotter, “Rain or Shine, Residing Outdoors,” New York Times, August 9, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/09/arts/art-review-rain-or-shine-residing-outdoors.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm (accessed February 26, 2013).

43 New York Public Art Fund, “Dan Graham: Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve,” Public Art Fund Target Art in the Park Press Release (June, 2002)

44 Information obtained via email exchange with Alex Logsdail, Associate Director, Lisson Gallery on July 16th, 2012 and Ines Grosso, Curatorial Assistant, Inhotim on September 9, 2012.

45 Graham asserts “I don’t make multiples, only variations.” See Dan Graham’s lecture “Dan Graham: Pavilions,” Glasgow School of Art. Glasgow, Scotland, October 16, 2006. Available at http://www.gsa.ac.uk/life/gsa- events/events/dan-graham/.

46 In an interesting side-note, Serra maintains that once Tilted Arc was removed from the Federal Plaza and put into storage, the sculpture should never again be erected in any location other than the Federal Plaza and forbids its public viewing. See Christina Michalos, "Murdering Art: Destruction of Art Works and Artists' Moral Rights," in The Trials of Art, ed. Daniel McClean (London: Ridinghouse, 2007), 180.

47 Josh Thorpe, “Searching for Dan Graham: A Global Tour of the American Artist’s Enigmatic Pavilions,” Canadian Art 27 (Spring 2010): 88.

CHAPTER THREE

EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE

Inhotim co-curator Jochen Volz begins the introductory essay to Inhotim’s catalog with a poignant rhetorical question: “Where is Inhotim?”1 In the most literal sense, Inhotim is located in Brazil’s rural countryside, bordering the town of Brumadinho and sixty kilometers away from Brazil’s third largest city, Belo Horizonte, in the state of Minas Gerais. However, Volz’s question cannot be properly answered in terms of simple geographies. To respond to it fully requires consideration of the cultural, social, economic and historical “locations” that together define the Inhotim. Thus, the “where” of Volz’s question brings to light some of the most pressing questions shaping site-specific artistic practices in the twenty-first century. To respond to Volz’s question a second question may be necessary: Where is Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve? As I asserted in the previous chapter, the reinstallation of Dan Graham’s installation Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve at Inhotim brings to light problematic questions. Notably, the transfer challenges the categorizing of Graham’s art as site specific. The wholesale relocation of the installation from Madison Square Park to Inhotim throws into question the intrinsic relationship Graham claims exists between his Pavilions and their sites. The goal of this chapter is to explore how Graham’s displaced Pavilion functions in relation to its site at Inhotim. To accomplish this goal it is necessary to provide a fuller understanding of the characteristics of the site. I will recount how Inhotim evolved from the private country house of Brazilian mining magnate Bernardo Paz into the public institution that exists there today. Once I have set up Inhotim’s historical background I will then suggest how this history informs the relationship between Graham’s Pavilion and its site. I will reintroduce Miwon Kwon’s categories of site-specific practice as detailed in the previous chapter. I will first describe how Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve functions within the phenomenological framework informed by its lush garden environment. I then will explore the social or “discursive” dynamic of Inhotim, focusing specifically on the institute’s relationship to the neighboring community of Brumadinho.

Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve is but one part of a larger curatorial program at Inhotim. The focus of this chapter will be the large, outdoor, site-specific installations which comprise the majority of the institute’s collection. The systematic acquisition and relocation of site-specific works to Inhotim is possible because of recent developments in site-specific practice. Specifically, I argue that Inhotim benefits from what Miwon Kwon’s labels the “unhinging” of the practice. I will explain how this new fluid interpretation of site specificity manifests at the museum. I will then question how Inhotim can function as a site designed for the exhibition of site-specific art. To do so I will consider Inhotim as one unified experience. In essence, I will treat Inhotim as one large installation set within the rural countryside of Brazil. Finally, I will end this study by examining how Inhotim functions in relation to the global field of contemporary art exhibitions. Inhotim is both literally and metaphorically isolated from the traditional loci of the contemporary art world. However, I argue that its existence highlights a new globalized and decentered curatorial practice. I argue that, with Inhotim, Bernardo Paz seeks to blur the lines that divide the center from periphery of the art world.

Collecting the Uncollectable

The history of Inhotim is intrinsically tied to that of its founder, Bernardo Paz (1949-; fig. 18). It is the Brazilian industrialist’s vision, and substantial wealth, that underlie the trajectory of the museum and botanical garden. The “Emperor of Inhotim” is often portrayed as wild-eyed eccentric, an “art world Fitzcarraldo” bent on building a self-indulgent paradise for art.2 A reporter from Frieze suggested the “whole idea of a billionaire’s collection of vastly expensive art works housed in a remote Brazilian location--could be straight out of a James Bond film.”3 Paz’s life has become a matter of public interest and his personal life is often recounted within the pages of Brazilian tabloids. However, for this study the importance of Paz’s history is how it informs the collecting and exhibition policies of the museum. The museum’s program and goals are undeniably bound to Paz’s history. A series of developments, both professional and personal, coalesced to create the unique site-specific art driven exhibition program at Inhotim. The history of Inhotim must begin with a recount of Paz’s professional success, as it is his vast wealth that has granted him the capacity to embark on as bold a project as Inhotim. Paz began his career pumping gas at filling stations owned by his father. After dropping out of high

48 school he worked for a short stint at the Belo Horizonte stock exchange. He then transitioned into mining, buying smaller companies from the area surrounding Belo Horizonte and bundling them together to later sell them off at a profit. In 1973 Paz joined Itaminas, Brazil’s largest mining company and by the late 1970s and 80s Paz was considered one of the country’s most influential businessmen.4 Paz would eventually own thirty-nine different corporations by the late 1990s including Itaminas. His career as a mining impresario culminated in 2010 with the sale of Itaminas to Chinese mining consortium ECE for 1.2 billion USD. It is estimated that Paz’s diverse corporations contribute between 70 and 90 million dollars per year to maintain and expand Inhotim. This amount is in addition to the 240 million he is estimated to have spent to develop the land and build the museum’s structures. The cost of buying or commissioning the works presented at Inhotim is not made public. 5 Paz’s history as a contemporary art collector began in 1998 with his purchase of a work by Brazilian installation artist Tunga. However, before this purchase Paz had sporadically acquired works of Brazilian modernist painters. It is unclear what pieces comprised the collection or whether he bought these works or if the majority of them were passed down to him from his parent’s collection.6 This notwithstanding, the collection was mainly housed at a modest summer cottage in the rural countryside near Brumadinho. Originally, the land was the site of a small farm owned by a man known to locals as “Mr. Tim.”7 The institution’s name, Inhotim, is a combination of the colloquial term for Mister ‘Ino-’, derived from ‘senhor’, and the farmer’s name, Tim. Paz purchased the land during the early 1980s to use as a weekend retreat. Although the land is some distance away from the city of Belo Horizonte, it is found immediately adjacent to the iron-ore mines that funded Paz’s business ventures. In fact, the name of the state within which Inhotim is located, Minas Gerais, translates to English as ‘General Mines’. Throughout the decade Paz would continue to purchase land near the mining towns of Brumadinho and Salzedo. By the late 1990s Paz had expanded the retreat from its original size of three thousand acres into its present-day area of over five thousand acres. The decision to convert the land surrounding the retreat from farming land to botanical gardens was primarily inspired by Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx (1919- 1994). Although Burle Marx was never officially hired by Paz to design Inhotim, he was a close friend of Paz and made several visits as a guest to Inhotim during the 1980s and 90s. Originally, the official architect of Inhotim’s gardens was Pedro Nehring César (a follower of Burle Marx).

In 1993 a third landscape architect, Luis Carlos Orsini, joined the project. However, Paz rarely, if ever, mentions Cesar or Orsini when asked of Inhotim’s design. 8 Instead, Burle Marx is the figure most often credited with providing Paz with the impetus to consider a botanical garden as an artistic endeavor. Burle Marx is considered one of the most significant landscape architects of the twentieth century and is hailed for providing the “trademark” for Brazilian landscape design.9 According to Inhotim curator Rodrigo Moura, Paz was drawn to the Burle Marx’s suggestion that Inhotim should represent the most fluid integration of art and landscape.10 Burle Marx’s philosophies would become especially prescient when Paz shifted his interest from collecting modern art to installation art during the late 1990s. During this time Paz sold the entirety of his collection of Brazilian modernism. He did so to refocus his efforts on collecting works that he believed, or was told to believe, “criticize and destroy society in order to create a better society.”11 Paz’s transition from collector of Modern art to collector of Contemporary art is important in that it set the direction for the public institution that is the focus of this study. I suggest that Paz’s decision to become a collector of Installation art was precipitated by two developments, one personal and one economic. The first and perhaps most transparent development was his involvement with an influential generation of Brazilian artists in the late 1990s. Paz began to associate with a circle of artists that included Cildo Meireles, Tunga, Miguel Rio Branco and Lygia Clark, amongst others. This group of artists were instrumental in the development of installation art practices during the 1960s and 1970s and were collectively labeled Neo-concretists.12 The Neo-concretists created works that challenged the viewer’s ability to perceive an object in its physical entirety by creating immersive built-environments that consisted of both sculptural and architectural elements. These artists were heavily influenced by the phenomenological theories of Merleau-Ponty which were manifested in their desire to force the viewer to move in and around the objects they exhibited. While the group adopted the conceptual framework of Minimalism, their uniquely Brazilian aesthetic sought to conflate the gallery space with favelas and the verdant landscape of Brazil. According to Claire Bishop works such as Meireles’ Red Shift (1984; fig. 19) “prompted heightened sensory perception as a direct stimulus for psychological exploration.”13 Paz was introduced to these artists by Rio de Janeiro- based curator and gallery owner Ricardo Sardenburg. Sardenburg operated first as an independent advisor and then through his gallery, Galeria Vermelho. The curator subsequently became a decisive figure in Brazil’s effort to bring the work of some of the most important

50 contemporary artists to Brazil. Paz was undoubtedly further influenced to collect installation art by his then wife, installation-artist Adriana Varejaõ. He eventually built a striking pavilion at the museum that is solely dedicated to the exhibition of her work. The importance of the personal relationship between Paz and Brazilian artists, such as Tunga and Meireles, is repeatedly emphasized in the literature regarding Inhotim. Tunga’s True Rouge (1997) was not only the first piece of installation art Paz would acquire, but it would be the first piece for which he would construct a dedicated pavilion at Inhotim. To date there have been no other authors who have investigated the influence of economic factors on the development of Inhotim’s curatorial program. In this light I propose a second, and perhaps more opaque, development that may have caused the shift Paz’s collecting behavior. In 2000 Brazilian tax laws regarding the importation of artworks changed drastically. The importation of artworks, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, etchings, tapestries, ceramics and photographs became subject to a tax of between 30 and 50 percent depending on the object’s final destination within Brazil. 14 The tax has proved prohibitive to the Brazilian contemporary art market; so much so that the organizers of the 2012 editions of SP-Art and ArtRio art fairs successfully lobbied for the government to cut the tax during the run of the fairs.15 However, these laws stipulate that the object must be “executados à mão pelo artista” or made by hand by the artist in order to be taxed as art.16 The stipulation that the objects must be made by hand in order to be taxed as artworks would seem to preclude the vast majority of large- scale installation works. This is because these works are often produced by a team of engineers and laborers and never actually manipulated by the artist. Moreover, by commissioning works to be produced or re-produced specifically for Inhotim, Paz would have avoided these taxes. Paz’s collecting responded immediately to the changing tax laws. It was during the period from 2001 to 2005 that Paz added the works of internationally-recognized artists such as Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson and Rikrit Tiravanija to his collection of works by Brazilian artists. However few, if any, of the works of these prominent artists held in the collection are objects which are directly fashioned by the hands of their respective artists. Often, such as in the case with the three artists mentioned above, the materials of the pieces in the collection are widely available or industrial in nature. Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet (2001; fig. 20) consists of forty commercially-available speakers on tripods, while Tiravanija’s outdoor structure, Palm Pavilion (2006), is made of corrugated tin and wood.17 Thus, the works collected in this early

51 period could either be produced on site with material purchased in Brazil, or could have been imported as goods not categorized as artworks. In a brief article from 2010 concerning the rise in popularity of Latin American Art amongst collectors, Georgina Adam confirms that site-specific commissions do not attract the duties levied on other artworks.18Although Paz’s wealth was quite vast, the opportunity to collect works which weren’t subject to the price hike would have proven quite attractive.19 In a recent interview in Veja magazine, Paz confirmed my assertion that the type of collection program at Inhotim allowed him to skirt the taxes. Speaking of the commissions he requested from foreign artists during the early period of Inhotim he stated “This format is more interesting because I produce the work under the supervision of the artist. If I were to import it, for example from a gallery, the taxes would be absurd.”20 It was during this period that Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve entered the collection at Inhotim. I suggest that the architectural materiality of the installation, consisting entirely of glass and steel, would have allowed Paz to import the work in pieces and reconstruct it on-site. Rebuilding or assembling it on-site would have exempted the installation from the 50 percent tax. Paz’s decision to shift Inhotim’s focus from private collection to public institution would have also spared him from the heavy taxes. When Inhotim became a public institution in 2005, ownership of the works ceased to be held by Paz but instead become property of the administratively and financially independent legal entity CACI or Centro de Arte y Cultura Inhotim. Because CACI is categorized as a cultural and nonprofit venture, any artwork purchased to be exhibited there is exempt from taxation. My goal here is not to suggest that Paz’s decision to collect large-scale installation work was motivated only by financial concerns. I believe it was a convergence of factors that led Paz to create the first and only museum in the world able to house works of this nature. However, I believe that these developments involving Paz set the tone for the collecting and exhibition strategies that continue to inform the museological process at Inhotim. In September 2004 Paz opened the doors to Inhotim to a select group of art collectors bussed from the 26th Bienal de Sao Paolo. By this time Paz’s weekend retreat housed three buildings devoted to the exhibition of works by Tunga and Meireles, as well as numerous sculptures placed throughout the manicured botanical gardens. According to Volz, it was during this event that “Paz’s initiative first articulated its ambition to operate as a meaningful element within the cultural life of the state of Minas Gerais, of Brazil, and beyond.” In 2004, a trio of international curators—Allan

Schwartman, Jochem Volz, and Rodrigo Moura, were brought in to refocus the institution towards public exhibition. Paz’s decision to shift curatorial duties from Brazilian Ricardo Sardenburg to the international trio signaled his desire for Inhotim to perform as a global destination. In a further attempt to “bridge the gap between art and nature” an independent department of environmental studies and botany was created in 2005.21 In September of that year the museum opened to public visits by appointment. By 2006 it benefited from six exhibition pavilions, three artificial lakes, a restaurant, and a café. In 2007 Inhotim officially opened to the general public and more than 130,000 visitors patronized it that year. By 2012 the number of exhibition pavilions had ballooned to twenty one and it hosted more than 300,000 guests. The museum complex occupies only two hundred and fifty of the five thousand acres Paz owns in the area. Inhotim now offers six restaurants, a theater, a nursery, and a gift shop. Inhotim will soon offer a variety of hotels, a spa, and its own airport. As I have recounted, Paz benefits from both financial resources and personal relationships that have allowed him to create a space with the specific function of housing works that could previously only be shown temporarily. Inhotim was not purchased with this function in mind but rather Paz developed it to meet this need. It continues to rapidly evolve in order to expand the visitor’s experience. While I will return to this assertion, I would now like to turn my attention toward the relationship between Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve and its unique environment at Inhotim. In considering the history of the site in relation to the experience of Graham’s installation I believe we can begin to tease out how Paz’s vision for the site has informed the way site-specific art is experienced.

Machines to See

In the book New Brazilian Gardens: The Legacy of Burle Marx author Roberto Silva describes the garden environment at Inhotim as “a tropical paradise where sculptures are placed in ideal settings, giving the impression that they have spontaneously arisen there.”22 Fietta Jarque echoes Silva’s assertion in a travel report from the Spanish newspaper El Pais when she suggests that art at Inhotim “exists in its most primal and raw form.”23 Inhotim curator Volz claims Inhotim “has been shaped to create the ideal environment for the presentation of art.”24 We are left to wonder what these authors are alluding to when they describe Inhotim as the “ideal

53 setting” for the experience of contemporary art. This concept of an ideal setting for art may derive, perhaps, from the anti-institutional critiques assailed at white-walled museums or galleries by site-specific artists of the 1960s and 70s. However, I believe that in the case of Inhotim these authors in fact are drawing attention to the influence the manicured botanical gardens have on the visitor’s reception of art. The scale of the vast botanical gardens that comprise the majority of Inhotim’s five thousand acres is awe-inspiring and difficult for visitors to comprehend as they traverse them. Inhotim houses over 4700 species of plants and boasts of the largest collection of large palms in the world. The botanical program not only consists of the actual plants and flowers that decorate the park, but research and controlled horticultural experiments. The botanical project at Inhotim sits on an equal footing, in terms of dedication and the expenditure of resources with the contemporary art program. Paz highlighted his own preference for the botanical program at Inhotim in an interview with Simon Romero from the New York Times: “There are works of art here which I haven’t entered yet, which everyone told me were spectacular, but why should I go there? I don’t consider myself passionate for art. But gardens, that’s what I like.”25 Paz’s preference for the botanical aspects of Inhotim is echoed by the majority of visitors. In exit surveys administered by the Public Relations Department, approximately 80 percent of visitors responded that they either came to Inhotim to enjoy the gardens or preferred the experience of the gardens over that of the artwork.26 Clearly the reception of the artwork at Inhotim is heavily influenced by the landscape design. This is not to suggest that the works at Inhotim must compete for the visitor’s attention. Instead it is the job of Inhotim’s curators to commission or obtain works that can successfully integrate with the overwhelming botanical presence. Inhotim co-curator Allan Schwartzman poetically expresses these curatorial goals when creating a relationship between art and nature: We can respond not only to the issues of culture, but to the world, or to a desire to be removed from it, to the sounds of the wind through the trees, the micro experience of the shape of a leaf and a macro awareness of the earth as an organism. Here is the place so removed from modern experience of culture, we can focus, refocus and contextualize art to perceive it differently, to create a place where the natural and the constructed, and the indigenous and invented cohabit, fuse and sometimes switch places.27

At this point I would like to propose a theory to suggest how Graham’s Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve functions in relation to its garden environment. The majority of Graham’s Pavilions are installed in public gardens or parks and are in fact designed for such spaces. However, as I will show, the environment at Inhotim is markedly different from urban garden spaces such as Madison Square Park for which the Pavilion was designed. The location of the Pavilion within Inhotim is quite dissimilar to the lawn-like open field at its original site. The vast and isolated gardens of Inhotim are markedly more fecund than those of the urban park. Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve is perched on the edge of one of Inhotim’s large artificial lakes, adjacent to a lush green rolling hill and an allée of palm trees (fig. 21). To reach the Pavilion visitors must leave the main pathway leading from the entrance of the park and descend a small embankment leading to a lakeside trail on which the installation is located. The lake is bordered by a medley of ferns, shrubs and stately palms. Helio Oiticia’s Penetrável Magic Square #5, a large installation consisting of juxtaposed brightly-colored walls, sits directly across the lake from the Pavilion. The panoramic vistas available to viewers from the vantage point of Graham’s Pavilion are striking in their expansive beauty. However, it is not necessary for the viewer to gaze upon this vista directly. The mirrored exterior walls of the Pavilion faithfully reproduce the scene. For Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve’s entry in Inhotim’s catalog Lisette Lagnado writes: Inside Inhotim’s tropical forest, the transparency of curved glass makes it possible to extend a virtual corner on the grass. A peacock stands guard, elegantly circling the pavilion that returns his image, while the view from the inside extends to swans and ducks that are at one with the lake. It is a place fit to watch through a lens curved by a minute, albeit perceptible degree or artificiality: one sees through, and is thus forced to remember that what is outside oneself immediately belongs to the subjective realm.28 The mirrored walls of the Pavilion create a dual effect: they both flatten and frame the reflection of the panorama and also allow the viewer to view their own bodies in relation to it. These phenomenological effects are however, not without historical precedent. In fact, the mirror plays a pivotal role in the development of visual techniques related to the touristic consumption of the picturesque.

John Dixon Hunt explores the relationship between the mirror and touristic experiences of nineteenth century gardens in the chapter titled “Picturesque Mirrors and the Ruins of the Past,” of his book Gardens and the Picturesque.29 Hunt describes the importance of the Claude Glass (fig. 22) to the visual consumption of the landscape. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tourists and artists utilized small ovoidal or rectangular pocket mirrors to view natural landscapes. The small mirrors were used translate the realist landscape they viewed into illusionist pictorial space. In other words, by peering “through” the glass at the reflection of the landscape behind them, tourists and artists were able to flatten and condense the landscape into a form that could be more easily perceived. According to Hunt, the use of the mirror “concentrated for its owner all the picturesque possibilities.”30 Writing of a walking tour in 1775, Thomas Gray details his experience with the Claude Glass: “The gloom of these ancient cells, the shade and verdure of the landscape, the glittering and murmur of the stream, the lofty towers and long perspectives…detain’d me for many hours, and were the truest subjects for my glass I have yet met with”31 Thus, the optical device focused the landscape for the viewer, highlighting its inherent beauty through condensation and flattening of the perceptive process. I argue that Graham’s Pavilion has a similar effect for its viewers at Inhotim. The mirrored walls also flatten and condense the garden landscape and inser the viewer into the illusionistic space of the mirror. I concede that it would be a stretch to suggest that Paz had these phenomenological effects in mind when he thought to purchase the installation for relocation to Inhotim. This notwithstanding, like the Claude Glass used in picturesque excursions, the Installation affords new and different possibilities for its viewers in this adopted environment. Though the Pavilions “phenomenological” site-specificity, as defined by Kwon, is challenged by its relocation to Inhotim’s gardens, it continues to function as a viewing device that frames the visual experience of its surroundings. Graham himself never suggests that his Pavilions function as Claude Glasses. However, I believe that this is because his Pavilions are usually not installed in spaces that are expansive as that of Inhotim. Interestingly, there are several works installed at Inhotim that use mirrors to mediate their garden environments. Olafur Eliasson’s Viewing Machine (2001; fig. 23) consists of a large hexagonally-barreled kaleidoscope mounted on a pivoting axis. One of the two works by the artist exhibited at Inhotim, Viewing Machine is installed at one of the highest points at Inhotim. Visitors who peer through the mirrored telescope are confronted by a dizzying reflection of the

56 landscape reproduced on the interior panels of the device. As the device is mounted on a pivoting base, visitors are free to move it and reframe their vista as they please. Much like with Graham’s Pavilion and the Claude Glass, Eliasson makes use of the kaleidoscope, another nineteenth- century optical device, to condense the expansive vistas into smaller, more readily consumable illusionistic picture. Thus, I believe that both Graham and Eliasson’s viewing machines function by heightening the viewer’s visual experience of their garden environment. Pamela Petro’s travel account for Telegraph seems to prove the need to capture Inhotim with optical devices: “Inhotim's creative impulse is contagious, and we felt challenged to frame its treasures, manmade and natural, in our cameras all day long, yoking and unyoking others’ ideas. Inhotim made us into artists.”32 It is in this way that these works integrate or interface with the overwhelming presence of the botanical gardens at Inhotim. I move now to a consideration of the “discursive” site-specific potential available to the Pavilion at its site at Inhotim. Recalling the previous chapter of this study, I will attempt to explain how Graham’s Pavilion fulfills its social function within the context of its adopted site. As we will now discover, this relationship becomes exceedingly complex as the nature of Inhotim’s site-specific exhibition program is fully explored.

Nowhere, or Nearly That

Where is Inhotim? Volz’s rhetorical question resurfaces as we begin to piece together the social dynamic of the land it occupies. Despite Rodrigo Moura’s assertion that Inhotim was “a toponym of a virgin location…in the middle of nowhere, or nearly that,”33 the area surrounding Brumadinho benefitted from a native history. The vast majority of Inhotim’s visitors are likely to experience Brumadinho only briefly and from the comfort of their cars. For these tourists, Brumadinho exists as a dusty red blip before they enter the pristine and fantastical gardens at Inhotim. The contrast between the dilapidated streets of Brumadinho and the interior of Inhotim could not be more striking. This contrast is not lost on reporter Dan Fox who relates the experience thusly: “Driving through its outskirts--through the mining-scarred hills…makes for a stark contrast as the industrialized Brumadinho starts to give way to the lush greenery at the perimeter of Inhotim.” 34Any response to the question posed by Volz necessitates a response that considers how Inhotim creates connections with the land it shares with the thirty-four thousand

57 residents of Brumadinho. More specifically, how does Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve serve the needs of this population? To answer this question we must first understand the history of the region in connection with the social mission of Inhotim. As mentioned previously, the state of Minas Gerais, and more precisely the area surrounding Brumadinho and Salzedo, benefit from some of the most plentiful mines in the country. It was, in fact, the resources hidden under the ground that brought inhabitants to the area during the colonial period. In the 1690s a gold rush brought more than a million profit-seeking individuals to the area, roughly half of whom were African slaves. Those who were not slaves were of mixed Indian and European heritage and were collectively labeled Bandeirantes. The term refers to the flags or bandeiras which they carried to identify their allegiance to the various private mining operations. The state of Minas Gerais became one of the wealthiest and most culturally diverse regions in Latin American during the colonial period.35 While the gold rush would subside by the nineteenth century, mining of the area continues to this day. Many of the contemporary residents of Brumadinho and the surrounding communities are descendants of the mixed-race Bandeirantes. A smaller, but well-recognized, group of the area’s inhabitants live in communities known as Quilombos. These hinterland settlements were formed by Quilomberos, escaped slaves and other marginalized people, including minorities from Portugal, members of indigenous tribes, Jews and Arabs as well other oppressed groups. Many of the descendants of both the Bandeirantes and Quilomberos that inhabit Brumadinho today continue to be employed by the mining operations that carry on drawing resources from the land. Specifically, the area is rich in iron-ore deposits. As one would imagine, these mining operations are not very lucrative for the miners. According to a government survey done in the year 2000, more than 40 percent of the residents lived below the poverty line, secondary school enrollment fell below 50 percent, and the infant mortality rate hovered at 20 percent.36 The vast quantities of iron-ore color the soil in Brumadinho a bright reddish hue. As a result, a thin red dust cakes the shoes of all visitors to Inhotim. The red dust that clings to Inhotim’s visitors serves as a subtle reminder of the history of the land. A perhaps not so subtle reminder is also visible from many points throughout the park. Many of the tops of the mountains and hills surrounding the park have been flattened, or display large red gashes as a result of the mining operations. It is no secret that the lion’s share of the financial responsibility for Inhotim is born by the profits from mining operations that scar the landscape. It is precisely

58 because of the uneasy relationship between Inhotim and the surrounding communities that the institution must make a public and concentrated effort to address these inequalities. And the institution has done so. In its official mission statement, Inhotim spells out its responsibilities to its community: In addition to the activities of the museum complex, Inhotim Institute is also responsible for inclusion-aimed programs in the area of Brumadinho, and its surroundings. Therefore, Inhotim adds to its already established position as a tourist destination the goal of facilitating and strengthening strategies for local development, for preserving the heritage and the environment, and for generating income, with actions in the field of tourism, education, sport, and infrastructure, benefiting the community.37 In line with this mission, the museum offers an array of social programs specifically targeted at improving the welfare of its surrounding communities in more concrete ways. However, for this study I will focus on how the artistic programs might function to benefit the community. In 2009 Inhotim issued its first televised advertisement as part of a larger marketing campaign designed to draw people to the institution. In this advertisement the viewer is presented with quick jumps between urban scenes which are littered large groups of what we must assume are sleeping bodies. Eventually, the setting shifts to Inhotim where more sleeping bodies lay. The camera then focuses in on works at the Park including Bisected Triangle and Penetrável Magic Square #5. The bodies begin to spring to life and, in a reverse domino effect, bring the bodies of those surrounding them to life. The commercial is titled “Stendahl Syndrome.” Stendhal Syndrome is a term coined in 1989 by Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini to describe a peculiar pathology occurring primarily in tourists.38 Margherini observed and suggested that a psychotic episode was caused when tourists encountered the many artistic treasures of Florence. Symptoms of the syndrome include increased heartbeat, confused thoughts and dilated pupils. She also claims that the “complex crisis” can leave the viewer sensitive and easily susceptible to emotions.39 The effect of the art on the sleeping bodies is undeniable; they have been awoken by Inhotim. I introduce this commercial because it serves to summarize Paz’s philosophical stance on the beneficial potential provided by the artwork occupying his institution. In an interview with Lisa Duarte in Flash Art, Paz reinforces his belief in the transformative power of art: “I think

59 contemporary art is the most powerful non-governmental organization in the world. Through art people feel curious, and curiosity evokes research, and research involves study and education. The first step toward education is dignity. When people are put in touch with art and culture they feel stimulated and proud. Waking up someone’s curiosity is a way to generate the desire to go beyond--to do better and to be better.”40 In the same interview Paz suggests he made Inhotim public because he “saw the light in the eyes of the people who came to visit,” and because “you cannot imagine the poor kids that come every week to Inhotim, how joyful they are while they are here.”41 On many occasions Paz presents Inhotim as an altruistic venture, suggesting that while most billionaires spend their money on personal possessions, he offers his wealth to the people of Brazil.42 The residents of Brumadinho seem to respond positively to Paz’s presence in the region, at least in terms of his economic impact. In an interview of local residents by Simon Romero, a resident of the village of Marinhos, whose son and grandson work at Inhotim, remarked: “Before Inhotim, our men worked in the mines or moved to Sao Paulo to make money, God lowered Bernardo Paz down to us, and I pray he doesn’t take him back too soon.”43 I do not believe it suitable to comment on whether Paz’s efforts are in fact benefiting the population of Inhotim’s surrounding communities. I am not trained as a social worker and thus I believe it irresponsible to assume that I can identify the needs of a community of which I am not part. However, I would like to attempt to explain how the social directive of Graham’s Pavilions relates to Paz’s transformative goals. As discussed in the previous chapter, the “discursive” mode of site-specific practice sought to address the needs of the specific social context provided by site. For example, Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument harnessed this discursive potential by providing the underprivileged residents of Kassel with a communal space in which to gather and improve their lives. In this same light, we must ask whether Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve seeks to serve the underprivileged population of the communities surrounding Inhotim. I suggest that Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve’s location within the picturesque gardens of Inhotim hinders the socially-beneficial effects Graham seeks to achieve through the Pavilions. Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve’s location is removed from the lived social fabric or “social functioning” of the community. 44 Although Inhotim is open to the public, and despite the fact that its administration makes a concerted effort to bring in the surrounding communities through various social programs, it still exists as institutional, and therefore rarified, space.45 Despite the decidedly anti-institutional aesthetic of its environment at Inhotim, Graham’s Pavilion does not

60 represent an intervention into public space. Thinking back to the function of works such as Skateboard Pavilion or Rooftop Urban Park Project for Dia Center for the Arts, Graham’s goal is to integrate the Pavilions into the spaces of lived experience. Instead, at Inhotim the Pavilion has been inserted into a space specifically designed to be the “ideal setting” for the viewing of art. Moreover, as I suggested above, the work may function primarily as a device which draws attention to its garden settings. This is not to say that it has been transformed into decorative sculpture due to its placement within the garden. As I explain in the first chapter of this study, the contrast between the interior and exterior of Inhotim activates the feelings of fantasy and heightens the sense of detachment from the realm of lived experience. In fact, this detachment may activate the viewer’s sense of play which, in turn, leads to increased social malleability. However, the sense of detachment from the reality of the Brazilian countryside that Inhotim produces seems to contradict Graham’s intention for the work. The concept of site-specificity is thus challenged by the environment at Inhotim. How can these works wake visitors who are meant to exist in a dream space? In essence, Inhotim exists as a site for site-specific art. Therefore, the logic or poignancy of site-specific practice collapses as the works are reintroduced into environments designed for their presence. Rather than suggesting that this modality of site-specificity fails according to the original definitions of the practice began in the 1960s, it is possible to infer that Inhotim represents the next evolution in the progress of site-specific art exhibitions.

Site-Specific

According to Inhotim co-curator Allan Schwartzmann “commissions and site-specific works form the bone structure of Inhotim.”46 As I have explained, Paz’s choice to create a contemporary art program dedicated primarily to the exhibition of site-specific art was inspired by the convergence of a series of personal and economic developments. However, I believe that Inhotim could not exist as an art destination unless it exhibited works that are site-specific. While paintings, sculptures, videos and even installations can be shipped and exhibited across the global network of museums and galleries, Inhotim offers viewers what it claims is the ideal setting to view site-specific works. In order to attract international visitors to its remote location it must offer an artistic experience that is unobtainable anywhere else. It is true that many of the

61 works at Inhotim are indeed unique to Inhotim, including installations by Matthew Barney (fig. 24), Doug Aitken and Valeska Soares. However, as we have discovered through an investigation of Graham’s Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve¸ many of the works at Inhotim are not in fact site specific but are instead relocations of works installed at other sites. In reality, what Inhotim offers is a condensation of relocated site-specific works installed in a paradisiacal botanical garden. Inhotim benefits from what Miwon Kwon terms the “unhinging” of site-specific practice. In her book-length investigation of the history of site-specific practice, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Kwon introduces the term to describe the nomadic tendencies that have defined the exhibition of site-specific work as of late.47 According to Kwon this unhinging is occasioned by the resurgence of interest in works of the 1960s and 70s. Exhibitions such as “The New Sculpture 1965-75: Between Geometry and Gesture” (1990) and “Immaterial Objects” (1991-1992), both at the Whitney Museum of American Art, relocated or recreated site-specific works by Richard Serra, Barry Le Va, and Alan Saret. These exhibitions offered art audiences “the ‘real’ aesthetic experiences of site-specific copies.48 As Kwon claims “this process of institutionalization and attendant commercialization of site-specific art overturn[s] the principle of place-boundedness through which such works developed their critique of the ahistorical autonomy of the art object.”49 The decontextualization of site-specific works has the effect of rendering the site irrelevant. This displacement thus returns the agency of the experience back to stylistic choices made by the artist. As Kwon states, “A methodological principle of artistic production and dissemination is recaptured as content, active processes are transformed into inert art objects once again. In this way, site-specific art comes to represent criticality rather than performing it. The ‘here and now’ of aesthetic experience is isolated as the signified, severed from its signifier.”50 Kwon’s critical analysis of this evolution of site-specific practice is clearly manifested in the exhibition program at Inhotim. What I believe to be especially significant is her suggestion that this decontextualization highlights the work’s relationship to the artist rather than to its site. The severing of the relationship between work and site returns the object to the realm of modernist sculpture. The work no longer functions in relation to the characteristics of the site but instead becomes a metonym for the artist. I believe that in order to inspire the kind of pilgrimages that are required to reach Inhotim, the institution must highlight its ability to

62 showcase site-specific works by the most important artists of the twentieth century. Inhotim was never envisioned as a destination for Brazilian tourists. Rather, Paz views Inhotim as his attempt to stake out a legacy within the realm of the international contemporary art world elite. Paz is banking on the cachet of names such as Barney, Eliasson, Kusama, Burden, Kapoor, Tiravanija and Graham. By bringing together a group of one-of-kind works by some of the most well- recognized artists in an idyllic and exotic locale, Paz hopes to create a new kind of institutional operation. Art critic Dan Fox astutely summarizes Inhotim’s position in Frieze when he argues “Inhotim does not show you work you can see at any old biennial or art fair, yet it’s nothing if not a garden of contrasts and contradictions. As the art world expands here and contracts there, the park may be the advance guard of a new model of institutional or private operation; for local people, it’s a day out, or somewhere that can provide work, but for the international art world elites in the northern hemisphere, its location simultaneously creates a new tier of privilege and access.”51 Paz benefits from a seemingly unlimited access to financial resources, a local population willing to comply with his wishes, a curatorial staff culled from some of the world’s leading institutions, and ownership of vast tracts of “virgin land.” There is no reason to doubt that Paz will carry out his dream of seeing Inhotim “develop into a massive city, where people can permanently reside.”52 Inhotim is perhaps most accurately conceptualized as a gigantic site-specific installation. The rural countryside of Brazil is its site, its medium is site-specific artworks and nature, its artist is Bernardo Paz. The trajectory of site-specific art has come full circle with Inhotim. The anti- institutional gesture of site-specific practices has been sublimated as even the site itself can now be produced. Paz wants to inspire pilgrimage, a journey to the outlands of contemporary art world. The illusion of isolation, naturalism and exoticism there inspires artists and visitors to feel that they have gained access to a virgin land. Inhotim is an empty space and a place ready to be intervened upon. Everybody knows this is nowhere.

1 Jochen Volz, “Unfolding an Institution, Discovering Inhotim,” in Through: Inhotim (Brumadinho: CACI, 2009), 16-23

2 Marcelo Marthe, “O Imperador de Inhotim,” Veja, April 28, 2010, under “Artes,”http://veja.abril.com.br/280410/imperador-inhotim-p-152.shtml (accessed February 22, 2013). And Mac Margolis, “Garden of Dreams,” Newsweek International, September 24, 2012, available online at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/09/16/inhotim-bernardo-paz-s-botanical-eden-of-sculpture.html (accessed February 22, 2013).

3 Dan Fox, “On Nature,” Frieze, March 2011, 4 http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/on-nature/ (accessed February 22, 2013)

4 See Mario Gioia, “Bernardo Paz,” Interni Magazine Online, http://www.internimagazine.com/magazine/special- features/bernardo-paz (accessed February 22, 2013).

5 My Translation. Medeiros Jotabe, “O Maior Mecenas de Arte Brasileira,” Estadão, October 10, 2009, http://www.estadao.com.br/noticias/impresso,o-maior-mecenas-da-arte-brasileira,448645,0.htm (accessed February 22, 2013).

6 At the date of this publication there is no document which provides information regarding Paz’s collection of Brazilian Modernist paintings. While the available biographical information all agree that he sold the collection in order to make room for his collection of contemporary art, it is unclear what pieces were in the collection and whether it was purchased by Paz or gifted to him by his parents. See Lisa Duarte, “Collecting: Bernardo Paz,” Flash Art International, May - June 2011, 126.

7 Fox, “On Nature.”

8 Interestingly, Orsini recently successfully sued Paz and was awarded ownership of 250,000 square meters of Inhotim. Although the circumstances leading to the suit are unclear, Paz commented on the authorship of the gardens at Inhotim in an article in Veja Magazine. He stated: “Once I asked Burle Marx for landscaping tips I personally took off my shoes, put on a pair of shorts and began unfolding sacks of soil. When I hired Orsini as a contractor, I basically told him exactly where to plant things. And Nehring, who worked as my landscaper for almost thirty years also contributed to the project. Who is the author of the gardens? I can’t be bothered with this nonsense.” (My translation) See Raissa Pena, “Inhotim Inaugura Dois Grandes Pavilhões e Uma Série de Obras,” Veja BH, August 30, 2012, http://vejabh.abril.com.br/arte-e-cultura/exposicoes/inhotim-inaugura-dois-grandes- pavilhoes-serie-obras-699914.shtml (accessed February 22, 2013).

9 Roberto Silva, New Brazilian Gardens: the Legacy of Burle Marx (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006), 8.

10 Rodrigo Moura, “A Museum in the Backlands,” in Through: Inhotim (Brumadinho: CACI, 2009), 36

11 My translation. See “Mentor de Inhotim, Bernardo Paz Busca Na Arte Contemporânea Uma Forma de Educar,” Estadão, March 14, 2012, under “Cultura,” http://www.estadao.com.br/noticias/impresso,mentor-de-inhotim- bernardo-paz-busca-na-arte-contemporanea-uma-forma-de-educar,872715,0.htm (accessed February 22, 2013).

12 For more information regarding the history of Brazilian Neo-concretism see Claudia Calirman, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2012).

13 Claire Bishop, Installation Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 63.

14 See tax law in Ministério Das Finanças do Brazil, Direcção-Geral das Alfândegase dos Impostos Especiais sobre o Consumo (Section 2.1.3). Ratified June 19, 2000. Available online at http://www.senado.gov.br/senadores/senador/edisonlobao/projetos/import_obras_arte_.htm.

15 T F, “Brazil Cuts Import Tax On Art,” Art Newspaper, no. 237 (July/August 2012): 48.

16 Ministério Das Finanças do Brazil, Direcção-Geral das Alfândegase dos Impostos Especiais sobre o Consumo.

17 Interestingly, the dates given for many of the works at Inhotim are hyphenated, the first date represents when the work was installed in its original location, while the second date represents the date it was installed at Inhotim. Within this study I have provided the date of creation instead of the date it was installed at Inhotim. The reason for this is tied to my argument.

18 Georgina Adam, “Latin American Art Is On the Up,” Financial Times, October 13, 2010. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0195861a-d4d6-11df-b230-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2LejDViFo (accessed February 22, 2013).

19 In 2009, Paz was investigated by the Police under direction by the Minsterio Publico for supposedly participating in a fraudulent scheme whereby Paz set up a series of phantom companies that divested the earnings from his mining operations into development programs at Inhotim. The government of Minas Gerais also donated over $20 million of land to Inhotim which the Ministerio is claiming was not used for the development of Inhotim but rather was sold as part of the sale of nearby mines to Chinese mining consortium ECE. The government is claiming that Paz avoided paying the eighty-million USD tax that would have resulted from the sale of the land by claiming it was part of the non-profit wing of Inhotim. Although the charges were eventually found to be unsubstantiated, the case brings attention to the thin divide that exists between Paz’s operation and the local government and tax problems that might result as a product of the relationship. See Breno Costa and Mario Cesar Carvalho, “Minas Dá Benef cio a Suspeito de Sonegação,” Folha de S. Paulo, September 17, 2009. http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/ilustrad/fq1709200909.htm (accessed February 22, 2013).

20 Pena, “Inhotim Inaugura Dois Grandes Pavilhões e Uma Série de Obras.”

21 Volz, “Unfolding an Institution, Discovering Inhotim,” 19.

22 Silva, New Brazilian Gardens: the Legacy of Burle Marx, 101.

23 My translation of Fietta Jarque, “La Selva Del Arte,” El Pais, February 9, 2008. http://elpais.com/diario/2008/0209/babelia/1202515576_850215.html (accessed February 22, 2013).

24 Volz, “Unfolding an Institution, Discovering Inhotim,” 17.

25 Simon Romero, “A Brazilian Mogul's Garden of Exotic Art,” China Daily, March 27, 2012. http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/culture/2012-03/27/content_14920067.htm (accessed February 22, 2013).

26 This statistic was relayed to me in a personal conversation with Inhotim’s Inclusion and Citizenship Director Roseni Sena on March 12, 2012. Although Sena confirmed that I would be granted to Inhotim’s exit surveys I was later denied access by the museum’s team. This issue was emblematic of a series of difficulties I confronted when attempting to obtain any kind of information from the administration at Inhotim. After submitting the proposal for this study to their Ethics Committee they subsequently denied me access to any information citing that they would be unable to provide me with the resources necessary to complete my project.

27 Allan Schwartmann, “A Place Worth Knowing,” in Through: Inhotim (Brumadinho: CACI, 2009), 28.

28 Ibid, 108.

29 John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994).

30 Ibid., 174-5.

31 Ibid., 175.

32 Pamela Petro, “Inhotim, Brazil: A Versailles for the 21st Century,” Telegraph, October 26, 2012. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/southamerica/brazil/9636556/Inhotim-Brazil-a-Versailles-for-the- 21st-century.html (accessed February 23, 2013).

33 Moura, “A Museum in the Backlands,” 33.

34 Fox, ”On Nature.”

35 For more information on the impact of mining on Southern Brazil see Alyson Warhurst, ed., Mining and the Environment: Case Studies from the Americas (Ottawa: IDRC, 1999)

36 Figures compiled in Municipal dos Objectivos de Desenvolvimento do Mileno, Relatorios Dinamicos Indicadores Municipais. Brumadinho –MG, available online at http://www.portalodm.com.br/relatorios/mg/Brumadinho.

37 Inhotim Institute: Mission Statement. (Brumadinho: CACI, 2009), 23.

38 Graziella Magherini, La Sindrome di Stendhal (Firenze: Distribuzione PDE, 1989)

39 Quoted in Melinda Guy, “The Shock of the Old,” Frieze 72, January - February,2003. http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_shock_of_the_old/ (accessed March 4, 2013).

40 Duarte, “Collecting: Bernardo Paz.”

41 Ibid.

42 See Paz’s comments in Paulo Cabral, “Brazil's Inhotim Park Celebrates Giant Art Amid Nature,” BBC News, June 8, 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-18328203 (accessed February 22, 2013).

43 Romero, “A Brazilian Mogul's Garden of Exotic Art.”

44 David Trend quoted in Rosalyn Deutsche, “Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy,” Social Text, No. 33 (1992), 47.

45 For a complete list of Inhotim’s social programs directed at bringing the surrounding populations to the museum see Inhotim Institute: Mission Statement. (Brumadinho: CACI, 2009), 23.

46 Schwartmann, “A Place Worth Knowing,” 27.

47 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004).

48 Ibid., 33.

49 Ibid., 38.

50 Ibid.

51 Fox,”On Nature.”

52My translation. Pena, “Inhotim Inaugura Dois Grandes Pavilhões e Uma Série de Obras.”

CONCLUSION

Little is discussed of the figure who is the namesake of Inhotim. The titular ‘Nhô Tim’is only referenced when authors wish clarify the proper pronunciation (In-yo-chim) of the museum that occupies his former farm. However, Mr. Tim’s history provides an interesting metaphor with which to consider the role of Inhotim within the context of the exhibition of site-specific art. Given the history of the region and its relative isolation from the major urban areas of Brazil, it would be safe to assume that Mr. Tim was either a bandeirante or quilombero, or at least a Brazilian. Yet we find that he was a nineteenth-century English geologist brought in by the mining companies to survey the land. Timothy oversaw the mining operations in the region and was given a plot of land where he cultivated a small farm.1 Thus, much like the majority of the work at Inhotim, Mr. Tim was a foreign transplant. Bernardo Paz has brought the work of an international cadre of influential artists to his remote garden paradise in order to create a new kind of museum experience. While I argue that the nature of the exhibition program severs the connection between these works and their original sites, I also suggest that the adopted idyllic garden environment has allowed the work to take on new meaning for its visitors. The works chosen for Inhotim are installed there to bridge the gap between art and nature, but also between art and entertainment. Inhotim is nothing if not an experiential museum. It presents art that provides an immediate sensory effect that is not conditioned by the history of the site. The kinds of works represented at Inhotim do not require visitors to have any prior knowledge of the history of art to enjoy a transformative experience. The transformative goals Graham hopes to achieve with his Pavilions are mirrored by the goals that Bernardo Paz has for Inhotim. The space inside the mirrored walls of Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve can be thought of as a micro version of the experience of Inhotim. Both Graham and Paz use art to bring together people in a space separated from reality in order to subject visitors to an experience which beneficially transforms them. Dan Graham’s Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve provides this study with a foil with which to discuss the possibilities for transformation in works that prioritize social engagement. Graham’s installation has also served as a vehicle with which to dissect the problematic nature of the exhibition program at Inhotim. This study has attempted to provide a description of the

67 psychological effects experienced by those who enter one of Dan Graham’s Pavilion installations. I have inserted Graham’s practice within more contemporary theoretical models which, I argue, describe the artist’s socializing intentions more accurately. I then explored how these psychological effects are conditioned by the environment into which the Pavilion installations are installed. I suggested that the environment at Inhotim creates a disorienting interplay between the real and the artificial that in turn causes the visitor to experience Graham’s installation as a space for entertainment and play. I have also inserted Graham’s Pavilion installations into the history of site-specific practice in order to question the relationship between these works and their sites. I have argued that these objects bridge the gap between the categories of site-specific practice – phenomenological and discursive – as defined by Miwon Kwon. Finally, I have provided a history of Inhotim through the biography of its founder Bernardo Paz. I have detailed the historical, sociological and topographic qualities of Inhotim’s location with the goal of connecting Graham’s socializing intentions with the needs of the communities that surround Inhotim. I argued that the curatorial staff of this unique institution are attempting to set a precedent for the exhibition of site-specific works and, in doing so, are attempting to reorient the traditional axes of the contemporary art world. The inversion of the relationship between center and periphery of the contemporary art world that Paz wishes to create is already taking place. In 2008, Paz was awarded “Best International Collector” by the organizers of Arco Madrid.2 In 2012, Inhotim co-curator Jochen Volz was appointed Head of Programmes at the prestigious London-based Serpentine Gallery.3 The same year, Inhotim hosted the Independent Curators International Annual conference. The group of curators sought to employ Instituto Inhotim as a case study to explore how curatorial practices negotiate issues of commissioning and adaptation of site-specific works; interpretation and recreation of lost and unrealized projects; and concepts of the expanded museum and exhibition, such as curating through collection building; the spatial expansion of the institution; and new forms of outreach and audience development.4 While I leave a judgment on the efficacy of both Graham and Paz’s social projects to scholars in other fields, I hope that this study contributes to the ongoing rhetoric on the role of museum practice within diverse communities. Although Inhotim offers a unique museum

68 experience at the time of this writing, I believe that other institutions will adopt its model in the future as the globalization of contemporary art continues throughout the twenty-first century.

1 See Raissa Pena, “Inhotim Inaugura Dois Grandes Pavilhões e Uma Série de Obras,” Veja BH, August 30, 2012, http://vejabh.abril.com.br/arte-e-cultura/exposicoes/inhotim-inaugura-dois-grandes-pavilhoes-serie-obras- 699914.shtml (accessed February 22, 2013).

2 Georgina Adam, “Art Market Analysis: Are Domestic Collectors Ready to Take On the World?” Art Newspaper, June 8, 2011. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Art-market-analysis-Are-domestic-collectors-ready-to-take- on-the-world/23913 (accessed March 2, 2013).

3"Serpentine Gallery appoints Jochen Volz as Head of Programmes," Serpentine Gallery press release, March 16, 2012, on the Serpentine Gallery web site, http://www.serpentinegallery.org/Jochen%20Volz%20Press%20Release%20FINAL.pdf accessed February 23, 2013.

4 Independent International Curators. "Curatorial Intensive: Instituto Inhotim" http://www. curatorsintl.org. http://curatorsintl.org/intensive/instituto_inhotim (accessed March 2, 2013).

APPENDIX A FIGURES

Figure 1: Dan Graham, Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve, 2002, mirrored glass and stainless steel, 7’ x 23’ x 16’.

Figure 2: Inhotim Institute and Botanical Gardens (Aerial View), Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Figure 3: Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981, COR-TEN Steel, 120’ x 12’ x 2.5”, Federal Plaza, New York City.

Figure 4: Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument (Partial view), 2001, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Figure 6: Dan Graham, Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve (Detail), Source: Fernanda Ribeiro, Belo Horizonte – Inhotim. 2007, Digital Image. Available from: Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/7948133@N08/698439505/ (accessed November, 22, 2012).

Figure 7:Rikrit Tiravanija, Untitled 2002 (he promised), 2002, chrome and stainless steel, approximately 116” x 472” x 236”

Figure 8: Liam Gillick, Fluctuation Screen, 2000, anodized aluminum and white opaque Plexiglass, 8’ x 12’ x 1’.

Figure 9: Lacaton & Vassal, Palais de Tokyo (Interior), 2002, Paris, France. 74

Figure 10: Dan Graham, Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve (Installation View)

Figure 11: Dondel, Aubert, Viard and Dastugue, Palais de Tokyo (Exterior), 1937.

Figure 12: Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970, indigenous rock and sediment, 1550’ x 15’

Figure 13: Richard Serra, Tilted Arc (installation view at Federal Plaza, New York), 1981, COR-TEN Steel, 120’ x 12’ x 2.5”

Figure 14: Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument (Partial view), 2002, mixed media, dimensions variable, Kassel Germany.

Figure 15: Dan Graham, Octagon for Münster (Installation view), 1987, Stainless steel and glass, 104” x 144”

Figure 16: Dan Graham, Two-way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube, 1991, stainless steel and glass, 8.5’ x 36’ x 36’, Dia Center for the Arts, New York.

Figure 17: Dan Graham, Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve (Installation view at Madison Square Park, NY, 2002).

Figure 18: Bernardo Paz de Mello (b. 1949)

Figure 19: Cildo Meireles, Red Shift, 1967-1984, mixed media.

Figure 20: Janet Cardiff, Forty Part Motet, 2001, sound installation in 40 channels, 14’ x 7’.

Figure 21: Map of Inhotim with Location of Dan Graham’s Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve marked.

Figure 22: Claude Glass.

Figure 23: Olafur Eliasson, Viewing Machine, 2001, stainless steel, 12’ x 6’ x 2’.

Figure 24: Matthew Barney, De Lama Lâmina, 2004, forest tractor, ficus, high density polyurethane, polyvinyl and nylon screen 52’ x 25’ x 18’

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Bryan Barcena is a candidate for a Master of Arts degree in art history from Florida State University (Tallahassee, Florida). This thesis is part of the completion of his master’s degree. Bryan earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in April 2007 from The University of Michigan, with a major in Art History and a minor in Latin American and Caribbean Studies.