At the front desk of the Timken Museum of Art, I learned some visitors really love the museum’s current exhibition Drift, while others hate it. I’m not entirely sure what my own reaction is.
Drift was created by the Timken’s summer artist in residence Margaret Noble. As the exhibition webpage explains: Drift brings together sculpture, sound, and moving images to explore the ways in which space and perception are experienced. Drawing inspiration from François Boucher’s Lovers in a Park (1758), Noble reinterprets Rococo ideals by introducing motion and layered context through reverse glass animation, revealing and disrupting the painting’s serene, ornamental narrative.
During the unsettling video, thick black paint creeps into the frame of Lovers in a Park in unexpected ways. Black birds (crows?) fly through the Rococo painting, as does a drone. A robot, a sinister masked face, ants and a rat appear. Tiny human figures tumble into consuming blackness. The intruding images tend not to be pleasant. The video feels subversive, juvenile, but not entirely so. To me, the effect is mostly experimental and weird.
Does the artist mean to say contemporary thinking is dark and cynical, and opposed to the Rococo ideals of pure beauty and love? Contemporary art often seems that way.
Perhaps the creepiest part of the video was when the two lovers became slowly covered by a big black blob. From it a claw-like hand emerged, reaching toward the passing peasant girl. (Reminding me of the black symbiote in Spider-Man!)
In the Timken Museum’s atrium, people can use black cut-out shapes to create their own altered Lovers in a Park. The figures visitors are provided with are less creepy and include butterflies, dragonflies and dogs.
What does it say about the artist’s intentions and broader human nature–that the video is very different from what museum visitors can happily assemble?
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