I am not, for one second, going to pretend to be an art aficionado. When I was younger, I always thought I would grow up to be an artist. It wasn't until a few years ago I learned that "outsiders" were frowned upon in the artiste community, and that kind of made me mad at art. But we're cool again, mainly because I will just embrace my outsider status. Well, I'm not an artist at all, I'm a documententarian. Why am I talking about myself? What I really want to talk about here is the art!
Much of the art at the 21c is interactive, and is kind of hard to describe. How do I describe the wall by the elevators which shows you projected on a wall and various letters fall down on your image, sometimes forming words(Text Rain, by Camille Utterback & Romy Achituv) In essence, that's what it is. But does it make any sense to just describe it?
The icon of the hotel is a red penguin, and they are everywhere - on the roof, in the hallways, and shaped into the lollies they give you at turndown service. We were surprised to walk out of our room one morning and discover a penguin looking right at us!
As you walk into the lobby, you are confronted with "Sleepers," a permanent exhibit by Abbas Kiarostami. A movie of two people sleeping is projected onto a white space on the floor. Watch closely and the sleepers move, stretch, and get up to smoke cigarettes. It was funny to watch whether people walked onto the "bed" or around it. I always walked around it. I'm sure there's meaning in there somewhere.
I was standing in the hallway at the 21C, staring at something (a mirror? window? I can't remember) and saw, in the reflection, a giant smoke ring in the window behind me (Cloud Rings, Ned Kahn). WHAT!? This was super cool, although hard to photograph (for me). Because I am simple-minded and easily amused, I could have stared at this for hours.
I enjoyed a lot of the art at the 21c, but by far my favorite was the installation "Constant World" by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. These installations are really difficult to explain, but I found them mesmerizing. In a nutshell, these works play with your sense of proportion by using tiny cameras to project large images of miniature items. There was an installation of a model of the Titanic, with a camera mounted on a track with tiny little hills, like a tiny roller coaster. The camera projects the image on a wall, and the movement of the camera mimics the shifting and rolling of the sinking ship (High Seas). I also loved an installations Big Box 1 and Big Box 2. Here, a fixed camera projects the diorama as it turns. The diorama is circular, and portrays big box stores after apocalyptic events. Big Box 1 (Bioshpere) shows the stores being overtaken by nature, and Big Box 2 (Zombies) (top of post) shows them overtaken by zombies. Again, I could have watched these for hours on end. I recommend reading more about the exhibit here, because the pictures and descriptions are way better than anything I can do!
