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When visitors "cross the threshold" and enter the Contemporary Gallery, Susan L. Stoops wants them to be ready for "a very visceral experience."
Could the curator of contemporary art at the Worcester Art Museum be talking about the large blue aluminum eyelash made by Scotsman Jim Lambie that's hanging from the ceiling?
Stoops has named her challenging exhibit "What Matters" to prompt visitors into rethinking how to "think about art" and its connection "with the world around us."
Drawing mostly from WAM's own collection, she's arranged 12 sculptures, or perhaps, installations made from everyday materials like plastic bottles or scraps of a shag run, around the roomy, high-ceilinged gallery.
A few steps away, a fur-lined steel hoop leans against the wall. Scented with sweet Timothy, a bale of alfalfa rests inside a wooden crate in the middle of the floor. Fourteen paving stones sit on a pinewood shelf.
If visitors want to see a marble Greek bust or Norman Rockwell's comfortable caricatures, they ought to visit a different gallery.
Stoops said, "I want there to be a continual presence of something new and unfamiliar" in the Contemporary Gallery.
Part educator, part provocateur, Stoops hopes visitors sort out likely questions about objects made by arranging familiar materials in unfamiliar ways to work out fresh definitions of what art can be in the 21st century.
With her own twists, she's posing something of the challenge Marcel Duchamp made in 1914 when he exhibited an iron bottle drying rack and declared it "a work of art."
Choosing objects made by "intergenerational artists" who worked between 1988 and 2008, Stoops wants to update Duchamps' challenge.
Following Duchamp's lead, artists have spent the last century pushing the idea of what constitutes acceptable material further and further from their predecessors.
"I believe artists inherit ideas and technology and reshape them," said Stoops. "This (exhibit) is one of those examples. It's definitely a pervasive way of working now."
Over the last century, artists have increasingly abandoned so-called traditional materials, like paint, canvas and marble, to use readymade things in unfamiliar ways that force viewers to reconsider what the simplest things mean.
We all know what fur is. We all know what a hoop is for.
"We look at Claire Barclay's fur-covered hoop," said Stoops, "and, as simple as it is, it triggers something deeper."
When visitors "cross the threshold" and enter the Contemporary Gallery, Susan L. Stoops wants them to be ready for "a very visceral experience."
Could the curator of contemporary art at the Worcester Art Museum be talking about the large blue aluminum eyelash made by Scotsman Jim Lambie that's hanging from the ceiling?
Stoops has named her challenging exhibit "What Matters" to prompt visitors into rethinking how to "think about art" and its connection "with the world around us."
Drawing mostly from WAM's own collection, she's arranged 12 sculptures, or perhaps, installations made from everyday materials like plastic bottles or scraps of a shag run, around the roomy, high-ceilinged gallery.
A few steps away, a fur-lined steel hoop leans against the wall. Scented with sweet Timothy, a bale of alfalfa rests inside a wooden crate in the middle of the floor. Fourteen paving stones sit on a pinewood shelf.
If visitors want to see a marble Greek bust or Norman Rockwell's comfortable caricatures, they ought to visit a different gallery.
Stoops said, "I want there to be a continual presence of something new and unfamiliar" in the Contemporary Gallery.
Part educator, part provocateur, Stoops hopes visitors sort out likely questions about objects made by arranging familiar materials in unfamiliar ways to work out fresh definitions of what art can be in the 21st century.
With her own twists, she's posing something of the challenge Marcel Duchamp made in 1914 when he exhibited an iron bottle drying rack and declared it "a work of art."
Choosing objects made by "intergenerational artists" who worked between 1988 and 2008, Stoops wants to update Duchamps' challenge.
Following Duchamp's lead, artists have spent the last century pushing the idea of what constitutes acceptable material further and further from their predecessors.
"I believe artists inherit ideas and technology and reshape them," said Stoops. "This (exhibit) is one of those examples. It's definitely a pervasive way of working now."
Over the last century, artists have increasingly abandoned so-called traditional materials, like paint, canvas and marble, to use readymade things in unfamiliar ways that force viewers to reconsider what the simplest things mean.
We all know what fur is. We all know what a hoop is for.
"We look at Claire Barclay's fur-covered hoop," said Stoops, "and, as simple as it is, it triggers something deeper."
She repeated phrases of uncertain authorship she's used for 20 years like a Zen riddle to snap viewers into a new stage of awareness: "One way of approaching art and thinking about it is not to ask 'Why is something art?' but to ask instead, 'When is something art?"'
A century and several art revolutions later, Tony Fehr has used steel chain, wire and a cotton sash to form dozens of plastic bottles into a meaning-sponge he calls "Linear B," a likely reference to a Mycenaean script that remains undeciphered.
And Heidi Fasnacht has constructed her own "jerry-rigged" Milky Way from polymers, hardware and springs.
If successful, the objects in "What Matters" don't just change how we look at art, said Stoops, but "when we go out into the ordinary world, they change how things look to the ordinary eye."
So Andrew Witkin gathered together pingpong balls, stainless steel screws, birchwood, alabaster, cork and paper and placed them on a table and called his work " Untitled."
"It takes the material out of the landscape and brings it into the gallery," said Stoops. "They straddle the world outside the museum and in the artist's studio."
What if viewers just don't "get it" or don't want to get it.
Stoops replied, "I do believe very strongly that art is a discipline."
"It's like going to the opera for the first time without notes and build on that experience for the next time," she said. "You become literate. You develop language, a new sort of art literacy."
Look around at Willie Cole's "Kanaga Field Iron" that's made from wood but resembles an oversized kitchen iron.
Let it sink in. Are you seeing things a little differently?
Maybe that's why Lambie's blue eyebrow might be winking.
