The Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar said that a bridge is a man crossing a bridge; those words came to me while I was walking through the exhibition Act/React that opened its doors this weekend in the Milwaukee Art Museum.
In Act/React, the art becomes a man crossing the art. The pieces are waiting for the public to squeeze all the possibilities. Some people simply stop in front or over a piece to contemplate it, while others moves and run and writhe around the pieces turning the art museum in a kind of children museum for all ages.
The spectators can see their silhouettes become snow figures; the floor dividing in parts or leaving a trail under their feet; their shadows painting flowers in a screen; or their bodies reflecting in an opaque mobile mirror.
Daniel Rozin, Janet Cardiff, Scott Snibbe, Brian Knep, Liz Phillips and Camille Utterback present a show where the protagonist is the public.
The art happens only in the eyes of the person that is interacting with the piece and this person will leave the place with his or her own private version of the work.
In a time where Joshua Bell showed us how our idea of art lays deeply in what says an institutional authority, these artists made superfluous the presence of the pieces in a museum because their only exits within the people. All the images, all the sounds, all the forms happen only with the complicity of the people present in the room.
If the artist is not capable to deeply move the audience, the piece is condemned to the oblivion, despite its presence in a museum and, by extension, in the official history of art.
Under these terms, art again means a challenge, and the artists of Act/React succeeded in a big way because many of us will leave the exhibition unable to forget what we saw and what we did while we were seeing the pieces.
