Plaidophile

This artwork is outside, and is supposed to be corroded and weathered by the (somewhat unpredictable) environment. Shouldn't the environment also include the people who are viewing it?

This is also what I hate about MoMA. Modern art was all about new frontiers and interactivity and a dialog between the artist and the viewer, but sometime in the past 10 years it's all been put behind a hermetic seal.

I have seen some really well-done interactive art, which embraces the environment. At MoMA New York there was a piece which involved a large print run of posters depicting all the wrongfully-executed death row inmates from the last century or so, with a statement that the viewer was to take a copy and do whatever they wanted with it. I saw people doing all sorts of creative things, such as making origami sculptures, or posting them in random places on the street, which is exactly what the artist intended.

Another interactive piece was at a modern art museum in Milwaukee, where an artist placed a large pile of candy in the corner of the room, where the pile weighed as much as his partner did when he died of AIDS, and the artist would regularly come in and refresh the pile to the original weight; people were instructed to take a piece of candy as a metaphor for his partner and thus carry this little piece of him around with them (with an implication of "you are what you eat" thrown in). It was a powerful statement of what immortality and remembrance can mean, and by making the viewer part of the work, it worked to make it much more memorable.

Christo's Gates was another exhibit which similarly existed to be affected by the environment. Christo loved that people were vandalizing, mutilating, and modifying the sheets (the only thing he had an objection to was people cutting out a piece of it and saving it as a memento, because he wanted the sculptures themselves to be completely transitory). The whole point to it was that they should become part of the environment and form a dialog with its surroundings. This also worked greatly in its favor.

So to me, it seems pretty unreasonable for the artists at the OSC to want to pretend to have some control over the particular way in which their sculptures corrode (when they really have none; they can't predict what sorts of pollutants will come in the next rain, or how much rain there will be, or if there will be another volcanic eruption which will add all sorts of sulfur compounds to the air, etc.) when clearly the viewers want to be active participants in the development of the art. If they want complete control of the process, they should use their own chemicals and put the exhibits behind a hermetic seal.

Art is a dialog, not a statement.