M.Ho and The Front Room
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Proximity #4 - Spring 2009
The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis debuted a new exhibition space in early 2008, housed entirely within their Brad Cloepfil-designed 25,200-sq.ft. facilities. Dubbed the “The Front Room,” this space-within-a-space hosts a unique exhibition schedule thrown wide to a variety of projects, groups, and artists, presenting an innovation in contemporary museum practice and adding to the list of reasons why St. Louis, as a steadily burgeoning art hub, cannot be underestimated.
The Contemporary approached The Front Room with a tongue-in-cheek attitude from the get-go. Its inaugural exhibition, White Flag Projects’ P.G.S. (“Provincial Gallery Simulator”), peddled “insult and abuse” rather than paintings or sculptures: visitors could get a slap across the face for free, or rise to the status of “collector” and pay to take home a snapshot of the exact moment hand met cheek. Other projects throughout the spring tapped into local St. Louis culture – like when the independent record store Apop Records built a temporary satellite shop in The Front Room for five days in April. They offered rare vinyl pressings, art books, local zines, and other “underground” exotica. Homegrown, curated by Dana Turkovic and designed by local artists Sarah Colby and Kim Humphries, turned the space into a carpeted and cozy living-room setting. The shelves and tables were stocked with books, art, film, letters, and more, all on loan from critics, art historians, and artists throughout the city, allowing visitors to sit and wrap themselves in St. Louis art. Comparable programs, like the MCA’s “12x12 New Artists/New Work,” provide a similar space for local artists – but the Contemporary subverts the paradigm of “one artist, once a month” to create a gallery-going experience that appears much more open to innovative work by anonymous collectives or artist groups.
The Front Room’s Spring 2008 season brought seven dynamic projects to the space, with twenty-five individual artists showing their work throughout the summer and fall. This high volume schedule was made possible by The Front Room’s unique approach to exhibition turn-over: Artists and projects occupy the space for anywhere from one day to a few weeks. One could visit The Front Room on a Tuesday and find an entirely different experience waiting for them that Wednesday. When I visited at the end of 2008, guest-curator Meredith Malone from Washington University’s Kemper Museum had lined the small room with the work of M. Ho for a two-week showing that bridged the winter holidays. M. Ho’s 2003 Strike unfurls pages from the New York Time’s multi-page supplement “A Nation at War.” A series of photographs and articles presented the many sides of the United States’ new war on Saddam Hussein and Iraq. However, M. Ho’s careful cut-outs of colored paper and floral imagery cover every bit of text, silencing the newspaper’s commentary and leaving behind the photographs to speak for themselves. The images of crying women, young soldiers, rows of war planes, and obliterated city landscapes reflect the ethical quandary and unavoidable tragedy that has sadly sustained through the last five years. The artist’s most recent work – Talk to Us, 2008 – entwines detailed crystal-like schematic drawings with a demand for answers to the U.S. government’s catastrophic, at times non-existent, response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Through this new space the Contemporary links in to a current of art-making that has always flowed around and under larger-scale operations like itself. Its unpredictable schedule allows for a sense of immediacy, more risk-taking, and an increase in traffic, while giving the surrounding community more reason to make the Contemporary a habit – a reason that forgoes the corporate sponsored happy-hours or dating games used by other museums to drum up 20-something patronage. The Front Room provides a counter-balance to the blockbuster shows that dominate the museum circuit and, as a strategy of early 21st-century museum practice, it’s working.
-CW
