Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's current show, the aptly named chronotopes & dioramas, serves two functions for its exhibit space—it both brings the Hispanic Society of America's collection into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and expands the collection to include objects native to the Americas. Founded in 1904 by Archer Milton Huntington because of his fondness for Spain, the Hispanic Society is comprised of a library with over 400,000 holdings and a museum with nearly 200,000 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, and decorative arts pieces. This cultural repository, though comprehensive within its scope, is narrowly limited to the history of the Iberian peninsula and colonial Latin America. Troubled by its lack of modern resources upon her first visit to the Hispanic Society, Gonzalez-Foerster, a French-born artist who divides her time between Paris and Rio de Janeiro, became intrigued by the idea of expanding the library beginning with an exhibit of contemporary “American” literature.
Reminiscent of a natural history museum's “habitat groups,” Gonzalez-Foerster's dioramas occupy the former Museum of the American Indian gallery building, now an annex of the Hispanic Society's research library. Upon entering the annex, the viewer first sees a large white wall covered with seemingly odd groupings of text in a variety of languages. This wall is the backside of the dioramas, and the text consists of excerpts from the books contained within the dioramas. The odd groupings comprise elements of a skyline, most obvious is the Empire State Building shaped quotation at the far left of the wall. To either side of the bright wall is a short, dark hallway leading to a more dimly-lit and enclosed area that provides a stark contrast with the initial entryway. There the viewer encounters three adjacent dioramas which are set up to represent three climatic or geographic areas of the American continents—tropical, desert, and the northern Atlantic. These three distinct areas correspond with the birthplaces of either the author of each book on display or the piece of literature itself. The forty-some odd volumes range from 1895 to 2004, from Joseph Conrad to Roberto Bolaño.
Chronotope, the other half of the show's title, is taken from the writings of Russian literary theorist M.M. Bakhtin in which he defined the term as “the essential correlation of spatio-temporal relationships, such as it has been assimilated by literature.” A term more akin to Einstein's branch of physics, chronotope, which literally translates to “time-space,” could easily replace the literary term setting. This refers back to the dioramas and their representation of either the settings of the books they house or the settings in which the authors wrote them. This self-referential title and her incorporation of literature is not atypical of the artist, such as with Tapis de Lecture in her show, Nocturama, at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC) in Spain.
Commissioned by Dia Art Foundation as part of its recent partnership with the Hispanic Society, chronotopes & dioramas appears, in some ways, related Gonzalez-Foerster's recent show at London's Tate Modern, TH.2058. Known primarily as a video and installation artist, her “work is characterized by a quiet, intimate interrogation of contemporary urban life. Exploring cinematic conventions, temporality and subjective experience, her short films and installations recreate specific moments in which individuals intersect with places.” The Tate Modern installations and the Hispanic Society dioramas do just that. Whereas TH.2058 places the viewer within the futuristic installation filled with books and monumental sculptures, he or she maintains the role of outside observer in chronotopes & dioramas. Seeing the show is like examining the history of the future through recent written word in much the same way the past is studied via historic objects unearthed in archeological digs. Therefore, though the viewer is first confronted with the museum-like qualities of the display, the exhibit quickly presents a more science fiction feel, a genre for which Gonzalez-Foerster has a particular fondness as evidenced by some of her book choices. One looks through the glass front of each diorama to a world long gone, a place whose only legacy lies in the words left by its former inhabitants.
Like so many contemporary artists, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster challenges traditional notions of the answer to “what is art?” In chronotopes & dioramas, the artist acts more as a set designer, an area with which she is familiar having designed fashion displays for Balenciaga. The dioramas themselves were constructed and painted based on images created by Gonzalez-Foerster by a team from the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The books, though titles selected by the artist, are obviously not objects created by her own hand. Chronotopes & dioramas utterly embodies the terms conceptual and site-specific. The show's significance and function lies solely in the act of Gonzalez-Foerster adding to the Hispanic Society's canon expanding its scope.
I agree with the reviewer that Gonzalez-Foerster’s exhibition was a good example of conceptual and site-specific installation, but perhaps only when considering the artist’s intention and not the execution. I did not fully feel confident the concept she wished to convey came through in chronotopes & dioramas. The “science-fiction feel” the writer so accurately pointed out distracts from the focus on the Hispanic Society’s copious collection of literature. And the overly constructed (and not by her apparently) dioramas, although entertaining, left me feeling misdirected. The wall of text at the beginning of the show, however, perfectly expresses the essence of this show.
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