The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. has aspired to provide its patrons with art in an array of unusual media, an ambition that the gallery's current exhibit, Visual Music, fulfills beautifully. An especially successful and coherent collection of 20th century pieces, Visual Music will awaken, energize and synchronize your senses. It's also your best opportunity to explore the theory of synesthesia, which deals with the ability of two different sensations, such as sight and sound, to merge with one another. The effect is dizzying, dazzling and disorienting--in a word, sublime.
The exhibit is divided into six mediums: painting, photography, film, light projection, computer graphics and immersive environments. To start off, the show presents a variety of paintings that do indeed inspire mental music. Passing paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe -- such as Music -- Pink and Blue II -- evokes the delicately melancholy sound of the sea lapping against a rocky shore. The exhibition's several pictures by Russian master Wassily Kandinsky, with their dense splotches of color, watery lines and patches of thin, veil-like paint, suggest a music that soars with rough urgency one moment and whispers quietly the next.
Out of context, in a different showcase or a permanent collection, these paintings would never raise the questions they do in this exhibit. For example: What exactly is man's relationship with music? How can something as simple as repeated vibrations of air enliven us, inspire us, move us? And can it be transmitted aptly through abstract art? Visual Music does not take pains to answer any questions, but it does an excellent job of pointing out that the two mysteries of music and visual creation are closely related.
From paintings, the exhibit cuts to film. Each of the gallery's featured pieces expresses an innate pulsation that is the union of movement and music. Most impressive are the crude, black and white movies from the twenties by the likes of Viking Eggeling and Walter Ruttman that wreak havoc on the pupils but delight the imagination. In one, an army of white blocks on a black screen imitates a symphony through flits, flutters, bounces, sashays, snaps and marches.
These early black and white films, using just light, darkness and a delicacy of movement, both weave together melodies and rhythms and express volume. They put the later color films by Jordan Belson and James Whitney to shame; in comparison, these projects are literal and heavy-handed.
Next, Visual Music segues from film to a display of machine-produced light projections called "color organs." Also known as "color music," "mobile color" or "lumia," these are the most intriguing and odd pieces in the exhibit. Popularized by artists like Thomas Wilfred in the mid-20th century, each color organ is displayed on a flat screen in a darkened room. Designated "Study in Depth" by Wilfred, these organs are unaccompanied by music. Instead, like the paintings, they choose to haunt the viewer with an ambiguous suggestion of sound.
The exhibit ends with a dymanic example of installation art by Jennifer Steinkamp, set in a darkened room on two ten-foot screens. In this 1995 piece, simply entitled "Swell," bullets of blue, purple and yellow are projected with a dizzying, video game-like effect. Zooming, shooting and buzzing noises bombard the ears. Beautifully disorienting and glowing, Steinkamp's creation provides an experience akin to what I imagine flying through a star would be like.
Visual Music,while inspired in concept, is not perfectly executed. Among other things, its selection of paintings is at times clumsy, even misguided. Though Kandinsky is often held up as an practitioner of the synesthesia theory, his painting is too heavily represented.
At other times, it seems as though the Hirshhorn's curator simply chose any art piece with the words "song," "music" or "aria" in the title. The Hirshhorn's open, fluid space is perfect for more conventional exhibitions, but harmful to an exhibit like Visual Music.Symphonies clash with computer-generated white noise; bossa novas clash with silence.
Yet despite its faulty presentation, the exhibit in its entirety bewilders. Walking through Visual Music, your senses are bruised and the flexibility of your mind is tested to its limit. This is a showcase that illuminates a shred of the delirious and frenzied glory of synesthesia and artistic creation. The union and merging of sound and sight into one sense is never completely achieved -- it may well be impossible -- but the sample whiff that Visual Music offers is sure to leave you hungry for more.
