Attachment provides a space in which the collections of the Krannert Art Museum are unearthed, revitalized, and reimagined. It is a collaborative exhibition that brings to light the bonds between artist and subject, artwork and viewer, museum and object. The exhibition's conceptual framework places the diverse collection of works within a network of relationships to bridge gaps of time, space, culture, and medium.
Attachment asks viewers to rethink the way in which they view art, what they view, how it came to be viewed, and to consider the present encounter. The curators remind us that acts of accumulation are never stagnant; they are always active through processes of forgetting, revisioning, and recollecting.
Throughout the exhibition, I found myself drawn to the idea of memory as a necessary component of attachment. Memories elicit attachments and each of the works on display communicates this bond. Kara Walker’s Freedom, A Fable (1997), for instance, is a book that embodies a sense of intimacy in the experience of actually holding and reading the work. Imbedded with history and memory, it tells the story of an enslaved woman’s life after emancipation revealing the complexities and power structures of this fantasy of freedom. Walker’s pop-up silhouette cut outs trace prejudice and issues of race, gender, and sexuality as though in a dark fairytale dream. Walker’s attachment to a specific past is what makes this work so captivating. My own interest lies in understanding how we as viewers bond to and are captivated by the memories Walker illustrates, responding to attachments to the past, experienced in the present.
In the larger context of the exhibition Freedom, A Fable speaks fluently with the other works on display through this intimate attachment with particular people, places, and times. Memory, used as a tool of attachment, becomes a way to see Walker’s work in conjunction with such disparate objects as Andy Warhol’s Marilyn (1971) or Marcel Proust’s 18th-century settee. Attachments to celebrity and engagements with absence are densely packed issues in these works that produce a network of understanding through the idea of memory—those of the artist, the collector, the viewer, and the museum.
In this way, the attachments formed by memory create endless possibilities of conversational thought. When you start to consider a shared past that say an Ibeji statue from Yoruba culture has with a photographic series by Lorna Simpson, it becomes clear that both of these works have intimate memories vital to their meaning. They embody a spirit of memory whether it is that of the owner, the artist, or the subject. They have specific attachments to these people and now to the Krannert Art Museum through Attachment.
Attachment, curated by Amy L. Powell, Allyson Purpura, Kathryn Koca Polite with assistance from doctoral student in Art History Dana Ostrander is currently on display at the Krannert Art Museum and will be on view until December 12, 2015.
