September 2019
CMOA x SLOWDANGER x CITY OF PLAY
Tonight, the Carnegie Museum of Art keeps the lights low. Intimate Subjects is a Third Thursday 21+ event at the Museum, an interactive evening of performance, dance, games, ritual, and music, all designed around cultivating close-feelings between people. This is the third Intimate Subjects, and the second for which I have made a map / schedule. Attendees will receive a parchment print of the map, a gift and guide for the evening. I'm really pleased with how it came out. Intimate Subjects is tonight, from 8pm to 11pm. $10
In the late summer of 2019, the Carnegie Museum of Art hosted its final Third Thursday evening event. Across the first floor of the museum, performers from across the globe and across the city lit the museum up with dance, music, sculptural performance, interactive games, and live theatre. In addition to hosting an instance of A Feeling in the City, I also designed the map & schedule for the evening. Each attendee got a printed copy to keep. In this way, the map served as both a guide to the evening, and a retrospective of the performances held during it.
In essence, I sought to capture the visual impression of the event before it had taken place. It is a neat trick, and only possible thanks to the wonderful event logistics management which the whole team performed. With a schedule locked down well before the event, I had a whole week to draw this map.
Here are some of my thoughts from just after the event:
What a night!
This was the third Intimate Subjects event, an ongoing collaboration between the Carnegie Museum of Art, the dance troupe slowdanger, and City of Play. Intimate Subjects is just one of the many series and single-night Third Thursday events at the Carnegie Museum of Art - monthly evening socials, 21+, with a cash bar, and usually a dance floor somewhere in the halls. Intimate Subjects in particular began as a conversation about emotional connection to art - can evening guests be invited to draw deeply personal meanings from the collection and the space? What happens if they do?
I participated in the meaning-making-evening in two ways.
First, the light-and-inspiration ritual pictured above, A Feeling In the City. Every guest got their own genuine, museum-grade inspiratory light, to keep, and options for further engagement and instantiation of that fiery process. You can download and print your own lamps here.
Second, I illustrated the map and schedule for the evening, seen at the top of the post.
The map was printed on yellow-white cardstock/parchment, highly textured, giving depth & character to the single-tone spaces. Though similar to last year's Intimate Subjects map, which I also illustrated, this second try is significantly cleaner and clearer. Last year's map had much too much floor texture. This year's map is much more legible, and legibility is a prime requirement of useful cartography.
Making these maps is an intense process - because its imagery is drawn from both the artist's performances and the museum spaces they are performing in, I can't start drawing anything until the final schedule, artist list, and space list for the evening is set in stone. I made sure to keep my calendar open for the 10-14 days leading up to the event, but even so, the work spilled over the bounds of its appointed hours - hence the slip in the newsletter schedule these last two weeks. Now I know to pad my drawing time estimates another 10%!
I had a lot of fun conveying the essential character of each of the spaces we activated in the museum, as well learning about each fellow performer and including figures, scenarios, and poses from their past work.
Some detail shots and making-notes:
The figure layout for the Resonant Bodies room was inspired by a governmental illustration of the Slotin Criticality Accident, ringed by the circular bases of the green columns in that room, the Hall of Music Foyer.
The Lost Crate was displayed in the rarely-used Music Hall Entrance, perhaps the most ornamented room in the building, and an appropriate place for a fellow robber baron's lost treasures to be displayed. The Music Hall Entrance is perhaps most famously depicted in the 1983 movie Flashdance, as the ballet school's imposing front doors.
The Music Hall itself I stripped down to the stage and pipe organ, redecorated to be a futuristic and sacred celebration space. The pipe organ was first constructed by the firm Farrand & Votey, in 1895. It has had three significant rebuilds since then, extensive enough that each incarnation was its own unique instrument. You can delve into the technical history over at the Organ Historical Society's Pipe Organ Database.
From its construction in 1895 until 1981, the Carnegie Institute retained a Municipal Organist, often the institute's director, who played a biweekly recital series, for free, for the public. They reached their 1000th recital in 1909. By the time the series closed, they had hosted more than 4700 such free performances. The organ was last played in 2010, during the Organ Historical Society's national convention.The pipe organ I drew above would thus be a fourth rebuild, done some time between now and 5981 AD, adding spires, towers, monumental faces of powerful futurist musicians, and an angel.
As Robert J. Gangewere notes in his 2011 book Palace of Culture: Andrew Carnegie's Museums and Library in Pittsburgh, "such a restoration [of the organ]- and the further renovation of Carnegie Music Hall itself - awaits major funding, board advocacy, and grassroots support."
The Hall of Sculpture hosted Empathy Machine, a circular light installation, and a series of scheduled performances. The dancing figures are representational of previous performances. The moray eel and moorish idol fish have escaped from the Museum of Natural History, the closed, adjacent space, visible here as the bones of an irish elk, a saber-cat, and a dorudon.
The Hall of Architecture shows off two church-facades, some of the largest architectural replicas in the world; and the space's activities. the game of Small Precious Objects, and an interdimensional Marketplace.
These interstitial spaces at the far end of the map were compelling to draw, because they devolved into abstraction and landscape, suggesting no real end to the layout, no boundary between the museum and the city.
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For many of the guests at Thursday's event, this was their first or second time in the museum - brand new students starting their fall semester at one institution or another. I think we did a great job, the Museum, slowdanger, and City of Play, at welcoming and delighting these new neighbors.
Thanks to everyone on this list who came out to the event - What a night! What a feeling!
Many thanks to Laura Zorch McDermit for her tireless efforts to better the Museum and the City.
Warm regards as always to Greg & City of Play, and much love to slowdanger.
Alex, this one’s for you.
You can hear the sound
Of the underground trains
