AMERICAN LANDSCAPES

	July 2, 1999
	Correspondent Betty Ann Bowser reports on an unusual art exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art – an exhibit featuring art from New York.

JIM LEHRER: The making of an unusual art exhibition. It opened recently at one museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, with the artwork of another, New York's Whitney Museum. Betty Ann Bowser reports. BETTY ANN BOWSER: For any art exhibit the elegance of opening night is just the payoff to months of complex work behind the scenes. Beginning more than a year ago, we watched the curators of this show, Cathy Kimball of the San Jose and Beth Venn of the Whitney at work. BETH VENN, Curator, Whitney Museum: It's also quite large, 236 inches. CATHY KIMBALL, Curator, San Jose Museum: Oh, my God. BENN VENN: It's maybe too large. BETTY ANN BOWSER: We found there's a lot more involved than just nailing pictures on walls. Somehow they had to find works in the Whitney's collection of 12,000 that would say something fresh about a very old and familiar art form, the landscape. CATHY KIMBALL: Yes, I think that is definitely the challenge. And that is some of what we're grappling with here. And we don't want to tell a story that's already been told, or state the obvious. BETH VENN: And some of that is by including works that people aren't as familiar with, so they can begin to look at landscape in a whole new way. BETTY ANN BOWSER: The first briefing for the tour guides was a chance to see how Kimball and Venn shaped the show to that purpose. SPOKESPERSON: We wanted to introduce people first coming into the show to the more traditional notion of landscape painting in America. BETTY ANN BOWSER: So the first gallery had a lot of classic landscapes, including three by the ever- popular Edward Hopper. But there was the highly personal vision of Japanese-born Yasuo Kuniyoshi - SPOKESPERSON: And this kind of rock symbolizing perhaps death or the spirit. BETTY ANN BOWSER: And one in a cubist style by Oscar Bluemner. SPOKESPERSON: This is very opaque, very dense. He's really covered the canvas. BETTY ANN BOWSER: Viewers could compare styles and learn from the comparisons. SPOKESPERSON: I liked the Hopper. I liked the O'Keeffe, with the New Mexico mountain, the sense of this redness, and then these little valleys. I looked at that for a while, the sense of probably a little river trickling through that made it so lush, the contrast of the arid desert and the lushness of it. BETTY ANN BOWSER: Other works stood out from the first walk-through at the Whitney's warehouse, like this giant abstract painting by Joan Mitchell. They wanted to include it, but they knew its giant size would dominate the gallery. They solved that by carefully placing it so it held people's attention as they rounded the corner from the first gallery to the second one. It's an old curatorial technique: Put the grabber at the end of the gallery to lead people on. Then in front of the Mitchell, they placed a baffling contemporary wire sculpture, "Mount Tai" by Alan Saret. SPOKESPERSON: You know, I think we need to be clear that this is a very challenging piece, and it is a piece that people are going to question and wonder why it's in a landscape show. BETTY ANN BOWSER: The curators knew they'd have to brief the guides thoroughly on this one. They tried to show why what looked like a tangle of scrap wire could be a work of art. SPOKESPERSON: He uses many different kinds of wire, and not just because that's what he happened to find around. But, in fact, again it's a very deliberate choice to use different colors, these kinds of metallic wires as well as wires that are covered in plastic. You'll see a very little bit of kind of orange and yellow wire through here. BETTY ANN BOWSER: They also explained why it belonged in a landscape show. SPOKESPERSON: What Saret was trying to communicate in this work is kind of the force and the energy within this mountain, the kind of human force and the natural force, and this idea that the Chinese believe that the mountain is literally kind of filled with the spirit of people long gone. BETTY ANN BOWSER: The guides had to use their knowledge to help audiences grasp a work that makes no concessions to conventional notions of beauty. Responses varied from intrigued - WOMAN IN GROUP: I read the caption that it was a mountain, but if I were to look at it without that background, I would see it more animalistic. BETTY ANN BOWSER: -- to enthusiastic - MAN IN MEMBER: It just blows my mind when people are so imaginative as to take something like that kind of wire and make art out of it. You know, that's my kind of stuff. BETTY ANN BOWSER: -- to clueless. ANOTHER WOMAN IN GROUP: I don't know what it's called. It's sitting in the other room, and it looks like they forgot to take it to the dump. BETTY ANN BOWSER: But the curators think new works of art always will strengthen people's imagination. SPOKESPERSON: I didn't see that, but I can see what you're saying. BETTY ANN BOWSER: And the head of the Whitney, Maxwell Anderson, thinks a good show should include some surprises. MAXWELL ANDERSON: At the end of the day, a lot of what can happen in front of an object is just serendipitous. It's just a casual observation by someone who draws in their own life an example from a work of art, which may have no real connection to their life. That kind of coincidental arrival of a visitor into a space like that can be magical. BETTY ANN BOWSER: But the show had to do more than just expose viewers to individual works of art. The curators were also trying to show the progression of landscape art in this century, from the famous and familiar to recent works, where the images are sometimes recognizable, but not always easy to understand, like this work by Fred Tomaselli, featuring a desert plant at dusk. Superimposed over it were hundreds of pills and marijuana leaves arranged in patterns to evoke drug-induced fantasies; or works like this that made ironic or highly political comments on how Americans have treated the land. This work by Roger Brown shows the effect of oil spills on wildlife. And this photograph by Richard Misrach shows leaching chemicals in the desert. To follow the whole storyline, viewers had to make connections between different works and different eras, an easier job for a knowledgeable viewer like Misrach himself. RICHARD MISRACH, Artist: What's really amazing for me is to see my work surrounded by all my heroes, people like James Turrell, and Michael Heizer, and Robert Morris, all these people - it's just very exciting. And what's really interesting is the way that their work bounces off my work, something I hadn't really thought about, and now seeing it together like that, it's pretty wonderful. BETTY ANN BOWSER: But others didn't look for any connections. YOUNG MAN: I look at each picture individually. I didn't really follow a storyline very much. WOMAN: Actually, we just sort of -- I mean, we have the write-ups, but we just sort of walked through and looked at what we liked. BETTY ANN BOWSER: So you were more focusing more on individual pieces? WOMAN: Right. BETTY ANN BOWSER: The show had one further purpose: It had to convince people to care about the museum as well as the art. San Jose itself has grown from a farm town to a major American city in a mere generation, and is now trying to shed its image as a cultural backwater. Museum director Josi Callan thought the solution was to make a partnership between her museum and the Whitney. She knew the Whitney had a glittering permanent collection of American art, but a shortage of gallery space. The San Jose Museum had enough space, but only a small permanent collection. After four shows, Callan says the collaboration has worked. JOSI CALLAN: Someone said to me yesterday that he has seen more of the Whitney's collection here in San Jose than he has ever seen when he's been in New York, and that's pretty remarkable. I think it has certainly added to the scholarship of American art, for students, for educators to be able to come and see this work. It has certainly attracted a new level of patron to the museum. BETTY ANN BOWSER: Attendance figures also seem to indicate the collaboration has worked. The museum's audience has tripled since it began five years ago. For a young museum with high ambition, it's clearly a vote of confidence in the future.