| If the first two floors are places for art historians to discover the breadth of the Katzen and Watkins Collections, the third floor is the place to find some of the sharpest of today’s cutting-edge art. And it is here, at the top of the museum, that we encounter the enigmatic source of that all-encompassing scent of the woods.
Emilie Brzezinski, Forest III, 2005, 30 sculptures 12 feet to 16 feet high |
There is, indeed, a forest. Carved tree trunks loom like giants, transformed by Virginia sculptor Emilie Brzezinski into monumental artworks and then, incredibly, hoisted to the museum’s topmost gallery space. These sculptures can be found both in the sculpture garden and in the third-floor rotunda. “It’s about the power of nature, the mystery—the work is overpowering, like being in the woods is,” says Rasmussen. The AU Museum with its grand architecture is a perfect site for the display of massive, gutsy sculptures that few spaces can handle. But it also has space for intimate works. Bruce Conner and William Allan may not be as well known as some artists in the Katzen and Watkins Collections, but for those in the know, they are not only big names—having attained a near-mythic status among other artists—but their work is so rarely on exhibit that displaying both at once is a coup that establishes the museum’s credibility as a hip contemporary space. “Everyone knows about them,” Rasmussen says, “but nobody gets to see them.” William Allan’s elegant fish, each of which can take months to paint, are not only “very, very beautiful—so finely done, with tiny, tiny touches of watercolor,” but are part of a narrative context that many artists love for its eccentricity and stubborn anticommercialism. Allan also crafts rambling tales, displayed at AU as text, that are by turn philosophical, witty, and stubbornly down-to-earth, like those that concern his fisherman alter ego, “Salty,” an ordinary guy who lives to fish. 
William Allan, Rainbow (soda creek), 2004, watercolor, 20 by 28 inches, John Berggruen Gallery
Then there’s the curiously named After Bruce Conner: Anonymous, Anonymouse, and Emily Feather exhibit. It appears that Conner, a legendary Beat-generation artist, announced at the age of 65 in 1999 that he has officially retired from art. His retirement would seem to spell the end to new exhibits of his meticulous, even obsessive inkblot drawings that invite the viewer into a disconcertingly personal realm that blurs the lines between interpretation and projection. But Conner has, evidently, trained a coterie of unknowns—Anonymous, Anonymouse, and Emily Feather—to carry on his work. And although they will never be seen in the same place as Conner, they are carrying on his quirky and fascinating legacy. From the art-world buzz surrounding the third-floor exhibits to the famed names in the Watkins and Katzen Collections, the new AU Museum proves that it is more than a fresh landmark in the nation’s capital. It’s a living space that entices visitors to explore the arts with wide-open eyes and curious minds. top |
