Alex Faltas, a 6-year-old art lover, prefers to sit on the ground. “As long as I’m sitting against something,” he said.
The something in this case was his mother, Danielle Huthart, who had brought him to the Park Avenue Armory to see “Clinamen,” a sonic installation by the French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. At the center of the Armory’s Drill Hall, a large wooden platform had been built, with cutouts for three turquoise pools. Each pool holds hundreds of bowls that gently collide, thanks to a motor-driven current, creating musical notes. Around the pools on a recent weekday afternoon, dozens of visitors sprawled. Some sat in the lotus position, some knelt, some stretched full-length. One patron lay with cloth beneath his head and might have been asleep.
Though the platform slopes up to something like benches at the back, far away from the pools, there is little formal seating at “Clinamen,” and even less at “Lightscape,” a film and music installation by the Los Angeles artist Doug Aitken, currently running at the Shed. (There is a small wooden structure meant for visiting musicians and vocal ensembles, which daytime visitors sometimes repurpose.)
Summer is typically a time of sitting on the ground — at the beach, at the park, poolside when all of the loungers are taken. This posture is scarcer in museums and museum-adjacent spaces. (Guards have been known to intervene when patrons plop down.) Though “Lightscape” and “Clinamen” are more refined experiences than institutions like the Museum of Ice Cream or the Museum of Illusions, they have borrowed some of the playground informality of these spaces, leaving it to viewers to decide on the best position — standing, squatting, supine, prone — to enjoy the art.
Informality is well and good, particularly for works that live between genres — sound and sculpture, music and film. Is it comfortable? For the 6-year-olds attending, sure. For the rest of us, it depends on the state of our discs and joints. Multimedia art is often challenging, provoking. Now, if you lack natural padding or a parent as bolster, it is also potentially bruising.
“We haven’t had any complaints,” Rebecca Robertson, the Armory’s president and executive producer, said in a recent interview.
Places like the New Museum and MoMA PS1 will often provide cushions for visitors. But Aitken, the artist, believes that seating, fixed or otherwise, would detract from visitors’ abilities to choose their own angle on the installation’s seven screens, which show fragmented scenes of Southern California life, set to a minimalist score. “One of the pitfalls of cinema is you’re asked to choose a perspective point and you sit there passive,” Aitken said in a recent interview. “I’ve always been much more committed in trying to find ways to look at a larger field of experience and to empower the viewer more.”
“Lightscape” invites a more active experience. “You weld together your own story,” Aitken said.
Viewers who attend “Lightscape” multiple times often observe that he has made changes to the 65-minute film, Aitken said. He hasn’t. But where they’ve sat or stood has changed it for them. “It has a different dance with you,” he said.
Boursier-Mougenot, 65, also resists prescribing how “Clinamen,” which he described as “music for the eyes” and “like a caress on your retinas,” should be experienced. He compared the Armory space to a garden, a refuge. (Many refuges have chairs. But still.) “I don’t want to signify it,” he said on a recent video call. “They can say I can sit here, I can lay down here, I can walk around the pool.”
Kin Tam, an usher at the Armory, has seen all of that and more as he’s observed tens of thousands of visitors come through. “Some people even bring a sheet, a blanket, they come prepared,” he said. “All of that’s welcome, all of that’s permitted.”
For Huthart, who had brought her son and two friends, that people watching was part of the appeal. “It’s just as interesting as the exhibition itself,” she said, with her son on her lap.
Her friend, Valerie O’Halloran, also enjoyed the exhibition. But she wasn’t sold on sitting on the floor. She couldn’t stop worrying about where the shoes of other patrons — shoes that had walked across the spot of wood where she now sat — had been. “It’s the germy aspect for me,” she said, with a look of mild revulsion, as the bowls and water chimed and blooped beside her.
Aitken, 58, doesn’t mind sitting unsupported. “I don’t feel any discomfort,” he said. But apparently not every attendee agrees. Alex Poots, the artistic director of the Shed, has already started asking for a few folding chairs to be brought in for the musical activations, even though chairs limit perspective. There would be a further intervention.
“I probably shouldn’t say this, but yesterday I asked for 50 cushions to be brought out of storage and we’re going to have them for the next one because we’re learning,” he said. “We need to listen to our audience.”
