You'll Love the Unmuseum

(first published in The Cincinnati Post June 9, 2003)

One of the most popular stops in the new Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art is likely to be the UnMuseum, the sixth (top)-floor space devoted to interactive exhibits for children.

"One in five CAC visitors comes on a school tour," said curator of education Lisa Buck. "Children love contemporary art. They really get it. They don’t ask questions about whether or not it’s art. They look at it with fresh eyes."

Opening to the public at 10 a.m. Saturday, the UnMuseum – short for the Sara M. and Patricia A. Vance Education Center - will offer plenty to delight their imagination, from a dripping robotic tree to a spunky toy piano with a voice like a pipe organ. With 12 exhibits by six artists, the 7,400-square-foot facility is a wonderland for kids and adults, who can step up to a podium and "conduct" the Cincinnati Symphony or play unstuffy music by pressing the keys of an inflatable vinyl piano.

"Why should it just be for kids? Why can’t it be for us, too?" said CAC director Charles Desmarais.

Beginning Sunday and continuing through Aug. 31, the CAC will host Family Sundays from 1 to 5 p.m. every other Sunday at the UnMuseum. Admission is free to CAC members and included with CAC admission for visitors ($3.50-$6.50).

Seven of the UnMuseum exhibits are musical, all by sound artist Anthony Luensman, himself an amateur musician. Luensman, 36, who designs regularly for Saw Theater (he and Mark Fox did the giant puppets seen in Cincinnati Opera’s 1999 "Faust"), plays flute, saxophone and keyboards after-hours with the electro-acoustic Current Quartet. He studies voice with soprano Blythe Walker, whose singing he sampled for the UnMuseum’s "Singing and Ringing Chandelier," a doorbell-activated fixture over the walkup entrance that spouts The Queen of the Night’s aria from Mozart’s "Magic Flute" and does a little shimmy to boot.

Those who come in the main entrance (by elevator) are in sculptor/installation artist Andrea Zittel’s world, a hands-on activity area where kids can create their own artworks. "The most interactive of all is when you make something," said Buck. The "A-Z Art Lab" is two sets of stacked terraces, not "little tables, chairs and cabinets like a classroom."

"UnMuseum" is spelled out in 22-inch high, whimsically decorated letters – molten crayons, rear-view mirrors, goldfish, etc. A blue neon sign identifies "Paavo’s Hands" (named for CSO music director Paavo Järvi), a podium surmounted by a proscenium arch where aspiring conductors can indulge their fantasies, complete with applause. Placing a hand inside the arch activates excerpts from the CSO’s latest CD (Stravinsky’s "Firebird" Suite). Wave it around and you can hear them all mixed up.

Press a button on the wall and rock legend Peter Frampton’s guitar sounds through a pair of bicycle horns attached to the ceiling. Take a turn at the joystick across from "Steel Drums" and the big cylindrical drums will rumble impressively and tingle your hands. All are Luensman creations.

Against the back wall is New York architect Allan Wexler’s "Hypar Room" (for "hyperbolic paraboloid") where six sets of chairs and tables are mounted on a raised, curvey floor. You can walk under the floor and see how it’s made (using straight pieces of lumber only).

Younger kids will make a bee line for Kim Abeles’ "Leaf Lounge," where they can take off their shoes and tumble among more than 450 hand-made, stuffed leaves authentically reproduced five times actual size and strewn on a bed of bouncy foam. There are huge palm leaves, tiny bayberry and everything in between, said Abeles, who videotaped trees in different wind conditions, from gentle to "very violent," to project onto the wall behind the lounge.

Luensman’s "Overblown Piano" encompasses one "octave," but what you get when you press the vinyl keys is a mélange of microcompositions, including all kinds of ambient sound, by New York composer Paul Hogan. Two rooms are devoted to Paul Tzanetopoulos’ "Color Complex," where you can switch on towers of colored light and see what the world would look like if light were only blue, red or green.

Sprouting inside a six-inch pool in the back, "The Growing and Raining Tree" – or "The Tree" - is sure to become one of the CAC’s most popular destinations. Draw near and the iridescent-skinned robot responds to your presence by raising (or lowering) its branches and dripping water into a pool according to sequences programmed into a computer.

There are four interactive areas around the pool," said Chico MacMurtrie, artistic director of Amorphic Robot Works in Brooklyn, creators of "The Tree." "It may go up or down or drip for you. It’ll change as you move around the pool." The drips are "rhythmical" he said, giving the exhibit a musical dimension.

The UnMuseum was the brainchild of the CAC’s former education curator Peggy Sambi (now education director at the Cincinnati Art Museum). Buck came to the CAC in 1998 to generate ideas and bring them to fruition. The name, said Desmarais, was chosen to avoid "the three scariest words to many Americans, contemporary, art and museum: ‘I don’t want to know about art. I’m conservative, not contemporary. Museums are stuffy and old and not a place where I want to spend my time.’

"’UnMuseum is simply to tell people it’s not something you expect. Don’t be afraid. Unravel your expectations of what a museum is and what contemporary is."