On All Sides

When visitors walk into the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale next month, they may have trouble believing their eyes. There before them will be a crazily tilting, garishly colored mock-up of Chicago (see color opposite), including a 14-ft.-long Michigan Avenue Bridge crowded with traffic and pedestrians, a view of Michigan Avenue itself with gigantic figures of Playboy's Hugh Hefner and Mayor Richard Daley towering above the skyscrapers. Before visitors are done, they will be expected to stoop, sidle and squirm through and around painted plywood installations representing the Loop's elevated trains and a mock "Historic Arch" decorated with a shimmying Little Egypt and Skyscraper Pioneers Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler.

They may be baffled--Abraham Lincoln, for instance, looks confusingly like a Marx Brother and the only well-known Italian is Al Capone. But judging from an earlier Chicago gallery showing of Red Grooms's work, they will leave delighted. And why not? The whole construction is a cross between a set from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Disneyland. Is it art? Directors of museums and owners of art galleries insist that it, and similar installations, are. The general term for them is "environments"; their aim is to box the spectator within a micro-universe and bombard him from all sides with wacky sights, weirdo sounds and otherworldly sensations, ranging from the feeling of weightlessness to hopped-up, psychedelic hallucinations. So popular with the general public have they become that dozens of contemporary museums and galleries feel obligated to display at least one major environment a year.

Sex-Murder Cave. Not all environ ments contain figurative art. Buffalo's recent "Second Festival of the Arts Today," staged at the Albright-Knox Gallery (TIME, March 15), included five abstract environments. Drollest among them was the Pneumatic Garden of Eden, created by M.I.T.'s Otto Piene, in which huge, air-filled plastic tubes waved in the air like undersea coral growths in a darkened room lit at shin level by slowly flashing lights. Delicately disturbing was Lucas Samaras' Mirrored Room No. 2, part of the Albright's permanent collection. The room (see overleaf) was plated with mirrors on the walls, floor and ceiling. Looking up, festivalgoers could see themselves, standing on their heads a thousand times; looking down, they could see themselves again, plunging like a jack-in-the-box into the abyss.

Samaras traces back his fascination with rooms to youthful visits to Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum, where he used to stand entranced in the period rooms. "There was no reference to today," he recalls. "You were overwhelmed, even seduced, into a past age." His mirror rooms fulfill a similar function today by allowing the viewer to experience weightlessness and the expanding universe of tomorrow. Red Grooms traces back the genesis of his Chicago to his boyhood efforts in Nashville to duplicate the Ringling Bros. Circus in his own backyard and to his student days in Italy, where he toured with his own puppet show. For Grooms, the progression was from canvas, to collage, to "stickouts," to full-scale environments, which he likes to call simply "installations."

But all today's practitioners acknowledge the pioneering efforts made by New Jersey-born Allan Kaprow, 40, who a decade ago began creating recognizable environments. One of the earliest was his 1962 Words; it consisted simply of random words lettered on pieces of paper that spectators were invited to staple at random onto the walls of a room. The idea, Kaprow explains now, was to create an intentionally sloppy, three-dimensional roomful of random art, in the abstract expressionist mode of the 1950s, when the wall-filling action canvases of Jackson Pollock were already being referred to as "environmental painting." Kaprow was also reviving and extending the then quiescent Dadaist tradition. One of his inspirations: the wondrous Merzbau assembled by German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters between 1924 and 1933. It consisted of rooms full of wood and plaster along with oddments culled from junk heaps, including a Sex-Murder Cave, which housed a red-stained bro ken plaster cast of a female nude.

Rapid-Fire Skeletons. Kaprow soon moved on to "happenings," a term that he coined (the distinction, he points out, is that "an environment is set up in a defined space, a happening is a theatrical performance, or continuing activity"). Artists who followed in his wake have moved a long way from his early haphazard, boisterous ways. Luminal artists first experimented with the pulsating strobe effects and psychedelic projections that have since moved into discotheques, ballets and boutiques; the newest and most radical works are apt to be calm, cool and minimal. A case in point is Dan Flavin's "Indoor Routines," constructed of 54 pink and gold fluorescent tubes, which turned the main floor of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art into a lurid, luminal glen.

Other environmentalists see their works as means to engage the viewer in a new kind of emotional release. New York's Tony Martin, who designed light displays for San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium and Manhattan's Electric Circus, is currently showing his Game Room in Manhattan's Howard Wise Gallery. As each visitor steps onto one of the four sets of marked footprints (red for fire, blue for water, yellow for air and green for earth), he triggers photoelectric cells that set in motion a rapid-fire sequence of images, lights and sounds. Nature lovers (green) find themselves contemplating a skeleton emerging from a pregnant woman, a wheat field, a graveyard. "People become part of the art object," Martin explains. "They score it. They compose it. I supply the format."

Inside Looking Out. Ralph T. Coe, assistant director of Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Gallery, is betting that environments will have an expanding role. "Form, as we have known it, is disappearing in favor of the container, which can occupy real space," he says. "Instead of looking at art through a window, we can be inside looking out." To demonstrate their variety, he is staging later this month an exhibition of eight environments which will utilize $350,000 in free labor and donated industrial materials. Expense apart, environments pose other problems; collectors, for instance, are in a quandary over where to put their purchases.

If the art form continues, museums may yet have to store them like opera sets in warehouses or, like the wooden triumphal arches of the past, they may simply be demolished once the fete is over. Whatever their future, right now environments with their fun-house ambiance are the latest crowd catchers, full of shock and fun--qualities that contribute to make the present art scene the liveliest ever.

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