Painting the IMA
When I first met Adrian Schiess in Miami in 2006, I was moved when he quoted Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs, an alternative travel guide to a mythical Japan. In this book, Barthes provides a lexicon related to establishing a meeting, or rendezvous, with the notion that the most meaningful events on any trip itinerary are in-person encounters. I paraphrase Schiess’s words to me on this occasion: “You only need to translate the words for a time and a meeting place, because everything else will occur when you are meeting in person, in real time. My artworks are like that.” Occasions for direct encounter—with people, architecture, artworks, and time—inform the process and outcomes of Schiess’s installations.
For the exhibition Off the Wall: Adrian Schiess, I invited Schiess to present his panel paintings and videos throughout the Indianapolis Museum of Art campus. Schiess placed works in direct relation to window views over the museum’s vast gardens, to works in a historic paintings gallery, to various interstitial spaces, and to the historic Lilly House on the IMA grounds. In all of these locations, Schiess’s works distinctly engage with their surrounding environments. Because of the dispersal of the show, visitors have ongoing personal rendezvous with the artworks as they navigate the exhibition. Schiess, who often designs his exhibition catalogues, decided to partially document the installation process for the first time with this book. Here, Schiess presents his own rendezvous with the building, collection, and IMA staff, which led to the final exhibition layout.
Adrian Schiess has titled this catalogue Elusive. When I asked him about this particular word, chosen in a language that is not his first, he faxed me this definition by way of explanation:
Elusive: Avoiding grasp or pursuit, incapable of being prolonged, tending to escape from memory, avoiding definition, hard to pin down or identify.
Schiess considers his artworks elusive because they resist static representation or totality: the works are, rather, ever-changing and unresolved. The high-gloss “flat” panel pieces reflect environmental attributes—such as people and places—that shift with each movement of the viewer. The works are surfaced with iridescent lacquer, which effects radical shifts in paint hues with changes in the quality and direction of light. By this means, Schiess says, reflected images and colors “escape from memory. What happens on the surface is elusive.”1 The artist also suggests that the scale and unconventional placement of the panels (resting flat on the ground or propped diagonally against walls) can make them appear elusive. In Schiess’s words, “the pieces themselves have a tendency to escape, especially when placed on the floor. A painting hanging vertically on the wall is very present, but things on the horizontal plane have a tendency to [appear] less present.” Indiscernible in profile, the works may be encountered unexpectedly and often reveal their faces only upon approach.
I would further suggest that Schiess’s artworks are elusive because they are neither reducible to single objects nor are they strictly parts of larger arrangements. They operate simultaneously as hermetic whole pieces and as constituents of broad networks. These networks change often, as each installation establishes new associations and contexts that become critical elements of the work in that location. At the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Schiess inhabited a range of spatial situations with a variety of recent works. The monochrome panels are in colors Schiess selected because they affected him viscerally, including colors that discomforted him. He wanted to see these evocative colors interjected into the built/lived environment on a larger scale. Other panels present scaled-up blurry photographs of his own gestural paintings on canvas or paint spills on pavement. These images are enlarged, photo-printed on aluminum, and coated with lacquer. In their transposition to the panels, the abstract and textured source material is rendered physically flat, materially unfamiliar, and without representational clarity. Schiess compares his panel works nevertheless to “wet paint,” due to the enticing luster and color of the surfaces. Unlike many conventional paintings, however, Schiess’s works are not hung on walls, and often are placed in locations that prevent them from being seen head-on in their entirety. This elusiveness is especially apparent when the works are placed on the floor, where would-be viewers must walk around them. The act of viewing in these cases is a physical process of navigation, which forces the shifts in light and movement of surface reflections that Schiess sees as fundamental to the artworks.
Schiess identifies his acts of arranging artworks as a process of “painting,” in that these are poetic and intentional gestures. The panels are presented as constituent components of multi-part assemblages or as deliberate interjections in exhibition contexts. Painting (2003–2005)2 is a lacquer-covered panel that modulates between hues of deep purple, violet, and white. This piece has been shown in various configurations over the years, usually in the company of other panels. In the IMA’s European Galleries, Painting appears alone, directly before a window, in Schiess’s 
career-first installation in a historical paintings gallery. Schiess intentionally placed this piece to literally reflect the early 20th century artworks that surround it, including works by Wassily Kandinsky, Raoul Dufy, Giorgio de Chirico, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Schiess installed his artwork knowing that the surrounding gallery display would change during the course of his exhibition. The artist specifically chose the site of an upcoming rotation in order to literally reflect the curatorial process of shaping and telling the story of art. In one sense, the panel points to the ways that museum presentations can establish historical canons; the work is, in a sense, complicit in bringing the gallery arrangement into its own web of associations. However, the piece, a contemporary work sited in the historical gallery, resists most taxonomical conventions. Schiess calls the situation of this panel a good signifier for “my thoughts and also my doubts about paintings. I think I’m not the only artist to try to resist classification in this historical context…. I like a lot that there is a window going out. It is a little bit dark, a little bit brown, you know? So maybe the window supports this metaphysical, psychedelic, or surrealistic aspect of my kind of painting.” Schiess’s panel points through the tinted window in the European Galleries to the activity in the adjacent Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion. There, the work is echoed by the profile of Painting (2006–2007) on the balcony floor. Viewing the interaction between these two works on either side of the window, Schiess envisioned a “cascading” set of reflections leading into other museum spaces and outside to the landscape beyond the entrance hall windows.
Painting (2003–2005) is by no means bound to this particular presentation format. The work has been seen in other, markedly different displays, including the 2004 traveling group exhibition Painting, curated by Ulrich Loock, which opened at Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal, and traveled to ZKM Center for Contemporary Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. That show featured fellow artists Herbert Brandl and Helmut Dorner. Schiess’s work Painting was initially seen as part of a grid of floor panels that probed into the unique architectural spaces of Museu Serralves, including a panel pushing awkwardly into an obstructed doorframe. At ZKM, where works by artist Christopher Wool were added to the exhibition roster, all four artists’ works were interspersed throughout the exhibition. Here, Schiess’s panels and videos on monitors were spread haphazardly (read: off the grid) throughout the exhibition space, with the paintings of Herbert Brandl suspended in the air overhead. Recalling the installation of Schiess’s panels as a reflection on light and color, Professor Peter Weibel, director of ZKM, said:
The panel paintings of Adrian Schiess placed on the floor of the ZKM Museum for Contemporary Art in the exhibition Malerei: Herbert Brandl – Helmut Dorner – Adrian Schiess – Christopher Wool, curated in 2004 by Ulrich Loock threw new light in a literary double sense. First, the panel paintings revisited the relation of light, color and paint, which has haunted the history of painting for centuries. Because of the specific surface of the panel paintings, the real light of the environment was reflected on the painting, changing the perception of the color. These colors have been reflected in real space together with real light, changing the perception of the space. The panel paintings became monochromatic objects, which changed both the surrounding space and their own surfaces under the influence of environmental light. Usually, painted color is frozen light. In the panel paintings of Schiess the light unfreezes and defrosts. 3
In this venue, Schiess’s panels became devices for reflecting new, colored light into the gallery space, actually affecting not only the environment but other artworks as well. Herbert Brandl, an artist with whom Schiess has a friendly rapport, suggested hanging his own large paintings over Schiess’s floor pieces. The deep rose pink of Schiess’s panels rebounded onto Brandl’s painted snow fields in a manner that Schiess refers to as “a real interaction” between the works. Schiess recalls that a conservator was concerned with the dramatic change in the tonality of Brandl’s paintings that ensued: “He said: this reflection is disturbing! …And me and Herbert we were really happy with this result. Because Herbert’s painting was very strong, it was a snow field. It was naked, just the white canvas. And on this white snow field you had then this rose reflection, it was really beautiful.” Quite apart from reflecting a procession of historic works as in the IMA configuration, in this scenario Schiess’s panels actively inflected another artist’s work, in an act of collaborative art-making, as it were. Much as Weibel pointed to the “unfreezing” of color and light in Schiess’s works, Schiess calls his panel paintings “in process” because of their vitality, because they change, and for their ability to animate.
Painting (2003–2005) was also shown in the Art Basel Unlimited fair in 2005. At art fairs in particular, Schiess prefers to personally install his artworks, when it is feasible. In those circumstances, the configuration of Schiess’s artworks in relationship to the art fair booth (what he terms the “crowded pieces”) is central to the work. To accommodate foot traffic, works may be propped against the wall or fan out around a tight corner (in this case, arranged by Schiess’s gallerists in his absence). Distinct from the sweeping floor installations in larger venues, Schiess’s fair arrangements make explicit the conditions and function of a commercial fair booth, where encouraging pedestrian access is a priority. Schiess can point, however, to at least one invitation from his gallerist Rosemarie Schwarzwälder to invert the conventions and expectations of the art fair booth: During the ARCO Madrid fair in 2006, Schiess collaborated again with Herbert Brandl to fill an entire fair booth, obstructing access to the space altogether.
Adrian Schiess similarly embraced and complemented the IMA’s unique circumstances, functions, and facility regulations in setting forth his Off the Wall exhibition installations. He attended not only to conservation and egress considerations, but also to the time of day that window drapery was opened in the dining room at the historic Lilly House and the frequency of foot traffic in the hallway where he placed his video installations. As ever is the case in Schiess’s work, the actual use and function of a place was inherently made visible through the selection of specific works and acts of accommodation in their placement (i.e., moving a panel to give access to a fire extinguisher or a pedestal where flower arrangements change regularly). Similar in effect to the “crowded” art fair pieces that elude the limitations of booth space, Schiess’s contributions at the IMA make evident institutional restrictions and particularities while also fancifully enlivening them.
Some of the other highlights of the IMA exhibition include Painting (2005), a green panel treated with iridescent lacquer that glows orange in direct light. This work is propped against a balcony wall in the Entrance Pavilion to specifically reflect the light-drenched span of windows surrounding the main entrance. The work, selected as the cover photograph for this catalogue, is intended by Schiess to “bring the outside inside.” Changes in daylight, foliage, and seasonal weather will alter the appearance of color over the course of the exhibition. Schiess also sited two installations in the Contemporary Galleries. In the Off the Wall gallery, his work Painting (2007) rests upright against the long title wall, partially obstructing Adrian Schiess’s own name. The image on this work is taken from a photograph of a colorful, gestural painting by Schiess, and its placement by a doorframe nods to the large-scale Abstract Expressionist works on view in the gallery behind it. Painting is placed in a balcony hallway adjacent to the museum’s central atrium, where it is visible from escalators and other gallery levels. Though the work is sited on the title wall in a prominent museum space, this piece in many ways is the most “elusive” in the exhibition. Painting stands in a narrow passage, flanked by columns, forcing viewing to occur only from strange vantage points: from a distance, with a partial view, or in too-close proximity.
On view in the Anna S. & James P. White Gallery is the largest construction of panels in the exhibition, incorporating four panel pieces in varying media, with one large pearlescent polyester piece draped over the top of the assemblage (five works total). Painting (2006–2007), also made specifically for the IMA exhibition, is the first work by Schiess to include a readily identifiable representational photograph on a panel. In this work, the artist describes his attempt to “keep an image” of a white flower on the surface, breaking from his traditional use of the lacquer to primarily reflect images from surrounding environments. Schiess defines the full reach of this installation as extending out of the window and into the galleries, saying, “We are showing only five pieces in the contemporary gallery, but everything around it becomes part of the show. And, like this, the show becomes much bigger.” In this arrangement, as throughout the exhibition, the works maintain ludic interaction with their broader circumstantial contexts, revealing new associations as time unfurls. For example, Schiess was excited to learn that the gallery adjacent to his contemporary gallery assemblage would host an exhibition of works by Ingrid Calame, with whom he had exhibited in the 2005 Albright-Knox group exhibition Extreme Abstraction. Some weeks after Schiess’s show was installed, Calame’s exhibition Traces of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway unveiled paintings based on her tracings of tire marks on the Indianapolis racetrack. Once the doors to Calame’s exhibition were opened, it was apparent that Schiess had placed a particular panel in especially close proximity to Calame’s works. Painting (2006) is taken from a photograph of paint spills on the pavement in front of Schiess’s studio in Provence, France. When I asked him about this placement, he confirmed that the association with Calame’s street stain paintings was deliberate. In his absence, Schiess’s work continues to wink at us with new and expanding references to the world outside of itself. Schiess considers the IMA exhibition his “largest” exhibition to date because of the breadth and dynamism of these associations.
The corridor to the DeBoest Lecture Hall on the ground level of the museum was selected by Schiess to be the site for presenting seven videos, a medium the artist has been using for over two decades. All of his videos are abstract, and most present monochromatic color fields that change hue at varying paces. The two projectors in this installation each host the same sequence of videos. Schiess chose to begin the two looped reels at different points, creating new and ever shifting color combinations. The artist originally created his videos specifically to play alongside the panels in circumstances where external light was not available, as virtual substitutes for natural changes in daylight. He has since displayed the videos separately as a means of insinuating his own time-based weather patterns into the built environment, in a gesture he calls “dictatorial.” Where the panel pieces reflect changes in light and atmosphere in two dimensions, the video projection pieces push these kinds of changes into architecturally inhabitable space.
By their reflective nature, Schiess’s artworks demand consideration of their position in relation to surrounding spaces, but Schiess does not insist upon being the agent of each configuration. The IMA arrangement, as Schiess has often stated, is just one suggestion, and is not unilaterally tied to his authorial hand. “The questions that come out about the place, about the collection, about the mood—this is ‘the painting,’” said Schiess during our Miami meeting. “I can come out to arrange them, but that’s just one example, a proposition.” He does not believe he must be present as author-arranger in order to retain the artistic intent behind his works. In cases where the responsibility of placement is left to a collector or curator, Schiess asks only that his work not be hung on a wall. He refuses to offer other instructions for presenting the work. In so doing, Schiess challenges other parties to become, in a sense, artistic collaborators and to reconsider their own relationship to their collection and the space being occupied. This is a form of institutional critique, as these questions, in fact, always surround the curatorial or collecting enterprise. When our team inquired about theoretical changes to the exhibition arrangement, in an effort to get to the heart of the artistic intent of this project, Schiess pointed out that the act of arranging artworks is always an act of curatorial (or other) authorship. “You don’t want the bears next to the birds,” he joked.
At the IMA, viewers activate the works through navigating the exhibition, either using a gallery map or on their own. By this means, the exhibition is also elusive because the experience of it is entirely indeterminate. Being installed in remote museum spaces, the many facets of this exhibition will be seen by visitors in varying order, yielding individually unique experiences. It is likely that some visitors will not see all of the works during one museum visit, or that others will happen upon the works accidentally in hallways or in Lilly House. The fragmented encounter of this exhibition yields experiences that are temporally and situationally dispersed. In Schiess’s words, “One can imagine an endless amount of reflections or images passing across the surface, but it’s open to the past because maybe a visitor remembers seeing it even five months earlier…. Maybe the weather was different or you were in different company.” The re-emergence of these works over time and space forms new networks, and empowers difference of experience.
Every piece in the IMA exhibition Off the Wall: Adrian Schiess has individual agency. However, much as the lacquered panel surfaces cause the eye to dance between luminous reflections and inherent surface materials, the museum-wide aggregation of Schiess’s works also prompts one to consider the part in relation to the much greater whole. The whole, in this case, includes the full IMA campus and the artworks, landscapes, and humans that populate it. While elusive, in this exhibition the panels and videos are operative participants in their environments, serving both to elucidate and provoke.
1 All quotes of the artist, unless otherwise cited, are from fax and telephone conversations, October 2006–October 2007.
