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Folding Instructions

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Mar 28 2008

Hi. I’m Phillip, and I work in the museum’s Education division. I’ll be posting periodically about exhibitions in Star Studio. Star Studio is a gallery where work by an artist is paired with an opportunity for visitors to respond to the exhibition by creating artwork of their own in a drop-in studio. Our current exhibition is Squares-Folds-Life: Contemporary Origami by Robert J. Lang. The artist is a former laser physicist who applies his knowledge of mathematics and science to the development of extremely complex and realistic origami sculptures. One of the works featured in the exhibition is Maine Lobster, opus 447.

Maine Lobster, opus 447

In the gallery, the finished work is shown alongside an 8’ x 4’ graphic panel that depicts the 113 steps developed by Lang to transform a square of paper into a realistic lobster with articulated legs and spindly antennae without making any cuts to the paper. I included the large print of the folding instructions in the design of the exhibition with the idea that it would help visitors understand how Lang coaxes such forms from the paper while adhering to the “rules” of origami. The step-by-step instructions are the same as those that would appear in any of the multiple books that Lang has published, and the implication is that if you possessed sufficient origami folding experience and skill you could follow them and make a lobster of your own. I am sure that a skilled origami artist would respond to the instructions in that way, but for most of our visitors, the effect is altogether different. Seeing exactly how the lobster was made does not demystify the process. Looking at each step makes the final piece seem more astounding and improbable, not less.

One of the great things about working in a museum with a large and varied collection is the way that dialogues between works of art sometimes appear unexpectedly. If you are standing in Star Studio, near the instructions for the lobster, and you look directly across the main hall you can see Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing No. 652. Thinking about the impact of displaying the instructions for the production of a work of art along with the finished piece while LeWitt’s mural is in your peripheral vision, some conceptual links between the two artist’s practices begin to emerge. Lang composes and diagrams the origami sculptures that he creates, and gives them titles that include an opus number, like a musical composition would. On his website, Lang describes the folding diagrams for each of these compositions as “…serving the same purpose that a musical score does: it provides a guide to the performer (in origami, the folder) while allowing the performer to express his or her own personality through interpretation and variation”. There is a parallel here with LeWitt’s practice of providing instructions for the production of his wall drawings and accepting the idiosyncrasies of the execution of those instructions by different hands. I’m not arguing that we should think of Robert J. Lang as a conceptual artist, but it is worth considering the ways in which some of Lang’s instructions, like those pictured here wouldn’t seem out of place in LeWitt’s body of work.

113 steps developed by Lang to transform a square of paper into a realistic lobster

Filed under: Exhibitions, Public Programs

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Exhibitions, Public Programs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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