Hessel Museum Of Art

A lovely museum in a bucolic setting. Hessel makes a great stop on a day trip from the city, easy to combine with visits to DIA Beacon or the Storm King sculpture park if you’ve got a car. If not – then you can’t do them all in one day, but be advised that the Hessel runs complimentary shuttles from Manhattan when they have openings. Beer, wine, soft drinks and pretzels at the opening are complimentary as well.
All in all, a great place. But couldn’t give it five stars because I’m not into the new shows. One is Haim Steinbach, an artist who never really got my juices running. His work is about shelving, display, minimalist art, the museum retail, etc. – a kind of third-​wave pop/​appropriation art (if you just read that and you were like «so what?» you feel me). What makes this show interesting – perhaps more so than others of his that I’ve seen – is what he did with the Hessel’s permanent collection. A cool thing about the Hessel is that it’s endowed with a small collection of important works of contemporary art but rather than put them up in the standard museum display they let invited artists and curators incorporate them in their shows, using unconventional and experimental display methods, the likes of which you would never see in your run-​of-​the-​mill museum. Steinbach put up this construction-​site scaffolding in the big gallery and arranged works above and below it, so you could glimpse the pieces (both museum works, Steinbach’s own stuff, design objects, knickknacks etc.) in horizontal and vertical layers, that made you think about the status of each thing as an object or artwork.
The other exhibition was Helen Marten, a young British artist. It was a smart pairing with Steinbach, though I like her work even less. It’s also about objects and display, and coming up with quirky convoluted relations between things. Everything is about weight, balance, and borders, and everything is solid and in tension. There are papery woodcuts that look flimsy but hold up to the weight of loaded key rings hanging off of them, for instance. The paintings have stuff attached to the bottom of the frames, so they don’t end with the canvas. It’s about surfaces and repetition, too – there are cans of olive oil positioned on the floor around the galleries, and the olives and vines from the logo are repeated on the wall – yet nowhere in the show do you find the mess of the oil itself. This is also true in her videos. Digital media can be slippery, glitchy, pixelly, liquid – but when Helen Marten gets her hands on it she makes everything robust and shiny and glossy, crafting digits into beautiful perfect objects, just as hard and solid as the commodities she appropriates in her sculptures. Yawn.
Great museum though!

Came here for my sister’s art show opening. She’s doing her masters in Curatorial Studies at Bard College and this art museum is affiliated to it. This college is quite prominent, as is the Hessel Museum of Art, and has housed some great art works. It’s also given a name to many curators that are now highly regarded. Granted, it’s in the ‘middle of nowhere’ but wow — it’s remarkable. From its design, to the space within and layout.