Art review: Performance/Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, in tribute to the opening of the arts district

by Sarah Blaskovich

DALLAS — You may have heard that things are shaking up in Dallas' arts district, as a handful of shiny new buildings may soon enhance our arts offerings exponentially. So what's the neighboring Dallas Museum of Art to do, its 25-year-old cousin? Two things: Celebrate their quarter-century birthday in concert with the birth of the arts district; and open a brand-new exhibit to tie it all together.

Performance/Art, an exhibit opened on Oct. 8, showcases opera, theater, and music through art. Don't be fooled by the title; there are actually no live performances during the exhibit. (Leave the live performances to All The World's A Stage, opened at the DMA in late September.) The exhibit preys upon the viewer as the performer, proving that even when we least expect it, we can become the art.

To lead us around the never-seen-before exhibit was curator Charles Wylie, a walking encyclopedia who explained the performances each of six artists sought to emulate. Wylie (not to be confused with Charles Wyly, namesake for the new Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre in the arts district) hand selected where each piece should go in the gallery. “We were going for a bit of a spectacle,” he said.

Performance/Art is presented in a large rectangular gallery, making it easy to wander about from sight to sight. Start with Eija-Liisa Ahtila's film Talo/The House. The film's scenes move in nonlinear format and depict a young woman as she loses her grip on reality. It's not an altogether “bleak freak out, as one might imagine,” Wylie advises, but it certainly showcases a chilling example of mental illness. The theater has three screens on four walls, each flickering with different camera angles of the same scene. The woman tells us, “I meet people. They live on my back and press their toes into my Achilles tendons.” Next thing you know, she's paranoid and pinning the curtains shut as her garden tiptoes into her living room. The result is sobering: Could this happen to me?

Across the hall is a glass sculpture called The Eye, created by Canadian artist David Altmejd with inspiration from the opera Doctor Atomic. This is the first true sense that the audience (ie, those peering at his gleaming sculpture) are part of it. The Eye is an explosion of mirrored glass, reflecting the light in the room and the people standing around it. It's an imposing structure with battered and fractured glass superimposed in the grandeur of the glimmering spectacle. Wylie proudly announced that the museum has recently acquired it for its permanent collection.

Next are Dallas artists Frances Bagley and Tom Orr's joint sculptures, created after the Dallas Opera's production of Guiseppe Verdi's Nabucco. Again we're part of their art: “Don't worry about it; you're on stage,” Orr says to his audience. We are standing in front of metal rods designed to look like the reeds on the Euphrates river bank. Behind it is a dizzying black and white striped wall, and the two together create a rippling effect. Nearby is a giant sculpture of a rodent portrayed as an idol and a tangle of industrial tubing hanging from the ceiling, mimicking the Hanging Garden in Nabucco. In a sense, the sculptures were placed so onlookers stand on the set of the opera.

In another corner is a film created by Yinka Shonibare, MBE. (Shonibare insists on putting MBE, Member of the British Empire, at the end of his name.) The film, void of any music or talking, shows a grandiose ball staged in the late 18th century and modeled after the opera Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball). The characters wear elaborate costumes made of dutch wax cloth. The heavy costumes rustle as they hit a striking pose with an animated “hah!” at each cadence. The dances continue in silence even after the king, played by a woman, is assassinated by another female leader. From there, the film runs in reverse, showing the cyclical rhythm of life. Wylie calls it “visually magnificent.”

The final artist's exhibit is from Guillermo Kuitca, an Argentinian artist who designed the curtain in the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, opening soon. Kuitca's works at the DMA are many, including four versions of the album cover of opera Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) by Richard Wagner. It's an art form that Wylie says will resonate with museumgoers. “This is the way we experience music these days -- through album covers.”

It's clear that the entire exhibit is all about the opera. In fact, every artists' inspiration came from an opera except for Ahtila's Talo/The House. Regardless, Performance/Art is worth a look.