ART INSTALLATION OFFERS VIRTUAL RESPITE
Museums and galleries everywhere are scrambling to create online content that will keep their shows alive and audiences engaged during the COVID-19 shutdown.
In Houston, DiverseWorks was one of the first to present an excellent alternative to a physical show. During the first week that people were advised to stay home, it published an adapted virtual version of Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin’s “50 States: Louisiana”on Vimeo.
The installment of an ambitious, yearslong project about the history of gay culture across the U.S., “50 States: Louisiana” opened at the MATCH gallery on Feb. 29 with a performance and a multichannel display with some large, wavelike soft sculptures.
I was sad that I hadn’t yet gotten there before the gallery had to close because the physical experience was important. But the evocative, single-channel video Vaughan and Margolin have made with the material for the online show does not seem like a poor substitute.
In fact, it’s hard to imagine a more poetic way to take the journey. You can focus and listen without distraction as the artists narrate, without sitting on a hard bench or lying on a beanbag with headphones in public.
A sampling: “Maybe this is an audio tour, or maybe it’s 22 audio tours — tours to sand bars and gay bars, and submarine ridges and colors and trenches and shipwrecks and scandals and reefs. Maybe it’s a set of directions along a stretch of the Gulf of Mexico, the way to get from New Orleans to a thin spit of sand stretching south from a barrier island protecting Mobile
Bay …”
The video is an hour long. That’s longer than most people normally would sit still to watch and listen to videos in a museum space. But everything has changed for now, hasn’t it? If you’re idle at home or need more than a quick diversion, this is a welcome escape.