Experiential Public Art Pools
In Contemporary Art: David Hockney, Leandro Erlich, Elmgreen and Dragset
The subject of the swimming pool in Contemporary art can be seen as a statement on access, luxury, collective experience, isolation or transcendence as well as an exploration on visual form. Historically artworks depicting public baths have bridged all eras from the Classical to the Contemporary. The artists that I have chosen to showcase depict the subject as a metaphor for visual illusions, fragmentation and the unique deconstruction of experiential engagement, using the audience to project the work beyond the display or installation point through dissemination of user generated content. These approaches as well as the ways they each creator exhibits and explores public and private space extend the engagement with their audiences as experiential and sense oriented works.
In each example the nature of viewer shifts from the observer to participant. Elmgreen and Dragset deconstruct what we associate with familiar into a monumental symbolic object by removing standard function of the pool and placing it publicly in a way that is out of standard contexts.
“The pool has the ambience of California, the plenty-of-space good life from the 1950s and 1960s..And that is everything the Rockefeller is not, which is busy, east coast, dense and urban. We thought it would be interesting to put that symbol of the good, middle-class leisure life out in that environment.”
David Hockney’s exploration of the subject of pools spans many mediums and six decades of work and ranged from wave pattern murals in actual physical pools to a wide range of representational paintings, prints and photo collages. Themes of graphic pattern, fragmentation, intimacy and voyeurism permeate his explorations. The participatory nature of his physical pool designs at the Roosevelt Hotel enable the public to engage with his graphic patterns and cast themselves in an extended continuation of his visual tableau.
The implicit perpetuation of variations on authorship and continuity of reproductions connects audiences with the artist’s approach while expanding exposure and dialog beyond institutions and museums. Leandro Erlich’s Fake Swimming Pool installation creates two areas where the audience participates in the illusion of being underwater or above water. The distortion of waves separates the levels and creates an magician’s trick where boyancy and floatation are removed but the waves that separate the layers and the colors and shape of the object of the pool play a trick on the mind. The environment of the installation encourages photography and video capture and share unlike more traditional museum exhibition. The sensory aspects of sound and light play a factor in the experience of the pool as do the collective and public aspect of the display.
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below. If you have stories or pictures of the works from your experiences with them or have other artists that you think do interesting things with experiential installation poolside or otherwise please share in the comments.
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