Chicago artist Brendan Fernandes doesn’t have to neatly fit his work into one category. “People ask, ‘Is it a prop? Is it a sculpture? Is it a work of art?’ And I’m like, ‘It’s all those things,'” he said on the phone recently.
His longstanding interest in fusing dance and sculpture has now turned to the work of early 20th century artist William Edmondson. Fernandes created a piece that is featured in a retrospective of Edmondson’s practice, “A Monumental Vision,” which runs through September 10 at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
In showcasing Fernandes’ work, The Barnes joins a number of institutions and artists around the world who combine the media of dance and sculpture to question how people interact with museums and the visual arts. The show’s curators, James Claiborne and Nancy Ireson, hoped Fernandes’ dance piece, created in response to Edmondson’s stone carvings, would “encourage new ways of seeing,” Ireson said. The work ‘Returning to Before’ can be seen as a continuous live performance in the museum from Friday.
Claiborne recalled hearing Fernandes, a self-taught artist from Tennessee, give a lecture at Rutgers University in 2022 discussing the point at which “objects become fine art and at what point they can be touched.” Claiborne added that this sparked his interest in how “museums often decouple artworks and objects of spiritual and cultural significance from their original context” and helped him come up with the Barnes Project.
Fernandes said that “Returning to Before” was “an hour long piece, but there are times when the dancers become statues.” They stop to think or to rest, but also to mimic the positions of Edmonson’s sculptures. “They are meditating,” he added. “They create this space of tranquility in the museum.”
“Museums are choreographed spaces,” Fernandes said, adding that choreography is “a set of rules” that people follow. At the Whitney Museum in 2019, Fernandes exhibited ‘Master and Form II’, a sculptural work of black scaffolding made in a steel cage. In performances that required considerable physical stamina, ballet dancers hung, balanced on, and jumped parts of the structure.
“You go to a museum, you don’t touch things, you don’t talk,” he said. In works like “Master and Form II,” he “played with those etiquettes and transformed them,” he said.
Just as Fernandes’ work interacts with Edmondson’s sculptures at the Barnes, American artist Carrie Mae Weems has used dance to give new meaning to long-standing visual work. In her 2013 video piece “Holocaust Memorial,” Weems moves reverently between the pillars of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, clapping and waving her arms.
There has been much debate about how visitors interact with the monument, which opened in 2005, including criticism of people for taking selfies or posing for other photos between or even on the grid of pillars.
Weems’ movement between the memorial’s objects, also captured on camera, was intended to emphasize the “shared sense of struggle” between black and Jewish communities, according to a quote from the artist in a recent retrospective of her work at the Barbican Center in London. At an exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany, last year, Weems showed still images from the series “Holocaust Memorial” for the first time.
Prior to these more recent works, American artist Nick Cave spent much of his career bringing dance and sculpture together. Since 1991, Cave has created more than 500 “sound suits” – vibrant, wearable sculptures – that have been displayed in museums around the world. Cave spent a lot of time thinking about how different museums separate works of art from their original purpose, he said
The sound suits have also been worn in numerous dance pieces in art spaces, with the movement of the performers in the suits producing the ‘sound’. For Cave, the idea of sculptures in museums lends itself to interpretation, he said. “A sculpture is something that you encounter in its full form from all sides. We move around a sculpture, we come in and out of a sculpture. In my case, one can be the bearer, or one can imagine the sculpture in a performative context.”
Like the Barnes Foundation collaboration between Fernandes’ dance and Edmondson’s sculpture, Ireson said museums and galleries were looking for “new ways to stay relevant.”
Movement puts people in “a contemplative space,” Claiborne said, which can open up new ways to engage with visual arts.
He added: “Dance becomes a way in which stationary objects are given a new life.”
