He Pioneers a New Way to Look at Art : Lecture: Controversial artist Fred Wilson tells a UCI audience how he exposes museums’ assumptions about objects and display.

Several weeks ago, on a trip to Seattle, I wandered through several galleries in the new downtown building of the Seattle Art Museum. Several things about some of the installations of art from various cultures seemed particularly novel and apt.

In the African section, a case showing traditional garments and other objects also held a dark business suit--a typical “costume” for contemporary urban African men. In a gallery of modern American art, a Morris Louis painting was hung adjacent to two leather couches and a coffee table--just the way such a piece might look in an upscale home.

At the time, I just assumed such display tactics were a testament to the museum’s curatorial savvy. Monday night, during a lecture by artist Fred Wilson at UC Irvine’s Nixon Studio, I learned otherwise.

Wilson had made the various large and small adjustments to the galleries at the Seattle museum as his slyly revisionary piece, “The Museum: Mixed Metaphors.” It is one of several projects he has carried out in museums, galleries and historical societies in order to uncover some of the hidden assumptions art institutions tend to make about the meaning of the objects they display.

After working as a guard, art handler and education staff member in museums in his native New York, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Modern Art, Wilson said, “I began to get some notions about what was happening to the viewer inside these spaces. . . . I had some vague notions about how those environments made you feel, one way or the other, about the art.”

He began testing his theories in the late ‘80s. For one of his earliest projects, in 1987, Wilson redesigned three rooms of the Longwood Arts Project, located in a former public school in the South Bronx.

In one room, designed to imitate the sterile “white cube” of the typical contemporary art gallery, work by 30 artists was displayed in the usual manner. Another room, painted and lighted to resemble a small regional history museum, contained different work by half of the artists. A third room contained different work by the other 15.

One piece in the “history” room was a pile of human heads made of ceramic, surrounded by a white barrier installed by Wilson. His label, which suppressed the artist’s name, read simply: “Pile of heads, ceramic, found Williamsburg area, Brooklyn, late 20th Century.”

Schoolchildren seemed entirely satisfied with this explanation of the piece, Wilson said. A visiting curator didn’t even realize the work on view was by an artist she had exhibited in her gallery the previous month. The anonymous, pseudo-ethnographic treatment of the artists’ work “really changed the way you viewed the art and the artists,” Wilson said. “The works lost their individuality. The artists lost their humanity. Even I, who knew all the artists, was feeling some of these things after I installed the pieces.”

Wilson turned the third space into a “salon,” complete with red velvet walls, a luxurious rug and harpsichord music playing in the background.

“Everything seemed to have a certain authority,” he said, “a certain power associated with wealth.”

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For Wilson, a black man who says he is familiar with the feeling of being an outsider in white culture as well as in the formal structure of museum exhibitions, this experiment was “a real watershed event.” Formerly a sculptor of large, outdoor works, he began devoting his energies to making work specifically meant to be shown in spaces he designed.

For the downtown New York gallery Gracie Mansion he made “The Colonial Collection.” On walls painted a deep rust color--a way of making the space look “serious,” he said--he displayed a group of African masks with artificially aged French and British flags wrapped around them.

The masks were made for the tourist trade and purchased in New York. But Wilson labeled them as if they were important pieces, on loan from the British Museum in London and the Musee National des Arts Africain et Oceanique in Paris.

“If you have a collection of note, (with African pieces) that are about 100 years old, these things were not taken out through commerce but as spoils of war,” Wilson said. “And museums are loathe to return them” to their rightful owners. Some were given labels far more honest than any museum would ever sanction, such as, “Stolen from Zaire tribe, 1899.”

“Museums change history to make it palatable for the public,” Wilson said. In his view, by dwelling largely on aesthetic issues, museums “anesthetize” the complex web of history, and proceed as if there are no alternatives to the imperialist mind-set.

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Invited to do a piece by the Museum for Contemporary Arts in Baltimore--which sponsors programs in temporary sites--he asked to work in the Maryland Historical Society, the oldest institution in the city and a bastion of the landed gentry. On a visit to the society, he found himself hating it and wanted to figure out why.

The historical society agreed to let Wilson reinstall the permanent exhibition his own way. He figures there were a number of pragmatic reasons. Attendance was in a slump, and Baltimore is 80% African-American. By having a black artist such as Wilson come in, the organization probably envisioned a big jump in black visitors and the prospect of getting grants based on serving a new population group.

This sort of thinking didn’t bother Wilson. But he decided not to tell the society what he had in mind. Instead, he made a point of speaking to every staff person and learning all about the museum’s holdings. (“What’s on view tells you a lot; what’s not on view tells you a lot more.”)

“Mining the Museum” took over the third floor of the society. A turn-of-the-century silver globe emblazoned with the word Truth was the centerpiece of the exhibition.

Pedestals displayed busts from the collection of some famous white men who had nothing in particular to do with Maryland: Napoleon, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay. Empty pedestals were labeled with the names of three of Maryland’s notable black historical figures whose images were not part of the collection: journalist and statesman Frederick Douglass, abolitionist Harriet Tubman and mathematician Benjamin Banneker.

It was not a “Black History Month show, which was what they were hoping for,” Wilson said, “but (an investigation of) what the museum is about.”

When visitors approached a painting of a white family, lights suddenly would illuminate the two almost unnoticeable black children in the tender scene. A black child’s voice would switch on: “Where’s my mother? . . . Who calms me when I’m afraid?”

One canvas of a rollicking domestic scene--painted before artists gave their works specific titles--had been known as “Country Life.” Wilson retitled it, “Frederick Serving Fruit,” to throw the emphasis on the only black person in the composition, the young servant.

In a display labeled “Metalwork 1793-1880,” engraved silver pitchers were shown next to slave shackles. “I believe they say a lot about one another,” Wilson said. “The labor of one enabled the wealth of the other to exist.”

A participant in the controversial Whitney Biennial in New York this year, Wilson is also working on several upcoming projects, including a transformation of the galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, tentatively planned for next spring.

Asked how he is able to work with museum people while undermining their jobs and their status quo, Wilson seemed surprised.

“They know museums are not exactly connecting (with the public),” he said. “They want change. . . . You work with people where they are. You don’t try to change people. . . . I’m not there to make fun of them. I respect what they do, and they become aware of that.

“(But) our museums are so far away from being involved in the day-to-day lives of people. The general public wonders, ‘Why is this (museum) experience different from everything outside this space? And why is no one talking about it?’

“Just by doing a little,” he said, museums “could do a lot.”

* One of Fred Wilson’s recent works, “Nature Morte: From the Wunderkammer” is on view through May 12 in the group exhibition “The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism” at the Fine Arts Gallery, UC Irvine. (714) 856-8251.