Cincinnati Art Museum's 'Crown' exhibit under fire

An exhibition opening Saturday at the Cincinnati Art Museum has reignited debate on guns, art and whether "Crown" is too edgy for Cincinnati's venerable museum.

Some people believe it should not be opening at all.

On an October day in 2012 when the museum was closed, an unprecedented art event by conceptual artist Todd Pavlisko took place. As a Navy SEAL sniper took aim from his perch near the front lobby, a forest of video and still cameras documented bullets whizzing through the center gallery and into a cube mounted in Great Hall.

"To shoot a gun in the halls in the museum, it's in bad taste. The speeding bullet is going in front of 18 iconic treasures. I think it's his way of showing that it's dead art and not relevant," said Stewart Maxwell of Hyde Park, a museum shareholder.

Why is the art museum, an encyclopedic institution for great art, creating art that some view as risky to the collection, too avant-garde or offensive? And is it art?

After a delayed opening of nearly a year, the exhibition "Crown" has evolved into a modified version of its original plan. When museum director Aaron Betsky described two years ago how the bullet would impact a 36-inch cast bronze cube, he said that just one bullet would be used. The resulting "crown" that was created would mirror the size of a sculpture in the museum's collection by the American artist Donald Judd, which is on display in the Mayerson Gallery.

But the bronze cube actually has 19 holes – and in effect, 19 "crowns," in sharpshooter lingo – perforated by the sniper. Eight flat-screen video monitors mounted along the bullets' path, Schmidlapp Gallery, display footage of the projectiles as they slither in slow motion by 18 of the art museum's most iconic works – Andy Warhol's Soup Can, a large Rookwood Pottery vase and Thomas Gainsborough's "Portrait of Ann Ford."

"Crown" refers to the shape of the hole the bullet makes, said Matt Distel, the museum's adjunct curator of contemporary art, who succeeded two now-departed curators on the project. The shiny hollow cube was filled with rubber ballistic material, which stopped the bullets, although slight bulges can be seen in the rear.

There were 19 shots "and no misses," he said. The 19 spent bullets now rest within the cube.

Distel said he is pleased by the outcome.

"The cube itself is a beautiful object. It rides that line between this functional-looking thing and a minimalist object," he said.

The video portion of the exhibition, "Untitled," is accompanied by the unsettling soundscape of rifle shots as one strolls through the gallery. During an exclusive Enquirer preview, the viewer was occasionally caught between footage of the sniper firing to the right and the resulting holes erupting in the cube's image on the left.

A planned exhibition of photographs is absent. But upstairs is a display called "All the Money I Found in a Year (2004-present)," gold-washed coins that Pavlisko has collected, laid out on the floor of the Dutch Gallery. The coins are connected to "Crown" because they mark the passage of time, the artist said.

Artist says a gun is 'a drawing tool'

So who is Pavlisko? The 39-year-old native of Cincinnati and Miami University graduate enjoys creating art with experts outside of the art world. He is also known for a project that involved nailing his foot to the floor – a collaboration he said he conducted with a plastic surgeon. The resulting video, available on his website (www.toddpavlisko.com) is not for the faint of heart.

With "Crown," Pavlisko said he is compressing art history and the history of the art museum into a single work of art. His work brings together art and science, he said.

"The video installation will hang amongst the masterpieces. This piece of art is about time," said Pavlisko.

He took his cue from MIT professor Harold Edgerton, who used high-speed photography to snap a bullet going through an apple, and French filmmaker Jean Luc Godard's "Bande à part," in which the characters try to break the world record for running through the Louvre.

"Leaping from that, I wanted to traverse art history as fast as I could. So using a bullet at 2,700 feet a second, I was able to take that record and to become the person who is making that leap as fast as you can," he said.

He specifically asked for a Tactical 308, a 30-caliber, high-powered rifle. To Pavlisko, a gun is "a drawing tool. It's no different than a pencil. But it's an intense conversation. The gun is such a charged material. I hope in the end people will see the patience and the beauty and the encompassing historical gesture that the work of art is really about."

Art historian Ruth K. Meyer of Chicago, an art museum shareholder, is incensed.

"For young people with no real idea of how to make anything, or any real talent or skill or inspiration, this kind of work comes easy, because it draws its materials from everyday life," said the former Cincinnati resident who was interim director of the Contemporary Arts Center and executive director of the Taft Museum of Art.

What constitutes art today is "wide open," said Kate Bonansinga, director of the School of Art at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning.

"Even in post-modernist art in the 21st century, artists are doing all sorts of things that maybe 50 years ago wouldn't be considered visual art, but today it is," said Bonansinga, adding that she could not evaluate the exhibition's quality before seeing it.

"He's making us question what the artist's role is and what the role of the art is, too."

Museum director says piece is 'not about the bullet'

Museum director Betsky announced the sharpshooter project in September 2012. Betsky, who in January announced he is resigning to pursue other activities, was unavailable this week to comment, said museum spokeswoman Regina Russo. She did not know the cost of the project.

At the time, Betsky told The Enquirer, "It's not about the bullet. It's about the images that it's going to produce, and about the way it's going to change the brass cube. It's about ... our great collection and all of our great hunting pictures and all of the ways in which artists have shown this."

The event was vetted by the museum's legal counsel, insurance companies, curators and registrars, and approved by the board of trustees. Four days before the Oct. 29, 2012, event, Betsky got City Council to pass an emergency ordinance authorizing the discharge of a firearm on the grounds of the museum. A sheriff was on the premises for the event.

Despite reservations of some board members and shareholders, Betsky said he did not believe that the rifle shot would present any danger to the collection.

"I think it's disgusting," said Hyde Park gallery owner Mary Ran. "I just cannot understand why the board allowed it. The shooting of the gun went on all day long. When you have gunfire inside a building, the vibrations go into the building, the sculpture and the artworks, and the long-term effects may not be seen for 100 years."

Shareholder Maxwell, a museum volunteer of 44 years, has fears that still linger.

"The whole thing is ridiculous. ... Curators were upset and concerned about the collection, that it was being put into potential danger from the sound and reverberation with the marble halls of the museum," Maxwell said. "The irony is, at the front door is a sign that you're not allowed to enter with firearms. ... And eight weeks later, we had (the massacre at) Sandy Hook Elementary School."

The timing was poor, admitted Tamara Harkavy, artistic director and CEO of ArtWorks, who owns Pavlisko's art.

"There is art that has been created over a millennium that has offended, made people scared, shocked and horrified people. Some of it now hangs in the Louvre," she said. "Does this piece mean that guns rule? What's the deeper meaning behind this? I don't know. But Todd as an artist makes art that isn't apparently instantly beautiful, but if you look deeper, it does have beauty to it."

Board president Martha Ragland finds the multidisciplinary installation "quite breathtaking."

"As a visitor you are taken along on that journey from the past to the present," she said Friday. "I understand the value of different art exhibits. ... We're an encyclopedic museum and we're charged to present all different types of exhibitions."

Others said the project delivers the wrong message about the museum's mission.

"It is disturbing, but is it disturbing in a meaningful way?" asked Daniel Brown, editor of the online art journal AEQAI and a freelance curator. "This seems so far from the mission of a general art museum, which is to preserve, display and exhibit art."

Museum officials say, to the best of their knowledge, a sharpshooting art event has never happened in any museum before.

"It takes bold, very genuinely thoughtful people to understand that it's not a crazy thing to do," Pavlisko said.

"It's possible to do it in an intelligent way and to result in fine art that is very rare, and has never happened and may never happen again." ⬛

If you go

What: Todd Pavlisko: "Crown"

Where: Cincinnati Art Museum, 953 Eden Park Drive, Eden Park.

Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; closed on Mondays.

Admission: Free. Parking $4 for non-members. 513-639-2995 or www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org.

Todd Pavlisko file

Age: 39; born in Cincinnati and raised in Oxford

Current residence: Manhattan, N.Y.

Education: Bachelor of fine arts, sculpture & painting/printmaking, Miami University; master of fine arts, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh

He has exhibited extensively across the world and locally at the Contemporary Arts Center and Weston Gallery. His work is in public collections at Carnegie Mellon University, Chicago Cultural Center, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, the city of Naples, Italy, and the Robert J. Schiffler Foundation in Dayton, among others.

Quotable: "Shooting down Schmidlapp with the art and architecture in the environment of the video allowed me to take that history into the brass cube, essentially embedding that history into the cube, taking it from these art historical gestures into modernism and showing it in a contemporary vein. So it's a full circle."

About the Cincinnati Art Museum

• Owns a collection of more than 60,000 works spanning 6,000 years.

• Mission: The Cincinnati Museum Association brings people and art together in ways that transform our everyday lives and our community.

• Located on park land that belongs to the city of Cincinnati.

• The Cincinnati Art Museum Association, composed of board and shareholders, owns the building and the collection.

• In 2013, ArtsWave allotted $1,617,000 to the art museum. It is also supported by Ohio Arts Council, city of Cincinnati, members and donors.