Can a prison cell be art?

I suppose if a museum thought it was a cool idea to do an installation of a prison cell, then the cell would be considered a work of art. Especially so since Marcel Duchamp convinced art lovers that anything, even nothing, could be art — AND could command a high price as well.

So it was that I opened an East Coast newspaper and found an article celebrating an empty room with walls made out of beeswax. The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., was adding a new room. Several decades ago, the Phillips Collection dedicated a room to a single artist — Mark Rothko. This second room is for Wolfgang Laib and will house a room made out of beeswax. The room formerly was a storage closet.

Laib says: "There's a feeling you get inside the space that can't really described."

Dorothy Kosinski has tasked to Wolfgang Laib to apply his beeswax to the museum's walls. This room will ask the person stepping into the room to experience Laib's sense of nature and quietude.

The New York Museum of Modern Art is also joining the bandwagon of beeswax installations. For Ann Temkin, chief curator, Laib’s installation has a transformative quality of providing the urban setting with "a place of silence, contemplation and nature."

Fine with me. If Rembrandt needs to give way to toilets (Duchamp) and beeswax rooms (Laib), so be it for those with an attenuated sense of being in the world.

But can't we ask of our curators whether there is a far deeper sense of the human condition? And perhaps even get to this deeper sense by making such things as beeswax rooms go beyond the single experience; perhaps becoming comparative with other such rooms that evoke equally interesting feelings and thoughts.

Let's imagine ourselves in other empty, or near empty rooms. These rooms would convey a different sense of time, sound and space. And after our journey to these other rooms, we can then return to the beeswax room and meditate about a much broader sense of the human condition.

Such a comparative installation of various rooms might not be possible at The Phillips Collection, but there are museums with rather large spaces such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego and similar museums throughout the nation.

Other rooms, other places, other rooms

There's the psychiatric isolation cell in Sierra Leone. Imagine yourself with bipolar depression kept away in this room. One thinks of Jack Nicholson in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," but that is far more comfortable than the room in Sierra Leone.

Or, perhaps on a cross-cultural religious note, how about a kiva used by Pueblo Indians in the American Southwest. Imagine yourself praying as a Pueblo Indian.

Or an even smaller beehive room made of mud and wattle that was used for religious meditation. Imagine yourself as a hermit living in this room.

On a more devilish note, how about a room that provides solitary confinement? Perhaps not so obvious as torture, including the Abu Ghraib prior to America's Iraq invasion as well as that post-invasion?

Of course, there are not-so-nice forsaken prison cells throughout the world. It would not be so nice to be languish in one of these rooms.

At the other end of the emotional spectrum, there is the orgone box. This is a place where one can harness one's life force.

And the list and images goes on and on . . .

A modest proposal about art room installations

If we imagined ourselves as a museum curator with money to spend and adequate space to fill, what might we do to broaden the narrowly focused beeswax room. Clearly, there is more to life and rooms than beeswax.

If rooms such as those illustrated above were placed adjacent to Laib's beeswax room, I'd say there would be a more informed dialogue about how seemingly empty rooms could have a transformative quality. A connection to a litany of voices: the individual and nature, the individual and the spiritual world, the individual and self-denial, the individual and debasement and hell, the individual and his and her orgone energy — and much, much more.

Wouldn't that be a novel idea for contemporary art — places with meaning in various times, various cultures and various intents?

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