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Gravity's
Rainbow
Troy-based
teacher and installation artist Michael Oatman tackles serious
themes with a blend of the concrete, the abstract, the absurd,
and plain old good fun
By
John Rodat
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John
Whipple
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Sprinting
up the back steps to the Williams College Art Museum to meet
installation artist Michael Oatman, I notice in the periphery
of my vision two lumpy black forms. They register vaguely
in my mind as benches of some sort, seemingly stone and single-occupancy.
As I gain the top of the staircase and turn toward the entrance,
the obverse side of the structures becomes visible: Two outsized,
disembodied and unblinking eyes peer down the walkway toward
the museum’s driveway. Like orbs pried from the monolithic
heads of the moai of Easter Island, they sit there
gazing implacably as students hustle past. Oh, it’s art, I
think, somewhat surprised. Kind of startling, unexpected in
an intriguing way.
Once inside the museum, I find a press release readily available
that identifies the granite objects as just one of four pairs
of eyes cast by artist Louise Bourgeois as part of a commission
in celebration of the museum’s 75th anniversary. As I walk
through the museum with Oatman to view his own work, IDOL,
also commissioned for the anniversary, the mild disorientation
of the bench-to-huge-eyeball double take fades easily while
we pass Renaissance and Medieval paintings framed in stately
fashion, hung at comfortable, average eye-level height. We
approach IDOL through a domed room ringed with neoclassical
columns entirely appropriate for a more-than-200-year-old
liberal-arts college. These rooms have a dignity and a deep
kind of calm, gravitas. And then we step into Oatman’s
work, and the disorientation returns.
The staccato, telegraphic rhythms of hurriedly written chalkboard
notes are heard from hidden speakers. The walls are blackboards
covered in dust and scribbled legends: “The Berkshire Rattlers
rule,” “All you need is Love,” “the Boatman will always be.”
Strange models, figures, textbooks, maps and gadgets of mysterious
purpose—a Tinker-toy atom, The Elements of Zoology, a
galvanometer, a blank chalkboard globe, a heroic painting
of Galileo, a stuffed jackrabbit, a six-foot slide rule—litter
the room in piles. An enormous frock-coated figure—covered,
head-to-toe, in powdery scribbles—reaches toward you from
his seated position on a segment of fallen tree. His hand,
as large as a tennis-racket head, indicates a space on the
log where the words “Sit here” are scrawled. The figure’s
unchanging and ambiguous expression—is he frowning? scowling?
smirking?—is unsettling, so you sit where instructed, under
the pewter-colored dunce cap suspended from the ceiling. And
then the lectures begin.
“You
never run out of things to learn,” a stentorian voice booms.
It begins a new sentence, only to be interrupted by a higher-pitched
but equally authoritative speaker discussing the nature of
objectivity.
Over the ensuing scholarly chatter, Oatman notes the central
figure’s resemblance to an antique cast-iron coin bank. He
says, “I was thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I could make
a sculpture where you could pay for your education, on a smaller
scale?’ You come in and you sit on this cast iron object,
you put your quarter in, you hear a lecture. And so I approached
the registrar’s office about giving college credit if you
sat through all 300 of the Williams College professors’ mini
lectures.” He pauses and smiles, irony betraying the serious
tone. “They didn’t go for it, strangely enough.”
So, in a far, artfully cluttered corner of the Williams College
Art Museum, beyond the works of classical and sanctified antiquity,
a looming, dusty figure spouts a babble of academic theories
amid a riot of arcane pedagogical implements—an artwork dispensing
an obscure, unaccredited and compelling education: Look closer
at this. What do you think?
“Here
at Williams, it’s a great model of smaller class size, and
more one-on-one teaching,” says Oatman of the work’s microcosmic
reiteration of its context. “But you also realize that teachers
are in a position of incredible power, and that’s something
that I think has to be looked at critically. So the piece
is really a love letter to all of my teachers—and also a little
bit of hate mail too, I suppose, on some level.”
Oatman’s interdisciplinary, kleptomaniacally inclusive oeuvre—his
fascination/apprehension with the reliability or stability
of information—evolved over years as a natural confluence
of his expanding intellectual interests, but his present work
is a far cry from his early intentions. The 36-year-old Vermont
native attended the Rhode Island School of Design with the
plan of becoming a professional artist, but even there he
found himself swayed and engaged by new information, novel
approaches and perspectives that were new to him.
“I
went to college to become a graphic artist, and really became
interested in painting after taking a great combined literature
and history—well, art history—course,” Oatman recalls, detailing
a formative academic experience, the effects of which can
easily be read into IDOL’s freewheeling mash of disparate
fields and forgotten or abandoned scholarly theories. “We
were reading the great works of literature while we were looking
at artworks that were produced contemporaneously. It was a
course that was only offered for one year, then it was canceled
for some reason. I thought it was incredible.”
This experience not only motivated Oatman to embrace painting,
but also sparked his enduring interest in history as source
material for ideas and artworks.
Oatman got his BFA in painting from RISD, did some teaching
in the art department there and later at Harvard, and eventually
made his way to the Capital Region to pursue his MFA, again
in painting. After graduating from the University at Albany
in 1992, Oatman began teaching at the University of Vermont
(“commuting 300 miles a week for six years,” he remembers
wearily) and “making installations in earnest.”
“I
think I’ve made what I would consider 19 major installations
between 1992 and 2000,” Oatman says. “So it’s about two a
year. When I say major, I don’t mean in the sense of notoriety,
but more in time commitment and scale.”
The major physical scale of Oatman’s room-filling works is
obvious, and the time commitment—Oatman categorizes IDOL,
which was completed in about four months after its conception,
as “quick”—is significant as well. Modesty aside, however,
the notoriety of Oatman’s works is also considerable. His
work Long Shadows: Henry Perkins and the Eugenics Survey
of Vermont (Vermont Pure), displayed as part of the Massachusetts’
Museum of Contemporary Art’s Unnatural Science exhibit, dealt
with the provocative and discredited science of eugenics,
which sought to identify and eradicate weaknesses in the gene
pool, and was a much-discussed feature of that show. Local
curators, including Ian Berry of the forward-looking Tang
Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, confidently identify Oatman
as one of the region’s best and most innovative artists. So,
why, one wonders, is this formally trained and lauded fine
artist with Ivy League teaching credits and a long list of
awards, currently teaching in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s
architecture department?
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John
Whipple
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Oatman
fields the question easily: “I guess maybe it’s not so surprising
that I find myself teaching in an architecture department,
because I find myself operating in a zone which is somewhere
between being an artist and being a detective and being a
kind of self-taught scientist or historian.”
Though he claims to prioritize the narrative function of art,
and says that architecture often eschews narrative for more
“non-hierarchical systems . . . letting the viewer or the
user determine use and occupancy,” Oatman finds his place
at RPI both challenging—“I’m learning a lot about this other
way of ordering space,” he says appreciatively—and comfortable.
“I
have a lot of notational systems about how I’m collecting
evidence, who I’m speaking to, how I evolve a project out
of series of drawings, sometimes model-making or video studies.
So there’s a lot of the stuff behind what you’re seeing now
that never makes it to the viewer that is shared territory
with architecture,” Oatman says.
“Often
in architecture that stuff is revealed in a way,” he continues,
“through materiality, through what architects would call programming,
the way a space evolves out of a program of set uses—instead
of, later, just filling it. I have program too, but it’s just
a little more slippery.”
More slippery, perhaps, because fundamental to Oatman’s approach
is the notion that an artwork unfolds as it develops, revealing
itself not only to the viewer but to the artist, almost informing
the artist as to his own program.
“For
me, that’s embedded in all the works—my encounter with discovery,”
he says.
It isn’t, however, merely hermetic and self-referential navel-gazing.
Oatman expresses as a conscious element of his work—an extension
of his prioritization of narrative—a desire to communicate,
albeit, often, only allusively and ambiguously.
“I
think a lot about the viewer,” he admits. “I don’t think I
cater to the viewer, where I’m trying to please the viewer
necessarily, but I think that ends up happening. I think if
I’m happy, the viewer usually ends up finding something to
engage with. If I’m doing my job well, they’re going to stay
in here and engage for a while. And, similarly, in architecture,
if all those programmatic elements have been considered, then
you’re going to have a space which is highly flexible yet
can become highly focused when needed.”
By way of example, Oatman gestures toward IDOL,
to the dunce cap (the once-common emblem of academic underachievement),
which I had assumed was intended as a playful jab at any who
sat to receive the statue’s scholarship—a crack at gullibility,
perhaps, a willingness to be led. I was wrong.
“I
didn’t know anything about the dunce cap until I began working
on this piece, and I began to research it,” Oatman says. “The
dunce cap was the invention of John Duns Scotis, a theologian
whose theory was that knowledge entered the brain from the
ether in a conical formation. So the dunce cap wasn’t to punish
people who were stupid, it was to help people who weren’t
doing as well to focus the intellectual stimulus as it entered
the brain. It was like an ear trumpet for the mind.
“Most
people don’t know that, though,” Oatman allows. “I recognize
that it’s going to hover out there making the viewer the dunce,
but I’m in exactly the same position when I begin the work
and start finding this stuff. I know nothing about what I’m
looking at.”
The installations allow Oatman to position these multivalent
objects in curious, provocative relations—to arrange, as he
says, “hundreds of little still-life moments”—pregnant with
allegorical or symbolic potential. Some of it is intended,
some of it fortuitous, and all of it a lot of fun.
“I’m
sort of playing with the laws of gravity—of seriousness—here,”
Oatman smiles. “What I’m trying to do is to set up as many
specific relationships that for me have meaning or humor,
so it’s possible that someone will discover that, trip over
that. And probably, quite unintentionally, I have created
some juxtapositions that have layers of meaning I don’t even
know about.”
Leaving the museum after talking with Oatman, I bound past
Bourgeois’ ever-vigilant granite orbs, without a second thought.
“I know you,” I think. “I’m prepared for you this time.” I
hurtle down the concrete steps, into the small courtyard between
the museum and Williams’ sports building. Gathered around
a small stylized table—a marble square balanced on its face
on a spherical base—are four slatted wooden benches. One bench
rests upside down, undamaged, as if gently placed that way.
I pause, and look back up at the stone benches on the level
above. For a moment, before ducking into the coffee shop,
I wonder if they’re looking back at me, gauging my reaction.
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