Walter Hopps: "A Future for Art"

We would like to introduce you to Walter Hopps- one of the world's foremost museum directors and authorities on contemporary art. By 1954, Walter Hopps made art history by establishing, with artist Ed Kienholz, the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. As curator and then director of the Pasedena Museum, Walter Hopps showed such giants as Duchamp, Warhol and Cornell before moving to Washington D.C. in 1965 to study future museum concepts at the Institute for Policy Studies. He served as director of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and curator of 20th Century Art at the National Collection of Fine Arts before becoming founding director of the highly acclaimed Menil Collection in Houston. Recent projects have included retrospectives on artists Robert Rauschenberg (Guggenheim), Max Ernst (MoMA) and Ed Kienholz (Whitney). He has known and curated Rudd's art since the 1960's.

Walter Hopps discusses the Dark Ride Project in a presentation titled "A Future for Art" also available below.

"A Future for Art"
Walter Hopps Video Transcript

Welcome to a future for art. The future worth considering now emanates from an American artist named Eric Rudd. And the kind of future we're talking about, of which there could be many, myriad really, has to do with the place occasion where one experiences art as well as the kind of art itself.

About two hundred years ago a tradition we take for granted began and that's called the art museum or the public art gallery. Conspicuously in France at the end of the French Revolution a palace was turned over to the citizenry and the wonderments that had been the private preserve of royal families heretofore were open in various ways to a public In America, in the United States, an event happened as well, a painter, Charles Wilson Peale, who had broad interests in science and natural history as well as art opened what constitutes the first art school and the first public gallery for art in America, save those associated with the much more restricted audience of Harvard University and Yale University in the north and at Williams and Mary College in the south. But, in Philadelphia, a city of many innovations, not the least of which was the Declaration of Independence and founding of our country, the Charles Wilson Peale Cabinet of Curiosities became a full fledged museum and we've known it over the last two hundred years essentially as the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. I think, it important to stress with this wonderful tradition of Peale's that, although he was one of our founding fine artists indeed and sons and daughters and daughters-in-law all involved in the arts the family very much so at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, he had broad interests, the European elite tradition of collecting any number of scientific and naturally historical curiosities, zoological and botanical specimens was part of his oeuvre, so there was a sense of innovation in Peale's work and an openness.

Most museums we've had in America and around the world since, have followed two traditions either they were the grand house thrown open to the public, when we visit New York City we can visit what remains of the great financier Frick's home and see his collection or a palace such as the Louvre thrown open to the public and filled with art treasures, and we've had this two hundred year tradition of building false palaces and false great renaissance homes that become the kind of a design and shell for art museums. What's interesting that we are concerned with now is a curious tradition, a curious meld of traditions that Eric Rudd has worked out. He's working with electronic innovations of our time, robotics, virtual reality, sophisticated video equipment, he's also working with his own art and innovative materials, polyurethane foam and other plastics fabricated in exotic technical ways but more to the point he's considering a kind of union with the tradition of what in the amusement sector, a low cultural aspect of our society - the amusement parks, is called the dark ride.

It's interesting that where we see the Disney enterprises involving all sorts of devices from the fine art world to work out their amusement parks we have the first serious occasion of the reverse situation. Where some of the techniques of the amusement park as they've been known over the last seventy five, one hundred years, really from the time of Barnum through the Disney world, that those are being brought in at the service of the visual fine arts. So thus our adventure is to address what Eric Rudd has called the Dark Ride Project.

An interesting and relative heritage of Eric Rudd is his Russian family background. In two centers early in the twentieth century some extraordinary innovations in the ways art could both be made and experienced were developed. One in Russia, in old Russia, in St. Petersburg, the city of Rudd's family origin, gave rise to what we think of today as the Russian Constructivists: Malevich, Rodchenko, Larionov. Extraordinary people both men and women who shot ahead in terms of new techniques and methods in twentieth century technology available and material to conceive and fabricate many new forms in art and ways of seeing art. Of course, the other was the De Stilj enterprise in Holland, in Amsterdam, and the most famous of all, I guess, thirdly was the Bauhaus in Weimar and then Dessau, Germany for architects, designers and visual artists. Artists of all types worked for great synthesis. Molholy-Nagy a great Hungarian conceived of ways of seeing art that anticipates, never realized, that were almost like virtual reality theatres for experiencing art.

Alas, the traumas that we center on the Russian Revolution and the second world war disrupted the normal chorus of these great innovative developments. One hopes, that now in the latter part of twentieth century some of our new technologies in robotics, in virtual reality, in the various ways that visual imagery can be recorded electronically that some of what was dreamed early in our century can come to fruition.

Rudd's direction in art follows the grand development of abstraction in our century which climaxed in the middle of the century with what are called the Abstract Expressionists in America that's a manifestation that is echoed indeed around the world in the far east even in Russia today. Rudd's approach to an organic kind of abstraction in painting and sculpture suddenly moved into a new realm with his use of polyurethane form a totally malleable material that could then harden and given its light weight could practically, as opposed to cast steel or metals or even fabricated cast plastics, this foam material could assume very large twenty, thirty, forty foot elements with light weight and an organic kind of malleability that was almost unheard of in other forms. More recently he's worked in the very powerfully strong polymer synthetic called lexan that has a tensile strength that the urethane form does not. But, fantastic organic shapes, the kind of biomorphism that was at the easel painting scale in the great Armenian American artist Arshil Gorky, assumes heroic proportions when these new materials, such as Rudd has employed, can be used. In the course of his career Rudd began to conceive of building a set environment where a large scale aggregate of his sculptural works could be experienced in toto. The practicability's, again, of an individual artist taking over something the scale of a vast public botanical garden or zoo was impractical and Rudd conceived as a kind of private experience, an individual experience, a way of seeing in grand scale his works.

The derivation from the amusement park ride when one would go through the tunnel of love or the chambers of terrors as children, or even adults that suspend our disbelief in the darkness and in the space, we imagine far vaster space than is actually there. It becomes illusory but very emotionally telling the space and Rudd's ingenuity has been such to work his art in tandem with these techniques and devices those we call the dark ride, which of course, gains reinforcement in that it echoes our dreams. Just going nowhere at night in our dreams we can travel through the millennium. And of course, that is part of the psychological effect that every amusement park counts on and reinforces. So, Rudd has been able to do this with his materials in an extraordinary way and on a human scale, a manageable scale, offers us this with the art at hand.

Rudd's innovations with the process or occasion to view the art that I've referred to as the, his term, the Dark Ride Project involves controlling the experience in certain ways, to heighten it, extraordinarily in others. Rudd has realized that a kind of, like, space helmet, or visually occasioning or allowing helmet, for the viewers can focus their attention and create effects unknown to many just wandering through in an undirected way, through an art museum. Further, he's developed a kind of robotic chair that the viewer can reside in and moves through the exhibit zones so that various dramatic effects or scenarios or occasions to see things in a preconceived order are possible.