The Brooklyn Rail

I was impressed and a bit daunted by the inaugural exhibition at The Campus—works by over eighty artists, nearly all of them represented by the six Manhattan galleries that banded together to purchase the venue, an abandoned high school in Claverack, New York. I suspected, correctly, that the opening would be a mob scene, so I didn’t attend. I am mob-ophobic. Visiting the following weekend, I was surprised to find the parking lot full. Inside the building was not a mob but a large and lively crowd drifting purposefully from the entrance to the gymnasium to one classroom after the next. For there is art at every step, and it looked to me as if visitors were intently focused on the works they were running across. Crowds have been ample on succeeding weekends, suggesting that The Campus has quickly become a high-profile feature in the cultural landscape of the mid-Hudson Valley.

This is remarkable, a sign of the richness of curator Timo Kappeller’s selections. It also shows how astute it was to repurpose this architectural relic now, when art is generating such intense interest beyond the narrow boundaries of the New York art world. After all, art has meanings that are not illuminated by reports on Manhattan’s blockbuster shows and record prices. Nor does most art criticism help us here, a remark I make as one who was an art critic for decades. In commenting on a work’s lineage, its style and iconography, criticism sometimes hints at larger meanings but usually leaves them in shadow. And I am not saying I know how to bring them into the light of day. Still, The Campus suggests a fresh approach, which begins with a contrast between its interiors and those of most art galleries.

Formerly the Ockawamick School, The Campus is a place of worn flooring, walls that could use a touch of paint, and woodwork the worse for wear. Dented metal lockers line the corridors and some doorways are missing their doors. You feel the past here, not as a succession of events but as an atmosphere—a mood that mixes nostalgia with glum forgetting. The past is different within the pristine, crisply defined walls of an art gallery—the white cube, as Brian O’Doherty called it.

Time in the white cube is a clarified current leading from a narrowly defined past to the work on view—immersed in its privileged present, and onward to a future that will ratify the work’s art historical significance. Spelled out in detail by formalist critics, this temporal sequence is implied by critical commentary in other styles. The white cube relieves time of its ambiguities—and its terrors. At The Campus, you feel time as we actually live it.

Inside this former high school, everything is contingent, from the style of the architecture to the lighting. Some light falls from old lighting fixtures and the rest sails in through the windows, bringing with it the silvery intensity of sunlight in the Hudson Valley. Each artwork interacts with these contingencies differently, engaging them with idiosyncratic flair or fending them off with a resistant posture. Whatever a work’s strategy might be, I was drawn into currents of the ordinary life that once animated this high school—currents inflected by the artist’s intention, insofar as I could intuit it, and by the associations I brought to the meeting between the work’s imagery and the particulars of its setting. From these encounters flowed meaning, so much that, as I said at the outset, I felt daunted.

I do, though, think that I have glimpsed the lesson The Campus teaches, not didactically but with the endless implications of its massive installation. The point of an artwork is not to clarify things, not to supply us with certainties. It is to provide a focus that interrupts the daily stream of half-unconscious experience—to puzzle us in ways that, as William Blake says, rouse “the faculties to act.” Art succeeds when it activates our powers of speculation, inspiring us to throw everything up for grabs. Possibility emerges when uncertainty is willingly embraced, and The Campus is rife with it. This first exhibition is sprawling and more than a little random. These qualities are generative forces, and I hope their virtues are recognized by the organizers and the public alike.