Almost ten years ago, John Schuerman got an idea in his head about curating an exhibition of visual art, where the main focus of the works wouldn’t be visual. Instead, while the art would have a visual component, he wanted to feature works that engaged with the other senses.
At the time, Schuerman was running Instinct Art Gallery in downtown Minneapolis, a small storefront gallery that regularly curated exhibitions that probed questions around society, culture, and the environment and featured a mix of regional and national artists. But Schuerman knew his idea for a sensory expansive exhibition needed to live in a bigger space than Instinct, which closed in 2016.
“The Other Four,” referring to the other four senses, first opened at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota in 2019. It’s now on view at the Weisman Art Museum, and offers visitors an invitation to smell, taste, listen and touch the art.
“The Weisman hasn’t done anything quite like this show before,” Schuerman wrote me in an email about the show. “It’s challenging the system.”
At a media preview, Schuerman said his idea for the exhibition came out of thinking about the one dimensionality of most museum experiences. “We call it visual art for a reason,” he said. “And I just thought, it would be interesting to try and do something more expansive than that.”
He had seen shows where visual art was augmented by other senses, but hadn’t seen anything where the artwork was primarily meant to be experienced through the other senses.
In his research, he learned that more than 50 percent of our frontal cortex is devoted to processing visual information. “The dominance of our sense of vision, and the way in which we organize the world around us, is really heavily weighted to the sense of vision,” he said.
He began noticing in his own life how focusing on engaging other senses helps to maintain a sense of presence, he says. “Like, if you’re driving some place, you’re usually thinking about other stuff, and you’re kind of keeping your eyes on the road, but you’re not even really aware of the fact that you’re doing,” he said.
Most of the work in the exhibition was made specifically for the show, Schuerman said. “It’s not like I went into artists studios and picked something that they already had,” he said. “Most of the time, I talked with the artist, because I knew that they might think this was an interesting challenge.”
That’s the same for the two museums that have presented the work. “If the museum’s not up for the challenge, this probably isn’t the right show,” he said. “There has to be sort of a willingness to kind of go to the boundaries, and break the rules.”
For one thing, some of the pieces contain organic material. “That’s typically a no no” for museums, Schuerman said. As an example, one piece by Katayoun Amjadi, called “The Names We Change,” is made to look like airline seats, and there are pretzels and other snacks visitors can eat while they engage with a series of videos portraying people who have changed their names.
Other work in the show engages with smell, like “Common Scents,” by Wendy Fernstrum, where visitors are invited to uncap various glass bottles with intriguing and yet not exactly enticing names like “Dammit Jim,” “Best Left Alone,” and “good lovin’ gone bad.” The smells themselves are also not exactly pleasant.
Another scent-based work, Emma Beatrez and Lee Noble’s “X-brace (diffusers),” invites the visitor to wear a vest that wafts subtle smells as you wear it around the gallery. Then there’s Liza Sylvestre’s “Taste and Smell Survey,” which has various edible and aural enticements for visitors to try and submit comments about.
Sound is incorporated in the piece as well, like Pedram Baldari’s “Walking Walls-Walling Talks.” The large circular mirror, adorned with Kurdish symbolism references the violence of colonization. If you lean your ear very close, you hear Kurdish tunes that have been criminalized in countries like Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq.
I especially liked the touch-based works, like Kate Casanova’s “Sensory Seat for Porous Beings.” In that piece, I sat down on a bench and placed my hands on two squishy and soft formations placed on either side of me on a bench. Made to look like an amorphous living organism of some kind, the work soothed with its tactile as well as sound engagement. I also enjoyed placing my hand on Alison Hiltner’s “Tethers,” which pulsed to the rhythm of my own heartbeat.
While not directly an exhibition about disability, it does venture into discourse around what makes art accessible, and how the tools for making spaces accessible open up possibilities for experiencing art in new ways for all audiences.
It reminded me of a recent dance piece I witnessed as part of the Great Northern, called “Untitled Night,” by Morgan Thorson. That work, which took place at night on a frozen lake, employed audio description— historically used for people with vision loss— as a vital part of the work itself (rather than a tool to adapt the work for people that can’t see). Similarly, the works in “The Other Four” offer new ways to present work that shifts long-held hierarchies prioritizing sight in visual art exhibitions. These types of projects perhaps are able to emerge in our culture now, as accessibility continues to become a more prominent consideration in thinking about public events.
Ultimately, each person will interact with the works based on their own comfort level. While you could wander passively through it, this is a show that asks the audience to step out of their comfort zone, try things out that feel strange, and really be present with the ideas and stimulations of the art. The Other Four runs through May 19 at the Weisman (free). See the exhibition guide here. More information here.
Sheila Regan
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.
