Click the image above to see a mixed media video not intended by the Carnegie Museum of Art

August 23, 2008
Day 3 (day 3, mind you! Nobody dawdles this long between the coasts, let alone within one time zone--we're less Lewis and Clark than Lewis and Martin) was another large slurp of Pittsburgh, with a dash of Wheeling, West Virginia, and a chaser of Columbus, Ohio. We have to say Pittsburgh blew us away not just for its impressive topography (is there another major city -- besides San Francisco -- so molded by hills, or defined by bridges?) but for its cultural pickings.

Exploring Carnegie's campus and the neighborhoods of Shady Side and South Side we stumbled on a few neatly appointed and well stocked used bookstores. Though we didn't leave with the same haul we found at the York Emporium, we didn't walk out entirely empty handed. At one we bought a historical guide to Indiana, a state we may hope to reach by Labor Day; at Elijay's a work on La Guardia and a 1913 guide to natural disasters before FEMA (Our National Calamity of Fire, Flood and Tornado); and at City Books a seldom seen collection of New Yorker articles by a forgotten staffer named Berton Roueche.

But just when we thought we had exhausted the art opportunities in Iron City we walked into the Carnegie Museum of Art. Cheek by jowl with their Natural History Museum our expectations were low (picturing galleries of Dutch masters and Greek statuary collected by the local robber barons of yesteryear). But the Carnegie is a world class institution with no fear of the contemporary. Their current show is the ambitious "Life on Mars," which pulls together international art confronting issues of being human. Ok, that's a bit of curatorial hooey (isn't much of art about being human?), but who cares. In Pittsburgh it probably helps to fool visitors by making them think they're walking into an IMAX film about extraterrestrials. What they would discover would still seem otherworldly.

For one, there's Mike Kelley's installation, inspired by the fictional city of Kandor from the Superman comic. Occupying an entire large gallery once devoted to classical sculpture, Kelley's installation brings together video images, sound, scale models and lab experiment-like sculptures to address themes of memory and perception. We cannot show you what the installation looks like (a friendly but watchful security guard explained the ground rules to us), but you can hear the aural maelstrom whipped up by Kelley's tornadic art in the video above. The images are an exhibit of miniature rooms displayed in a side gallery, a remnant of an earlier curatorial mandate that the museum pursued.

Nearby, in an alcove of the Natural History museum, a short film by Cao Fei documented in three parts the grim routine for workers in a Chinese factory that manufactures fluorescent bulbs. In contrast with the celebratory industrial films of America's early 2oth century manufacturing prowess, Cao Fei's machinery doesn't so much relieve workers of tedious tasks, but instead relegates them to painstaking, ever-diminishing quality control-bots.

Worthy of mention amongst the forty-four participants is Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn's work "Cavemanman," an immersive, confrontational, but thought-provoking environment where museum visitors are led through a cave-like maze built from packing tape and cardboard. It's filled with detritus (aluminum soda cans); texts (Habermas, Foucault, Thomas Paine) hooked up to dynamite and connected to the heads of aluminum foil manikins; consumer culture imagery (pages from celebrity magazines, pornography). The unease is heightened by the oblique angles and uneven floors that must be navigated by the museum visitor.

Before concluding the day in scintillating Columbus, Ohio (more to come), we spent a few hours in that Miss Havisham of cities, Wheeling, West Virginia. Empty of inhabitants except for a few policemen minding a water main break (ok, it was the weekend), the town had literal cobwebs on its light posts. But the late afternoon light made for perfect photo opportunities, and herewith are a few fading signs from Wheeling's more prosperous yesteryear. Click on them to see additional images from the day. There may not have been a gallery of conceptual art to browse, but the city itself is a living monument of interstate commerce and transient lifestyles.
--Michael Dashkin and Peter Miller