When a school building is decommissioned, it feels like the best move might be to destroy it. It is eerie to think of the hallways lying fallow year after year. Where children once ran around, now there are just off-white walls and old linoleum floors. Walking through an abandoned school feels almost like the children have died, even though, in fact, they’ve just grown up.
There’s a lot of baggage that comes with repurposing a school building. But six galleries from New York City have taken on the challenge, turning the old Ockawamick School in Hudson, NY into an exhibition space. They call it THE CAMPUS. Barring a few touch-ups, the building has been left largely as it was. The few renovations that have taken place were done before the galleries took over, when the space had been used as the set for HBO’s Pretty Little Liars. There’s still a gym, locker rooms, and niches with water fountains that, for some reason, either shoot in a much-too-high arc or provide a limp trickle.
The installation channels a spirit of childlike inquisitiveness to propel viewers into finding art creatively embedded in the environment. In the science lab, there are rows of experimentation tables with double-faucet sinks along with windowed cabinets displaying rows of rocks and stones. “OMG remember having a lab partner,” a fellow visitor exclaimed. A few moments later she pointed at a metal tube on the desk, “Whaddya call this… a Bunsen Burner?” Meanwhile, in the center of the room a different kind of scientific exploration was taking place. A spherical sculpture by the artist Haegue Yang hangs by a wire attached to the ceiling. It is a planet made of bronze-colored beads, around two feet in diameter, with two intersecting rings held into place by scaffolding rods that jut out from the sphere. Strings of beads hang from the rings until they touch the floor. It feels like a diva-queen version of Saturn, evoking a shaky aesthetic memory of science class sans all the formula tables and annoying computations. Another sculpture by Yang called Sonic rotating whatever openings on hemisphere #16 looks like a coronavirus cut in half. It protrudes from the surface of a blackboard, inviting viewers to touch and spin it.
By virtue of their setting, the artworks feel less precious than they would in a white-cube gallery. These paintings and sculptures feel almost unfinished as they encourage the viewer to consider the process of trial and error that went into making them. Although museums and galleries are often where art ends up, those settings hardly resemble the places where it was made. By contrast, the raw emotion and messiness of craft feels totally natural in a school, where the students, like art, would have been works in progress. In one classroom there are paintings by Jenny Holzer, which comprise enigmatic aphorisms written in enamel paint on kraft paper nearly the same color as the wall. Ockawamick was a K-12 school, full of children of all different ages. Looking at Holzer’s work, I could imagine a six year old splashing paint on the wall to write nonsensical phases in freshly-learned English, as well as a tormented teen working through their identity, carving depressive thoughts like “TEAR DUCTS SEEM TO BE A GRIEF PROVISION” into the page.
In another classroom, there are two paintings on blackboards made in situ by the artist Sanya Kantarovsky. One shows a pale girl lying naked face down. The other is a melange of skeletons and body parts. Rather than invoking Death (with a capital D), the memento mori aspect of these images made me think about the mini deaths that come after the passing of each year, leaving behind your former self in favor of a new one—a change felt most profoundly by children. A painting in a nearby hallway, Lamentation by Ella Kruglyanskaya, shows two girls with their heads in their hands, hunched over crying. The figures are sketched in blue on raw canvas cutouts, framed by a place-less plaid background. Are they apparitions of students who came before THE CAMPUS? They may be adults now, but the ghosts of their pubescent years still linger in these halls.
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