“Misread Unread Read Re-Read Misread Unread Re-Read” — or MURRMUR — is described as a work that “expands how we think about reading, publishing, and distributing art, books, and ideas.” But it’s obvious that this bold exhibition series, opening in two phases at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) on Feb. 24 and April 21, is also about giving the ICA a much-needed makeover.
Less about what we read than how we read, the multi-part exhibit’s heady assemblage of alternative spaces and futuristic furniture will see the museum’s public areas and ICA Shop and Cafe reconditioned to (as the description to one of its works reads) “center the body in the act of reading.” But the underlying concern is how to transform the ICA, and cultural institutions like it, into a more relaxed, more welcoming place for visitors to read, hang out, and potentially want to stay a little while.
“This is definitely a response to the kind of seriousness we might associate with institutions like contemporary art museums,” says MURRMUR’s curator Egbert Vongmalaithong, the ICA’s assistant curator of commerce and publications. He refers to the pieces that the participating artists will showcase, largely outside of the museum’s galleries and into its halls and public areas, as “interventions.”
“Typically when we read, we are sitting upright at a table. But what these interventions and furniture pieces welcome is for you to experiment with how you might sit and move. And to consider your body’s relationship to whatever you are taking in.”
MURRMUR technically started in September of last year. On the ICA’s third floor, Cuban American artist Rafael Domenech’s “The Medium is the Message” has been offering up an environment of flexible architecture – modular furniture – that can be manipulated and moved around to create “self publishing spaces.”
Slated for the exhibit’s second phase April opening, nicole killian’s “between a book and a soft place,” is literally a big cushy book you can snuggle in. “There’s a playfulness to it,” says curator Vongmalaithong, “but it also references how we might ourselves be vessels of information, like a book.”
Artist and educator killian is interested in softening the institutional space, and that this particular museum is a space that needs softening. “It’s creating an alternative to what we normally see at the ICA,” says the associate professor of Graphic Design at VCU.
For “soft place,” killian is constructing a life-sized book cradle, a package used by libraries and special collections to protect delicate books. “Inside it, I’m creating a very large soft book that visitors can lay in and slide their bodies into… this came from thinking about how the reward for preparing yourself to read, getting yourself settled and cozying yourself up, can often be what’s really important.”
While there will be text in this giant book, the professor says that the work is more of a “touch” experience, lined with a variety of soft multi-fabrics stitched together – windbreakers, puffer coats, blankets. “This reused material suggests the presence of a body.” The book will be encased in a special soft rubber designed for playgrounds, as will a special “conversation pit” that killian is designing for the ICA’s second floor terrace.
“In this communal space, you can relax, sit and face each other, talk, read,” the artist says. “Despite the ICA’s best efforts, the museum [which opened in 2018] is still not an inviting space for people to be in. So how can I make visitors stick around a little longer and use that terrace space on the second floor… no one ever hangs out there.” The professor, who got the idea for the pit from studying radical Italian architecture and Montessori school design, is also constructing a long, 15-ft. “soft bench” for the ICA Cafe’s soft relaunch on Feb.24.
Slated for, at different times, the main floor and ICA Cafe area, artist Riley Hooker has devised SIT(UATION), a “modular reading environment” consisting of inflatable furniture inspired by, of all things, slime molds.
“Slime molds are single cell organisms that can exist independently but form collective bodies when they need to find food, which is most of the time,” says Hooker, an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. “They are seen in almost every forest growing on the underside of logs and have special properties that form collective bodies that can execute complicated engineering tasks.” The molds are highly intelligent, the artist stresses, but there’s no centralized brain.
Hooker’s mold-shaped sitting system, engineered by architect Nick Meehan, is being constructed for comfort but also to provoke questions. “Can we participate in collective intelligence?” the artist asks. “And what happens when reading becomes more social, a group activity? What happens to the body as an active participant in that?”
Hooker’s funky furniture is shaped like the molds but is also inspired by a “fidget toy: called The Tangle, which was developed to help attention-challenged children focus and learn. “I’m severely dyslexic and really struggled in the public education system,” Hooker says. “My grandmother dedicated herself as a teacher to educating other teachers about dyslexia.” The artist remembers a summer of tutoring with her that was transformative. “I remember it as play, not school. We had games with blocks, pattern recognition, and after that summer I got an IQ test and it took me from special ed to gifted and talented.”
This experience led Hooker to become interested in different teaching environments. “The more of your body that you use when you engage in the learning process, the higher the retention. That’s a fact. So when I think about reading in an institutional space, I think about a lack of sensory input and agency. You feel it in a place like the ICA. You step in and there’s white walls, the acoustics are terrible, there’s wall text that tells you what to think, there’s a foreboding, very uncomfortable museum bench that asks you to sit but not for too long.” These are conventions, he says, that have really held back people who think, learn and read differently.
An article about teaching the dyslexic, written by Riley’s grandmother, BettyJ. Roy, will be among the extensive research materials offered as part of the exhibit. This materials library and an accompanying website is being overseen by designer Sam Taylor, a product strategist with Manhattan Hydraulics. The library will, he says, “tap into what reading looks like in all its many forms.”
The host of a weekly Zoom book club where participants read aloud to each other, Taylor says that the concept of MURRMUR is to “expand the idea of how to distribute books, read books and to have a space for reading that seems new and exciting.”
The exhibit presents alternatives that the ICA, and other institutions, may want to consider implementing, he posits. “What does it look like to actually create a space that’s fun, soft and helps people learn more about art?”
MURRMUR, long titled “Misread Unread Red Re-Read Misread Unread Re-read,” currently features work by Rafael Domenech with installations and publications by nicole killian, Riley Hooker, and Sam Taylor slated for Feb. 24 and April 21. The multi-part exhibit ends July 16. Free. For more, go to https://icavcu.org
