The GLUME: a walk through the newly-reopened Clowes Pavilion at Newfields

My daughter Naomi and I went to the newly-reopened Clowes Pavilion at Newfields last Saturday. The Pavilion had reopened the day before, after being closed for the last four years, during which time extensive renovations were undertaken.

There is now a “digital ceiling” where there once was a skylight. The curating in the adjoining spaces has a 21st century feel to it as well.

At the Pavilion entrance you’ll find a silkscreen portrait by Andy Warhol adjacent to Paolo Uccello’s “Portrait of a Young Man.” The former is a portrait of fashion designer Stephen Sprouse, evoking the genre of Pop Art which Warhol pioneered. The latter dates back to the 1430s, evoking the poses found on late-antiquity Roman coins. As you’ll find in the museum’s first major gallery reorganization, “Embodied: Human Figures in Art,” such pairings are designed to generate a conversation across genres, eras, and cultures. 

But the marquee item in the Clowes Pavilion is the digital ceiling. As Naomi and I stepped into its glow, it was projecting an image of blue liquids swirling and frothing like the surface of the methane seas on Titan. The video, which runs on an hour-long loop, also features scenes from the Newfields campus in extreme closeup.

“It’s mesmerizing,” Naomi said, as she took out her iPhone to take a picture of it.  Across the courtyard an Indy Baroque harpsichordist was plucking out some Bach, I think it was. The courtyard was quite crowded, and Naomi was not alone in having her smartphone out. 

We climbed the staircase to the balcony as the video feed, on the ceiling’s ultra-high definition LED panels, froze periodically.  This glitch in the matrix, as it were, occurred for fractions of seconds at a time.

The last time Naomi and I had been in the Clowes Pavilion —  named after the major benefactors to the Indianapolis Museum of Art (now Newfields) —  was 2013.  After starting out with the post-Impressionists of the Pont Aven School in the European Galleries, we entered the Pavilion. We ultimately arrived at the Hieronymus Bosch painting "Christ In Limbo," painted in 1575. (With its plethora of tortured souls, and surreal hellscape, this wasn’t exactly Naomi's favorite in the collection.) 

Now, however, the effect was not like that of going back in time at all. Instead, as we walked through the adjoining gallery spaces, it felt as if the last 1,000 years or so of time had been amalgamated together. Think of the penultimate scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the cosmic bedroom.  This feeling was particularly acute in front of an electronic LED sign by Jenny Holzer from 1983. The sign had been placed over a painting titled “Battle of Theseus and the Amazons” by Domenici di Michelino, dating from the 1430s, which had originally been placed on one side of a wooden marriage chest. 

Truisms such as “We Should be Exemplary”, mixed with feminist adages, crawled by on the Holzer LED over the much older work. It’s probably not possible to know if this painting, which depicts a war between male and female armies,  was supposed to be some kind of sly commentary on the institution of marriage. But the grouping of these works together begs the question.

This reorganization comes a year after museum director and CEO Charles Venable was forced to resign over an online job listing he placed for the position of museum director that had the goal of retaining “core white art audiences.”  

Speaking of core white art audiences, the new curatorial layout pays the Clowes family an extraordinary amount of deference. That is, you’ll find here a digital notebook full of family history and large portraits of the family principals. Considering that the Pavilion was originally built to house the Clowes Collection of Old Masters’ Paintings, there is a certain logic to this, I suppose.   

But you might wonder if this is a case of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?

This unveiling of this renovation comes on the heels of Newfield’s most dispiriting, and disfiguring renovation to date. I’m talking, of course, about The LUME, the immersive digital experience that took over the museum’s entire fourth floor, which swept away the expansive contemporary galleries, replacing them with faux Van Gogh sunflowers and starry nights on an infinite loop.

I wanted to spend a little more time in the museum, but I was at the mercy of my daughter, who is a senior at Carmel High School. She didn’t have all afternoon to explore the galleries (and neither did I for that matter.) Naomi will be concentrating in graphic design at The IU School of Art, Architecture, and Design in Bloomington next year, provided that the US and Russia don’t exchange nukes before then.  

For better or for worse, I will keep coming back to the museum. It still functions as a spiritual and psychological refuge for me — in parts. But I’m nostalgic for the days when you could wander the museum without being compelled to have some kind of copyrighted experience or other. 

As we left, I glanced upward at the digital ceiling. It now displayed what looked like a long tunnel, slowly rising upwards. Like the one Virgil and Dante climbed up from Hell, towards the stars.