When Frank Sanguinetti, former director of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, introduced the public to the museum’s new building in 2001, a few scratched their heads. The “guava” color of the walls might take some getting used to, they seemed to mumble. In the upper galleries, where paintings and sculpture took up much of the wall space, the color seemed manageable. But in the soaring heights of the Great Hall, it was simply overwhelming. How could any installation compete.<\/p>\n
And indeed, over the years the exhibits installed there have achieved mixed results. Paintings can seem dwarfed by the size of the room, which is why the museum chose to go huge with its Brian Kershisnik exhibit in 2007. If the palette of an installation is too muted, as in the case of the Hyunmee Lee exhibit in 2006, the works can disappear. Blues seem to do well with the peach color of the walls, as suggested by the recent Dale Nichols exhibit. And works with a strong visual presence, that read well from a distance, appear to hold the space the best. The most current installation in the Great Hall satisfies both these demands, and does so with a single work.<\/p>\n
Created in 1976, Lawrence Weiner’s “BENT TO A STRAIGHT AND NARROW AT A POINT OF PASSAGE” is a conceptual work that consists of that very phrase, in a variety of possible iterations. In the case of the UMFA’s Great Hall, the work has been created in six-foot tall blue capital letters and installed across three walls of the space.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first glance, the phrase is seemingly\u00a0simple and direct,” says poet, critic, and University of Utah English professor Craig Dworkin, who has studied and written extensively about the art of this period. “But then one realizes how open it is to\u00a0grammatical possibilities and suggestive ambiguities. ‘Narrow\u2019 and\u00a0\u2018straight\u2019 suggest themselves as adjectives, though they seem to\u00a0operate as nouns, evoking \u2018straits\u2019 and \u2018narrows\u2019 in the sense of\u00a0waterways, which would be nautical \u2018points of passage.\u2019 However, they\u00a0also of course recall the idiomatic \u2018straight and narrow,\u2019 so a whole\u00a0social and political resonance emerges from an ostensibly objective\u00a0phrase about linear geometry.\u201d<\/p>\n
The UMFA purchased the work in 2011\u00a0with funds from the Phyllis Cannon Wattis Endowment for Twentieth Century Art.\u00a0It will be on display in the Great Hall through mid-2014.<\/p>\n