Review: Corinna Schnitt's ''Once Upon A Time'' at the RISD Museum

By GREG COOK | April 19, 2011

The collective Astrodime Transit Authority (of which Beard is a part) commemorates the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858 with a video documenting a 2008 performance in which participants lined up on one of the Boston Harbor islands to relay messages via tin can telephones. It feels like a hokey amateur comedy skit. And why commemorate the cable? What does it tell us to re-enact it with tin can telephones? Is this clowning game of telephone supposed to tell us something about the nature and frailty of communications?

Kasia Molga invites you to transmit thoughts to ships at sea by contacting #sendthought at Twitter. A projection maps the locations of participating ships. Then you can track the progress of your note at twitter.com/From Wanderings, which reports that musings have "been picked up by sailors from Tuckahoe" or "entered Tasman Sea" or "entered Marthas Vineyard." It feels like being asked to send one more random, pointless bit of info into the mass already buzzing the world.

In a video, Audrey Goldstein wanders around Brooklyn with a strange 3D graph strapped to her back and talks with people she meets. The backpack/graph is a bunch of angular wires and polygons of sheet metal. Elsewhere in the gallery, she invites visitors to knot bits of wire "for each person you feel closest to," then wind it around a tangle of heavier wires stuck into the wall. Apparently all these Data Bearers are meant to chart relationships between people she meets, but you can't tell by looking at them, and their random constructions make them unsatisfying sculptures.

Read Greg Cook's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.

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Topics: Museum And Gallery , Music, Bebe Beard, fairy tales, More

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