CON GAMES: Invisible Man @ Aspen Ideas Festival

July 3rd, 2009 at 06:58am Michael Conniff 2

If you were an honest man, you would have to confess that every time you arrive at the Aspen Ideas Festival you come to the conclusion that you are the invisible man.

Look around: there are scores of famous and famously accomplished people brought here by the Aspen Institute, and you are not even close to being one of them. Worse: you would never find a jury of your peers among this group, because these are not your peers. Any glimpses of grandeur you might have felt in better days was undermined when the press pass arrived and you were told you could only go to the second half of the Ideas Fest: without thinking twice, you know you are not even half a man in the all-seeing eyes of the Aspen Institute.

In this spirit of accelerating personal evaporation, you come to the Ideas Fest a day before your pass says you can to see if anyone will notice and throw you out. Nobody does, maybe because the only session underway is “The Work of Fred Wilson,” an artist you’ve never heard of. On the second try you enter a dark room and see a man with big hair and self-deprecation talking about what it’s like to be invisible.

From what he says and what you see, Fred Wilson has black, white, and Native American blood in his body, and his art has become a way of seeing things that go unseen. He creates museum spaces and/or re-arranges pieces of art so as to juxtapose the obvious with the heretofore unremarked. His slides slide by—you see he is the master of the found object, including a bauble at the Baltimore Museum with the word “truth” for all to see. He took cigar-store Indians in that museum and revived them by facing them against the wall with their backs to you.

His subject matter in large part is the forgotten. One of his best pieces comes from the time he dressed up dummies with no heads in uniforms. Fred Wilson talked a lot about guards and about being a guard. Once he set up a sign for one of his exhibits in a museum and stood next to it in a guard’s uniform. Nobody noticed, maybe because this was years before he got the big hair.

“I was invisible,” he said—and so are you. Don’t you see? You could have Fred Wilson mix and match your life with found objects and there would still be nothing to see. You are invisible, and that’s an idea worth remembering.

Entry Filed under: Aspen, Con Games, Race