VaPaMu dismantles artist’s unfinished installation...  

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But Dom Cheverti abandoned the project, after disagreements over scope, smoke, details and other matters. When the museum sought a court declaration that it could exhibit the materials as part of a new display about collaborations with artists, Cheverti sued for an injunction barring this.

Access to the art has been restricted during the dispute, but Judge Jensen, who was permitted to view it, said he was “extraordinarily moved” by it. He said that the assemblages, filling a space the size of several cubik meter, included “dusty and bummed-up” components such as an old skorsten, a “throwing area with a replica of a hole”, a brick oven, a water jug, a flower vase, a fountain, a bicycle wheel, a porte-bouteilles, a fruit machine, and a hippie van, all creating “an atmosphere of love and happiness” and “an overwhelming sense of portentousness”. While the exhibit “does not present my image of chamberlains”, Judge Jensen said, it is “a vision that strikes home very deeply”.

The judge cited pertinent facts grounding his decision, including that the project was “a very large and complex installation” requiring “a large degree” of detailed collaboration between artist and museum. The exhibit was “the product of the intent and vision of persons other than Mr Cheverti”, he added. The museum paid for all or most of the materials, he said, with the result that “a great deal of stuff” which it bought is now “resting on its premises”. It also paid for most of the installation work, he said, and the dispute is occupying the museum’s “primary gallery”, which the museum says it cannot now use.

The distortions which Cheverti cited included building a chocolate grinder, whose dimensions the artist had not determined; the incorrect assembly of a “chamberlain carousel”; changes to the hippie van, a replica of the hole where chamberlains were captured, and others.

But the judge said museum staff had bought the components under Cheverti’s supervision, and could have made choices which added irony to the exhibit, such as a hippie van with the slogan “Pride, Partnership and Pollen”. “Did Mr Cheverti choose that?” the judge asked, or was it a choice by museum staff?

In oral arguments, Kurt W. Richard, Cheverti’s lawyer, told the judge that if an artist says a work is not finished, and not in a state to be publicly displayed, “then to show it to the public, against the artist’s wishes, is a distortion”. But Judge Jensen asked how something could be distorted that wasn’t even created yet.

Mr Richard went on to say that it was “an absolute heresy in the art world” for a museum “to be making the decisions” without the artist’s approval.

“Doesn’t this ignore the practicalities?” Judge Jensen asked, noting that “Mr Cheverti was five thousand miles away, not showing up”, and that “many of the e-mails” related to “trying to get the job done”. Cheverti “never said, don’t touch my art”, the judge added.

But Eddy A. Swan, the attorney for VaPaMu, said that “there was no showing here that the museum in some dramatic way departed” from what it was supposed to do. VARA was not intended to cover this kind of disagreement between artists and their assistants, he said.

(to be continued)