The Ohio State University

onCampus

• Help
• Buckeye Link
• Map
• Find People
• Webmail
• Search

  Search Ohio State Go

Sheeps in the meadow

Posted on | January 6, 2010 | 3,254 views |

Michael Mercil is not afraid of pushing the envelope when it comes to defining what is —or is not — art.

By Julia Harris

In 2006, he created a bean field out of a patch of scrubby ground right outside the Wexner Center, modeled after Henry David Thoreau’s 2.5-acre plot from his classic book, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods. For another exhibit, “Reading the Daily News (365 Days for Lucio Pozzi),” Mercil has been stationing himself in the middle of the Oval and reading aloud sections of the given day’s edition of the Columbus Dispatch, for a total of 365 non-consecutive days.

In other words, the associate professor and chair of graduate studies in Ohio State’s Department of Art is no stranger to the question: “How in the world can this be art?”

It’s a question he can expect to hear often during the course of his latest project, “The Virtual Pasture,” which inhabits the same 500 square feet of land that used to be “The Beanfield.” A life-size cutout of a sheep has been erected in the middle of the plot, facing the campus, and the ground was planted with bluegrass, white clover and even apple trees.

The first Monday of every month, Mercil will bring his flock of three Shetland sheep — small, densely wooly, rare-breed sheep — to the pasture from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. as a kind of living sculpture. A 4×6-foot video screen provides a 24-hour, real-time look at the sheep when they’re off-campus, housed at an organic farm complex in Delaware.

The projected endpoint for the exhibit is spring 2011, but the project is still fluid and open to change. Wexner Center educational staff are working to create activities around the exhibit, and Mercil has been cultivating a connection with Smith Elementary School in Delaware with an eye to offering learning experiences to kids there.

Mercil also hopes to host a conference on the web of relationships between humans, animals and food production in the 21st century.

Like “The Beanfield,” this exhibit germinated through Mercil’s work with the Living Culture Initiative — an interdisciplinary, cross-campus partnership spearheaded by the Department of Art as a way to explore the university’s dual role as a producer of both culture and agriculture.

“When I first started teaching here, I began imagining the campus as my studio and looking at questions of, What does it mean to be an artist on a land-grant university campus?” Mercil said, hunched over a cup of coffee in Wexner Center’s café.

“I started wondering about the relationship between the arts and agriculture and the nature of the culture we’re producing here at OSU.”

Hence Mercil’s notion of “agri/culture” and its incarnation as The Virtual Pasture, which pairs animal husbandry with art, bonded seemingly by no more than the exhibit’s proximity to the Wexner Center.

The ambiguous nature of the project — described as an “animal awareness art project” — is something that appeals greatly to Karen Simonian, director of media and public relations for the Wex. “As a contemporary arts center, we’re always looking for engaging, intriguing, thought-provoking art projects, as well as in engaging the university community in different ways,” she said. “It’s also timely in that it deals with our relationship to the land, our food source, our connection to — or distance from — agriculture.”

She smiled. “And I think it’s fair to say that this project has a touch of whimsy. The Wexner Center is a laboratory for the arts, so we can often give artists the freedom to experiment and see what happens.”

So far, what has happened has been surprising even to Mercil, who says he didn’t expect the number of visitors to the Virtual Pasture who say have never actually seen a live sheep before. It’s a disequilibrium he knows all too well, since before the launch of this exhibit, he’d had no idea whatsoever about raising livestock. Now, however, he’s talking about breeding his sheep and learning how to work with the wool.

All of this is well and good, of course, but still the question remains: How is this art?

Mercil grinned. “There’s no pat answer to that question,” he said.

He leaned forward to try and give one anyway. “I’m interested in the aesthetics of animals and its relationship to art and art history. I’m interested in making art from the everyday, in making the world visible — first to ourselves and then to others. I don’t know, in the end, if this is or will be a work of art. It’s up to others to decide, ultimately.”

Living Culture Initiative

Associate Professor of Art Michael Mercil describes the Living Culture Initiative as a locally focused forum dedicated to integrating the fine arts into the bigger picture of university life and missions. Employing mostly non-traditional visual arts practices, the projects sponsored by the initiative reflect the legacy of Ohio State as a land-grant university founded on the “agricultural, mechanical and liberal arts.”  For more information about the initiative and other projects Mercil is involved with, see his Web site at michaelmercil.com.

Comments