Art Fitness Training helps with understanding contemporary art

A group of 30 people stood around a square platform that was about the size of a bathroom stall. It only came up six to eight inches above the ground and was painted white, seemingly insignificant. But what the platform held was what captured the crowd's undivided attention.

Three different-sized cardboard boxes were strewn haphazardly on display. Branded with FedEx stickers and signs of what must have been an obviously rough journey, the boxes sat side-by-side with three equal-sized glass containers. The wear and tear on these was even more evident on than the cardboard, with spiderweb cracks lining the sides, and cracked sides that looked like they wouldn't make it through another day.

"What do you see?" asked Laura Hurtado, education assistant for the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art.

Responses followed:

"FedEx boxes."

"Labels."

"Broken glass."

"Barcodes."

Again, Hurtado posed the question, "What do you see?"

The question was one of three that was posed to the group to guide them through the Art Fitness Training, a flagship program hosted by the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. The program ran three consecutive Saturdays, Jan. 28-Feb. 11, and was designed to assist anyone who wanted to feel more comfortable in a museum setting, especially around contemporary art.

"It's clichÉ, but it's like the teaching-a-man-to-fish idea," Hurtado said, donning a workout jacket and pants. "The purpose of art fitness is to give the trainee skills to actually interpret it (the art) for themselves."

During each session, participants were taken to view three different works of art, and then asked a series of questions. The first question posed was, "What do you see?"

Hurtado said this question forces a viewer to actually look at a work of art.

"You look, you look again, you look closer, and maybe start to see things you've never seen," Hurtado said.

Second, "How would it be different if?"

Hurtado used to the example of the "Mona Lisa" not smiling. She said this question gives a viewer insight to why the artists did what they did, and in the mind of the viewer it destabilizes the artist's authority and opens the work up for interpretation.

Third, "What does it suggest that it is this way?"