CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

Grave matters

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:01:41 GMT

The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta
Entering the small back room at Gallery Kayafas, you feel you’ve been transported into the shadowy pages of a small, mysterious book.

MEMENTO Imagery and poetry combine to tell the story of a community.

The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta | Photographs by Peter Kayafas, Epitaph translations by Adrian G. Sahlean, essay by Sanda Golopentia | Purple Martin Press | 120 pages | $45

Entering the small back room at Gallery Kayafas, where Peter Kayafas’s photographic tributes to the poignant sculptures that dot a solitary cemetery in a remote Romanian village are on display, you feel you’ve been transported into the shadowy pages of a small, mysterious book. In fact, you have. Kayafas’s show marks the publication of The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta (Purple Martin Press), which celebrates the riveting and crude carved wooden grave markers in an isolated village in northern Transylvania. It also chronicles the germination and fruition of a real folk art.

A carver of gates and crosses, Ion Stan Patras (1908–1977) eventually began carving the likenesses of his fellow villagers for their tombs. Over time, the likenesses became representations of a central theme in the life of the deceased (a woman who sang in her church choir, a man who loved his oxen) or, more dramatically, a re-enactment of the moment of death. Lightning strikes one ill-fated farmer; a rabid horse spits in the face of another; vehicular accidents abound; a youth meets his end rollerblading in a Paris subway; the shepherd Saulic Ion was shot and beheaded by a Hungarian.

But the enchanting power of these colorfully painted scenes is only partly explained by Patras’s carving. Below each portrait or tableau, a poem has been etched into the wood, and thanks to a linguistic device that’s as simple as Patras’s sculptural style, The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta casts a hypnotic spell. Each poem is delivered in the first person, the voice of the dead. Some are philosophical (“Man goes through life with many trials/More bad than good”), some bitter (“Maybe mother cursed me/When she rocked the cradle”), some penitent (“Forgive me father/I did not listen to you”). All are terse, idiosyncratic, and utterly personal — you’re delivered into the frequent sorrows, occasional joys, and continuing passions of a people. How Patras developed the literary complement to his effigies remains unclear, though Sanda Golopentia’s graceful essay alludes to funeral rites in the region of Sapanta in which the officiating deacon sings to the bereaved in the voice of the deceased.

The poems’ translator, Adrian G. Sahlean, has rendered the rhymed trochaic couplets of the Romanian into English that’s earthy, uncomplicated, and direct. The result reads as uncompromised and strange.

Salons of summer

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:54:42 GMT

Group shows at the Berenberg and the Pepper, flowers and Fox at Howard Yezerski
I’m not sure when the word “salon” started to mean an all-inclusive sampling of a gallery’s artists.

UNTITLED: Dan Miller’s piece is both an expression of and an homage to debilitating compulsion.

I’m not sure when the word “salon” started to mean an all-inclusive sampling of a gallery’s artists, but the “summer salon” exhibits that currently dot the city offer the sort of crowded, measured excitement I associate with suitcases packed for summer vacation. Designed to maximize content, they emphasize comfortable, well-worn staples but also admit to a few new items.

That’s true of the exhibit at the Berenberg Gallery: most of the artists on display have enjoyed wall space in the past. Yet it’s hard to say that anything’s “worn” at this space. Lorri Berenberg has carved out a niche in the Boston art world, focusing on — what to call them? — outsider, naive, self-taught artists. Many are handicapped, physically or mentally; few, if any, are schooled; none holds an MFA. And the roiling, vibrant, image-rich, symbol-laden art they produce enjoys a vitality that their studied counterparts on Newbury Street and in the South End would do well to emulate.

Two works in this chock-a-block show stand out, perhaps because they speak in visual whispers whereas the surrounding frames all but shout. Born in 1945 in El Salvador, José Nuñez has been associated with an artists’ collective in San Francisco since 1993. His Seven Figures belongs to a larger series of muted, upright, androgynous, nearly identical figures: they wear white shrouds suggesting a temple frieze, and their rectilinear, side-by-side, unpunctuated forms suggest a row of neatly packed sardines. Do not, repeat, do not look at this work on the gallery’s Web site; what in real life is soft to the point of vaporous — they could be votive candles seen through a fog — becomes unduly bright and articulate. The magic of Nuñez’s acrylic-and-magic-marker painting lies partly in its homespun majesty; the figures are both caryatids and cartoons. And they appear to bear witness; square-shouldered and facing forward, they become a Greek chorus, an army battalion, a living fence.

Kinetic

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 21:12:25 GMT

Pat Keck’s undead, plus Joe Johnson, Bert Antonio, and Gary Green
In their doll-like stiffness and manufactured hair, Pat Keck's shamelessly wooden, unmistakably hand-hewn figures suggest a descent into the underworld.

SPINNING DIZZY: Still and still moving, Pat
Keck’s creation will leave you dizzy.

For most figurative sculptors, the human form — no matter how distended, abstracted, degraded, or bio-engineered — implies human life. Pat Keck isn’t like most figurative sculptors. In their doll-like stiffness and manufactured hair, her shamelessly wooden, glossily painted, unmistakably hand-hewn figures suggest a descent into the underworld. Bloodless, elongate, and frozen in their expressions, Keck’s people — who in her current show at the Genovese/Sullivan Gallery include one riotous woman, a chainsmoking man, two spinning zombies, a straitjacketed asylum escapee, and an army of one-legged soldiers — appear to have risen from their coffins, maniacal veterans of the legions of the undead.

For most figurative sculptors, moreover, movement is suggested through gesture and form momentarily arrested by stillness. For Keck, movement isn’t suggested, it’s real, and it typically comes about when you interact with one of her delightfully diabolical creations. Press the protruding belly button of Man on a Pole and his red, salamander tongue sticks out; flip the switch beneath Spinning Sleeping or Spinning Dizzy and the miniature men on the circular, circus-inspired pedestals go into their respective tailspins. Give a shove to one of the six oversized dice in Future and watch the wild woman in the red dress and costume pearls go round and round on the roulette wheel she straddles. It isn’t just these creatures’ movements that gives them their risen-from-the-dead ambiance — it’s that while they’re in motion, they’re also holding still. Smoking Man’s lips don’t purse and his cheeks don’t contract, though smoke from his butt fills the air; the two Spinning figurines’ arms grip their sides despite their gyrations, and for all that her arms extend vertically like a hysterical actress taking a bow, Fortune’s eyes never blink and her wrists never bend as she circles round like a top. Like roller-coaster riders fixed to their seats at some hellish carnival, Keck’s people are both motionless and catapulting at the same time.

Three of the works in the show don’t move at all, and in some ways they’re the best: they feel as if they were about to explode. Perched on a stepladder so that he meets you at eye level, Smoking Man never reaches for the cigarette that burns between his yellow teeth, but if Keck had wanted him to, he would — she’s a master engineer capable of making a decapitated man drum his fingers while playing solitaire (Big Head) or a fortune teller sit upright and ring a bell (Answer Man). Instead, her version of the Marlboro man in a black outfit and top hat sits and stares and smokes — gray-skinned, jaundice-eyed, and sufficiently emaciated to look as if his next toke might come through an oxygen mask. He lives for his poison.

Conversations wanted

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:14:48 GMT

The Boston Cyberarts Festival looks for interactive
Just what is cyberarts?

CENOTAPH: Steve Hollinger creates silent dramas.

Just what is cyberarts? Well you might ask. Is it art that draws on the latest technological advances in software-driven interactive imagery? Yes. Is it art that reconnects with primitive mechanics like those reminiscent of 19th-century circus sideshows? That too. Could it be digitally manipulated film stills enlarged to the size of hotel windows? You guessed. Now in its eighth year and fifth incarnation, the Boston Cyberarts Festival is a bi-annual spring ritual of diverse performing- and visual-arts events and exhibits hosted by area galleries, museums, theaters, universities, and public spaces. Perhaps cyberarts might best be defined by what it isn’t: it isn’t painting, it isn’t sculpture, and it prefers to move or at least to have moved. Here’s a sampling of this year’s fest.

For those looking to feast their eyes on the cutting edge of technology and art — a dangerously mixed metaphor, I know — a trip to Art Interactive is in order. There, Camille Utterback’s three installations, which visibly consist of two separate and one pair of white movie screens suspended high above even the tallest viewers’ heads, at first look like big abstract paintings. One is made up of multi-colored dots; the others sport all sorts of colorful shapes and daubs, and on the floor below each screen appears a corresponding panel of projected light. Only when you begin to walk on the lighted floor area (whose tiles shift slightly with your steps) do you notice that your movement radically reconfigures the shapes on the screen. Sometimes you’re an inadvertent eraser, wiping away whole networks of design. Other times you’re an inadvertent painter, leaving in the wake of your movements huge swaths of unpredictable imagery. In either case, your motions get picked up by a sensor that translates your body’s activity into a cloud-like force that’s continually re-creating what you see. It’s fun.

There’s no denying the intelligence and the precision of Utterback’s art, or its tongue-in-cheek majesty. Few artists in any medium warrant such scale or offer such variety. A fleeting thought came to me as I watched my moving around leave a new canvas behind: I should have been on drugs. A good hallucinogen hit would have heightened the effects of her shape-shifting projections, and that thought may point to the artist’s achievement but also to her achievement’s limit. For all that Utterback’s art is highly interactive, it is not in the least way personal: one’s own particular shape is not reflected on any of her screens. Instead, every body becomes the same amorphous, rounded force field. Further, the graphic content of her ephemeral creations — the painterly brush strokes, the line drawings, the smears of projected pigment — reflect exclusively the artist’s hand, not the viewer’s. Before her immersion in interactive technology, Utterback made works on canvas that look a lot like her sophisticated etch-a-sketches. For art to be truly interactive, it needs to operate like a conversation: both parties get to set the terms.

Absence and presence

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 18:49:25 GMT

‘Sensorium II’ at MIT, Francis Peabody at Harvard
“Sensorium I,” which was up at MIT’s List Center between October and December last year, was an ambitious mixed bag of what one critic aptly termed “circus art.”

LET’S GET PHYSICAL/DIGITAL: When Christian Jankowski fails, it isn’t for lack of wit or commitment.

“Sensorium I,” which was up at MIT’s List Center between October and December last year, was an ambitious mixed bag of what one critic aptly termed “circus art.” Mega installations that included tall walls that gave up foul-smelling odors when touched. Long corridors whose lights and sounds could induce a seizure. Various big rooms, some actual and some on video, where events occurred that were either mysterious or banal, depending on your taste and patience.

Now we have “Sensorium II.” Gone are the elephants and big cats and human cannonballs; we’re down to the jugglers and clowns, and not many at that. The one carry-over from “Sensorium I” is Mathieu Brand’s Ubiq, a Mental Odyssey, in which you don ingeniously engineered headgear and find your perspective switching between seeing what you’re looking at and what someone else wearing the same headgear is looking at. It was delightful the first time I tried it; I hadn’t realized how much of a one-liner it would turn out to be until last week, when I was in the company of the MassArt graduate students I teach who’d all seen “Sensorium I.” Of the 25 of us who’d partaken of the mental odyssey last time around, only one was inclined to repeat the experience.

Christian Jankowski is a funny, iconoclastic, smart video artist, so even when he misses the mark, as he does in Let’s Get Physical/Digital, it isn’t for want of wit or commitment. Jankowski inserts himself into videos that are themselves real-world events — a TV psychic hotline in which he’s the caller; an evangelical prayer service during which he lies passed out on the altar; a television talk show on the subject of performance art that sees him silently circle the set while the guests discuss his antics. He’s at his best when he’s unrehearsed, when the dialogue is unscripted: the richness of his playful intrusions depends on the complete seriousness of the other performers. Let’s Get Physical/Digital takes Web chat-room conversations between Jankowski and his girlfriend — from a period when they were living in different countries and couldn’t afford to phone — that are mouthed by varying pairs of amateur actors in drab sets with bad lighting. Even though we don’t know the exact origins of the dialogue, it’s clear that the words being spoken issue from cyberspace, with the result that the physical nearness of the actors is weirdly at odds with their echo-like protestations of love. But the hollowness Jankowski is after — language emptied of meaning, proximity stripped of closeness — is undermined by the artist’s self-consciousness. He knew all along he’d be saving the transcripts of the conversations for a performance piece, so the male half of the now spoken dialogue sounds stilted and insincere. There’s also no reason, except for the List Center’s need to occupy its cavernous space, for the video projection to measure in at something like 30 by 30 feet; what’s interesting about Let’s Get Physical/Digital isn’t about the gigantic, it’s about the small.

Eye on you

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:01:46 GMT

The new ICA’s pretty, so how’s the art?
Oskar Kokoschka is reputed to have asked, if the Louvre were burning and you could rescue either the Mona Lisa or a cat, which would it be? Slideshow: "Super Vision" at the ICA

Oskar Kokoschka is reputed to have asked, if the Louvre were burning and you could rescue either the Mona Lisa or a cat, which would it be? He wasn’t being silly. The question comes down to the fundamental importance of life itself — whether anything that breathes shouldn’t be valued above everything that doesn’t.

JOSIAH MCELHENY’S CZECH MODERNISM MIRRORED AND REFLECTED INFINITELY: A wonder even if it doesn’t get far beyond being a magnificent department-store display case.

I was reminded of Kokoschka’s challenge by the dazzling, and in a curious way humble, space that the ICA now enjoys in its extreme makeover in Fort Point Channel: no matter what sculpture, video, installation, painting, or sculpture you’re looking at, you’re never more than a few feet away from a spectacular panorama of ocean and sky. The glass-sided building beckons you to engage with the wide-open world of possibilities with the same energy and attention with which it invites you to take in the products of human imagination. The architects appear to be reminding artists and audiences alike that the temple to which art belongs has no ceiling, isn’t static or windowless or an isolated retreat but a bright and vibrant and surprising place poised between land and sea.

Only someone who would grab the cat can fully appreciate Leonardo, and only architects who appreciate the necessary limits of art could have created such a superb display case for it. There are five shows currently on exhibit: the intelligent if somewhat predictable “Super Vision”; the permanent collection on view for the first time; the four local finalists for this year’s James and Audrey Foster Prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize); the latest in the ICA’s “Momentum Series”; and of course the building itself courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Op art and surveillance videos, strobe photography and mirrored vessels, stainless-steel rabbits and laminated-wood sculptures are among the items served up in “Super Vision,” a loosely conceived, eclectic smorgasbord of mostly playful, occasionally provocative, and uniformly accomplished pieces that in various ways riff on the possibilities and improbabilities of seeing. The show serves up a 40-year overview of the intersection of technology and art. At one end live the advances in still photography achieved in the 1960s, notably Harold Edgerton’s experiments in strobe photography at MIT. In his eternally combustible 1964 Shooting the Apple, a bullet suspends in mid air, caught in its exit from the McIntosh. Behind it you can see two luminous, lace-like explosions where it has entered and departed the skin: speed and violence rendered as stillness, an instrument of death partying with an emblem of wholesomeness. What could be more American? Four years after Edgerton’s fast applesauce, the astronauts aboard the Apollo 8 took the first deep-space picture of planet earth, an apple-sized orb bobbing in blackness whose delicate swirls of white clouds over blue oceans remain a reminder, more Christmas ornament than paperweight, of our fragile globe.

The joy of looking

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 23:28:15 GMT

Surveillance and power at the Rose
In the hurried world of print journalism, little time goes by between seeing an exhibit and writing about it.

In the hurried world of print journalism, little time goes by between seeing an exhibit and writing about it. But it’s been nearly two weeks since I visited the historically important, uniformly intelligent, and often gratifying show of video art at Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum, and the images in “Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance in Video Art” remain fresh and provocative. That in itself suggests that the exhibit is more indelible than its initial impression.

LOBBY I: What’s everyone at MIT looking up at?

Michael Rush, the Rose’s new director and this show’s curator, makes the case in an accompanying essay that the emergence of video art in the 1960s corresponded with the government’s use of surveillance equipment, photos, and videos as tools in thwarting anti-war and civil-rights protesters. Aesthetics, entertainment, and social control are indeed twined, but not only because of their proximate birth dates. Artists took it upon themselves to film unsuspecting subjects or to employ surveillance footage as elements of artistic production.

But that doesn’t explain how a good deal of the work included in “Balance and Power” got to be there. Martha Rosler’s filming of herself being measured head to toe (Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, 1977) may be making a statement, but it’s hardly about Big Brother, since she issued the invitation to the man measuring her, as well as a few female onlookers, and oversaw the procedure. Similarly, the fascinating Political Advertisement VI, 1952–2004 from Antonio Muntadas and Marshall Reese, a string of television ads for American presidential candidates, is a study in slick propaganda techniques, not high-tech surveillance.

The good news is that the exhibit’s lack of categorical unity doesn’t much matter: whether a particular video fits its organizing principle or not, these works mostly stand on their own — as surveillance-inspired documents or seminal artifacts of video art’s beginnings or as genuine artistic accomplishments. Jonas Mekas’s Award Presentation to Andy Warhol gives us the latter two as we become witnesses to what feels like a camp, metaphorical orgy. In the short film, Warhol presides over a good-looking group of Factory regulars (including Baby Jane Holzer and Gerard Malanga). He receives as an “award” an assortment of fruit and then ceremoniously distributes the phallic-shaped food to his cohort. In the silent, somewhat slowed-down black-and-white footage, we watch as the participants feed themselves and each other; they stare with ironic amusement into the camera as if to say, “You know what our chewing symbolizes.” With waifish authority, Warhol moves among them, dispensing his comestible trophies as well as the camera’s fixed attention. You feel you’re part of getting away with something naughty or forbidden, a form of public group sex no one can object to. Surveillance — whether by a government, a gated community, or a peeping Tom — is predicated on its subject’s ignorance of being recorded. Award Presentation is the opposite, a self-conscious if not narcissistic celebration of standing in the spotlight. Which is why it’s fun.

Realm of the senses

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 22:55:15 GMT

Digging the media in ‘Sensorium’
Put aside everything you think you know about art for the sake of experiencing the sensual extravaganza of “Sensorium.” Slideshow: ‘Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art’ at MIT List Visual Art Center.

Put aside everything you think you know about art for the sake of experiencing the sensual extravaganza of “Sensorium,” the ambitious, technically astute, and at times mesmerizing List Center exhibit that addresses the intersection of technology and physical sensation. Six international artists ranging in age from 34 to 65 and working in media ranging from sweat-scented walls to headgear that allows you to see what others are seeing embrace technology with varying degrees of playfulness, involvement, and wit. At their best, we’re made to see ourselves if not differently then at least with our awareness pricked, though touch (which corresponds with the largest sense organ of the human body, skin) and taste prove to be the two senses least engaged.

UBIQ, A MENTAL ODYSSEY: Mathieu Briand’s installation might not exactly challenge the foundation of Western thought, but it’s cool.

The show’s highlight might be French artist Mathieu Briand’s Ubiq, a Mental Odyssey, where you start by entering a room inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. One super-bright white wall (unfortunately off to the right so as to go almost unnoticed) encompasses a large video screen of the earth in orbit as seen from outer space. Directly in front of you stand some similarly white, space-age benches upholstered in blood-red plastic; behind them is a set of tall columns through which you must pass to enter the rest of the gallery. Each column has a shelf on which a strange helmet rests, and with the aid of an attendant, you’re invited to strap yourself into the cumbersome headgear, which is equipped with lenses, earphones, and a hand-held device with a prominent red button. Push the button and the fun begins — suddenly you’re no longer seeing through the lenses balanced on your nose. Instead, you’re seeing what somebody else wearing another helmet is looking at. The high-tech hall of mirrors gets especially interesting when the channel changes and you see yourself — that is, the self another participant is seeing when you happen to tap into his or her apparatus.

Although the technology isn’t uniformly up to snuff (my first helmet didn’t work), the effect is captivating, even delightful, as your perspective switches from deliberately to inadvertently changed. Does that mean, as curator Yuko Hasegawa claims in her catalogue essay, that Briand’s inventiveness challenges the notion of subject and object and by extension the foundation of Western thought? I doubt it. Looking at the world from another’s point of view has been the domain of language for at least as long as there have been stories and poems. What’s new here, and pleasurable, is the medium, not the message.

Monkey see, monkey do

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 22:20:26 GMT

Into the cute at the DeCordova
So thorough and deadpan is the joke that Catherine Chalmers pulls off in her ravishing color photographs of insects crawling across flowers they resemble that when I read the wall text I was sure there had been a mistake. Slideshow: Going Ape: Confronting Animals In Contemporary Art at DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park

POP BEETLES: You don’t have to know the punch line to appreciate Catherine Chalmers’s costumed cockroaches.

So thorough and deadpan is the joke that Catherine Chalmers pulls off in her ravishing color photographs of insects crawling across flowers they resemble that when I read the wall text I was sure there had been a mistake. The text talked about her cockroach series and the “fictive scenarios” she creates by employing mail-order cockroaches, but where were they? In one photo, a bug I’d never heard of, the peacockroach, displays the dazzling plumage, feathery and iridescent, of the bird it’s named for. In another, black and yellow bumblebees with unusually large antennae amble across a brilliant sunflower of the same contrasting hues. In a third, ladybugs in their traditional finery of black spots on red surfaces inspect the blossom of a leafless red and white flower. That the ladybugs were elongate and sported antennae larger than their bodies only meant I wasn’t familiar with all the variants of the species. Even the pop beetles with their ’60s-style pattern of simplified blossoms on their backs raised no suspicions: who hasn’t beheld with awe the ingenious camouflage of not dissimilar creatures in the pages of National Geographic?

It took the patient good humor of the DeCordova Museum’s publicist to explain what I had failed to see: all the insects were in fact cockroaches that the artist had meticulously painted, outfitted, and positioned. The joke was on me. Yet grateful as I was to have been arrested in my gullibility, and impressed as I am by Chalmers’s rich artistic sensibility, her “American Cockroach” photos and the estimable contributions by a few other artists are not sufficient to make “Going Ape” more than a mostly silly, frequently inept, and decidedly unconfrontational treatment of a well-worn (but hardly worn-out) theme: animals as the subject of artistic imagemaking.

One problem with the exhibit is that all the still works — paintings, photographs, installations, and sculptures — are just animals, with the exception of Komr & Melamid’s contribution, two acrylic paintings they coaxed elephants into making by holding a paintbrush in their trunks. The result of keeping humans out of the pictures and 3-D works is that none of our interactions with what remains of the beasts and the birds and the bees has been allowed in. Instead, we get the museum version of a zoo. Onlookers only, we’re invited to stare at animal forms that are as removed from their meanings and contexts as the caged cats at Franklin Park.

The time is Nau

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 22:31:48 GMT

An artist gets his due in four shows
Chris Nau is riding a surge. His popularity is deserved.

NARKEETA: If paintings are a puzzle, these are the assembled solutions.

I once asked a gallery director how he decides whether to consider representing an artist, and he confessed to having what he called “the rule of three”: if three different parties independently recommended he check somebody out, that’s when he scheduled a studio visit. One Boston artist has gone that rule one better, simultaneously occupying the Project Space of the Bromfield Gallery and being the subject of a solo show of paintings at the Artists Foundation Gallery as well as the featured artist in the Bernard Toale Gallery’s ongoing Boston Drawing Project and a contributor to the summer group show at Tufts University with two of his signature wall manipulations. Chris Nau (rhymes with “cow”) is riding a surge. His popularity is deserved.

This recent work gives a sense of his studied playfulness. He brings an anthropologist’s sensibility — exploratory field work to be sure, but deliberate to the point of mathematical — to his colorful abstract forms. At the center of his paintings and woodblock prints looms a multi-sided, typically striped shape, and within those simple constants of outer edge and inner content begins one of many tensions at work in his frames. The stripes themselves are angular and bold; the shapes they zigzag across have had all their edges pressed into soft contours. Imagine a package with adhesive wrapping that’s been worked over by a rock tumbler or the tide or UPS. Metaphors quickly break down in trying to describe Nau’s imagery, however, since there’s no making sense of how the sharp definition of the patterns coexists with the randomly amorphous forms to which they belong — except that those same words can also be applied to the detritus of train wrecks and car accidents and the aftermath of natural disasters. Integrity and dissolution balance each other. And yet nothing explicitly suggests damage: no edges blacken, nothing appears cut off or incomplete or compromised. After considerable pondering of these images, the nearest I could get to a simile was thinking that this is what space debris must be like: improbable manufactured heaps whose purpose has passed and whose former velocity and direction have been reduced to gravity-free floating.

Summer daze

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 20:27:27 GMT

Cool pickin’s on Newbury Street and in the South End
One of the invigorating qualities of summer art shows in Boston is their relative playfulness. Slideshow: Images from the galleries

WHERE WE COME FROM: In Morgan Bulkeley’s work, Bosch meets Rousseau and Keith Haring meets Roger Tory Peterson.

One of the invigorating qualities of summer art shows in Boston is their relative playfulness. Nobody expects to attract the multitudes and dazzle the critics — at least not in the same way those expectations kick in for fall and spring. So relaxation trumps seriousness, risks almost outnumber sure bets, and expansiveness prevails over narrowly defined themes. Too bad our summers aren’t six months long.

The most challenging of this summer’s highlights turns up at Genovese/Sullivan Gallery, where Matt Harle’s casual, enigmatic, diffident sculptures remind us once again that the question Duchamp raised and Warhol explored — What makes art? — is alive and well and raging in the South End. Harle has enjoyed a reputation as one of Gen X’s outstanding minimalists, notably for his brightly colored cast rubber sculptures, long as anacondas and shaped like dental molding, that slither across gallery walls like architectural details fashioned from intestines. A similar fusion of the organic and the manufactured describes his current body of work, which looks like thin, industrial, 3-D versions of pressed leaves.

Harle combines care and casualness. The rubber moldings had the authority of temple friezes that could be washed away with a garden hose; his pressed-leaf sculptures look painstakingly exact and also like the work of an eight-year-old. Between two sheets of identically sized translucent white plastic — some shaped like triangles, others less geometrically precise — crude fans of wood and colored plastic resemble the veins of desiccated flora. There’s balance and bilateral symmetry; there’s also randomness and mischief. The sculptures are typically held together by a small length of industrial wire; one’s clipped shut by a green plastic clothespin. And the circumference of each sculpture is slightly open, as if it were a dying bivalve; you can peek into its interior. Fragile buildings suggestive of hands loosely clasped in prayer, Harle’s pieces are both maquettes and fully finished, the mature work of a young spirit dedicated to process as much as product.

Kitchen-sink ‘Summer’

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 19:34:50 GMT

A sprawling show at the Peabody Essex
You wouldn’t think a painting exhibit of ships and still lifes, landscapes and portraits, primitives and abstractions representing 82 artists and spanning 148 years would hold together in any discernible way.

You wouldn’t think a painting exhibit of ships and still lifes, landscapes and portraits, primitives and abstractions representing 82 artists and spanning 148 years (the oldest, Fitz Henry Lane’s Castine, Maine dates from 1856; the newest, Scott Prior’s Apple Tree, dried to a finish the year before last) would hold together in any discernible way. And you’d be mostly right. The sprawling, uneven, frequently enjoyable collection of summertime paintings of New England at the Peabody Essex Museum by artists who come from here or settled here or summered here or simply passed through feels little more cohesive than a Security Council meeting at the United Nations. Yes, the delegates have gathered in one place, but the languages they speak and the interests they represent are global. The thematic looseness of “Painting Summer in New England” is implicit in curator Trevor Fairbrother’s catalogue essay when he writes, “The diverse works all have two properties in common: each is a subjective arrangement of pigmented substances on a flat surface, and, as a result, each is an invention or fictional exercise.” Is there a painting of the last 1000 years about which that can’t be said?

HARBOR #9: Alex Katz’s wall-sized work exceeds the limits of his cartoonish minimalism.

“I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,” begins William Butler Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” and just when you’re prepared for the high seriousness of the creative search, the poet undermines it with the next line, “I sought it daily for six weeks or so.” “Painting Summer” enjoys no such irony — the theme is relentlessly pursued through rather bogus groupings (“Streets and Gathering Places,” “Individuals,” “New England Nudes”), with the result that you come away with gratitude for glimpsing a number of gems, annoyance for being made to look at some forgettable tripe (just what is Leon Kroll’s Cape Ann doing here?), and at least one or two breakthrough realizations about artistic influences and affinities that you never before appreciated.

Good behavior

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Wed, 17 May 2006 14:47:52 GMT

Looking for the renegades at this year’s DeCordova Annual
Restrained playfulness and a certain decorative sensibility are the outstanding attributes of this year’s DeCordova Annual Exhibition, an event that began life 16 years ago to showcase the work of New England artists at various stages of their careers.

TEN WINDOWS: Joe Johnson depicts a marriage of proximity and distance, intimacy and alienation, symmetry and disruption.

Restrained playfulness and a certain decorative sensibility are the outstanding attributes of this year’s DeCordova Annual Exhibition, an event that began life 16 years ago to showcase the work of New England artists at various stages of their careers. The 2006 show presents 13 artists, mostly in the early middle stages of their creative lives (my guess is the average age hovers around 36), who work in media ranging from traditional painting and sculpture to high-tech interactive electronics. There’s even a video of an improvisational monologue in which Christopher Gray free-associates with the small, yellow, abstract wood sculpture he’s made.

As is so often the case with group shows that are not organized by theme or in any other formal way, the big and the splashy tend to dominate while the small and the subtle go overlooked. The curators appear to have addressed that issue: if the work’s small, there’s an abundance of it. More disappointing is the confined emotional range of much of this year’s Annual. I had the sense of being in a primary-school classroom on parents’ night. An overarching tidiness and look-what-we’ve-done formality told me I was there to admire, not engage. Little that was gritty or tense or raw — including Jon Sarkin’s room chock full of R. Crumb–like graffiti-influenced drawings (too many names of modern masters written beside the druggy cartoons) — got past the decision makers. We’re left with art by and for the well-behaved.

That said, a few renegades hint at an edgy underside. Joe Johnson looks down from the roofs of city buildings to take 40-by-40-inch color photographs. He’s set himself a difficult and interesting task: to shoot architecture that’s charged by human presence without including much in the way of people. He succeeds by taking nighttime photos of apartment complexes without a flash, so that whatever light we see suggests occupancy. Ten Windows, 2004 is both his most populated picture — there’s a probable body in one window, a possible body part in another, and, of all things, a miniature skeleton on the ledge of a third — and his most captivating. He makes us shameless voyeurs, not only by goading us with the nebulous human elements we have to struggle to identify and make sense of (who keeps a skeleton on the other side of a drawn shade?) but also by messing with our expectations. The title implies a predictable grid formation and uniformity, not to mention the likelihood of a visible building. Yet by cropping the photo as he has and by angling the camera to catch an exterior wall perpendicular to the one we face, he’s ensured that no two windows will measure in identically. And the building itself exists only as pure blackness. Ten Windows is an arresting marriage of proximity and distance, intimacy and alienation, symmetry and disruption.

Seeing the unseeable

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Thu, 11 May 2006 16:24:04 GMT

Harold Edgerton’s science as art
In tonal music and in dance it never happens.
In tonal music and in dance it never happens. In literature it’s as rare as a hen’s tooth. But in photography, though still exceedingly uncommon, it’s not unheard of: the serendipitous creation of art. No orchestral score or ballet ever materialized fully formed by accident, and you’ll probably be able to count on one hand over the course of a lifetime the occasions when a moment of everyday discourse reveals itself to be a poem. (An 1881 death sentence issued in the New Mexico Territory found its way into a literary magazine 30 years ago and I have been treasuring it ever since.) But photography is another matter. The pioneering work of Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), who set out to discover whether a horse’s four hooves all leave the ground in a gallop (they do) catalogued the movement of people and animals in a series of images that blurred the line between science and art. In the pursuit of truth he discovered beauty.

It is fitting that Harold Edgerton, who became an internationally celebrated presence at MIT over the course of his 60-year career as an inventor, teacher, and photographer, was a year and three days old when Muybridge died, since their lives intersect at a profound level. Muybridge’s investigations into animal locomotion (he set up 50 cameras along a racetrack, their shutters triggered by trip wires) aimed at recording images the human eye could witness but not see. Forty-four years after the publication of Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion, Edgerton, then doing graduate studies in engineering at MIT, turned his stroboscope, essentially a high-speed stop-action camera, from the motors he was investigating to the movement of commonplace objects that are also beyond our ability to see: a bullet in flight, a golfer’s swing, the impact on a football when it’s kicked. Those studies constitute the enthralling exhibit at Gallery Kayafas up through June 10. To call it important is an understatement.

It’s too easy to get caught up in the scientific underpinnings of Edgerton’s art — the way the stroboscope freezes the motion of a moving object by being synchronized with its trajectory. It would be like attributing Shakespeare’s greatness to his mastery of iambic pentameter. There’s a whole lot more at stake. By taking as his subject matter the movements of everyday objects — the flow of water from a faucet, a girl jumping rope, a diver springing from a board — Edgerton enhances the sense of mystery and awe the photographs deliver. We’re amazed not by the otherworldliness of his images but by the strangeness of what we’ve presumed we’ve seen. His photos are a version of the fairy tale in which the impoverished child discovers he’s the son of a monarch — wealth we could only dream about turns out to have been ours all along.

Follow your themes

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Tue, 02 May 2006 21:04:28 GMT

Sophia Ainslie, ‘Tipping Point,’ and Amber Davis Tourlentes
Tucked into a low-slung, century-old brick building in an industrial neighborhood not far from Boston Medical Center is one of Boston’s best-kept gallery secrets.

CRAWLERS: "If these are earthworms, they’re on amphetamines."

Tucked into a low-slung, century-old brick building in an industrial neighborhood not far from Boston Medical Center is one of Boston’s best-kept gallery secrets. Inching into its second decade under the shrewd stewardship of John Colan, Hallspace belongs to that rare echelon of art galleries where the quality of the work supersedes the bottom line. The current exhibit of South Africa-born, now Boston-based Sophia Ainslie underscores Hallspace’s place as an important showcase for provocative, meaningful art.

Had the gallery director not told me that the clear glass vase filled with dirt is home to 14 earthworms and that the sometimes sprawling, sometimes refined, and invariably energetic abstract images that fill the gallery reflect the artist’s preoccupation with the creatures, I wouldn’t have known. No matter. Spiraling charcoal-black forms abound, rarely reminiscent of earthworms; they appear to be moving at a tremendous velocity and rarely come to an end. A tangle of what look like cornucopias, ribbed hoses, fungi, and intestines occupy an entire wall where different-sized sheets of paper fit together to become an erratic collage. If these are earthworms, they’re on amphetamines. Some writhe, others encircle each other, loop, squeeze, snake, and stretch in a bizarre drama of subterranean drive, a living magma in which everything connects and no strand can be followed.

Ainslie’s compositional sense is astute; she applies color with spare precision. On the left side of the gigantic, visceral hodge-podge called Crawlers 3, mustard yellow runs through the shifting forms, but only down the middle of the mountainous debris. On the right side (the work almost qualifies as a diptych, with its two distinct masses joined by a pair of dark, thick chutes), a rich brown glazes a heart-shaped area in the upper reaches of the complementary heap. Yet for all the mysteriousness and unpredictability of her imagery, she achieves a balance beyond the mere application of color. The left half of Crawlers 3 is essentially vertical and pulls leftward, an uneven pyramid that appears to rise from a tapering, distant tail. The right half, denser and less given to contrast, is more horizontally shaped and tugs in the opposite direction. Turmoil, confusion, entanglement, the indecipherability of organic matter — all contribute to the artist’s vision. And though the monumental compactness of her images couldn’t be called playful (play requires air), the energy of her shapes also precludes somberness or foreboding.

Two provocateurs

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 13:47:20 GMT

John O’Reilly’s devout blasphemies; Ruth Daniels’s kinky abstractions
More goes on in a single John O’Reilly photo collage than in the entirety of most museum and gallery exhibits. He’s inexhaustible; there’s no way to take everything in.

More goes on in a single John O’Reilly photo collage than in the entirety of most museum and gallery exhibits — group shows and retrospectives included — so the 22 works on view at the Howard Yezerski Gallery feel like a concentrated trip to the Louvre. He’s inexhaustible; there’s no way to take everything in.

Which doesn’t mean O’Reilly is all over the place. In fact, he’s a refined if matter-of-factly outrageous stylist. To see him once is to recognize him forever. Working strictly in black and white, the artist orchestrates fragments of photographic images — some he takes himself, others come out of places like art-history books, porn magazines, and flea-market photo albums. Then he fragments further, scissoring into reproductions of masterpieces, dismembering bodies, creating silhouettes, and adding snapshots of views from his suburban home. What emerges are lyrical, spatially bizarre, frequently hilarious, charged assemblages. He’s a uniquely American surrealist whose indirection and complexity serve dramatic, emotional, and political ends.

O’Reilly’s peculiar celebration and investigation of the male body succeeds at making the erotic register as innocent and innocence register as sexually charged. In Bottom we see what appears to be a fraction from a 1950s porn magazine — the back side of a muscular body spreads the cheeks of his ass with his right hand as one lifted leg bends on a tabletop. The invitation to penetrate is unmistakable. Yet superimposed on the head is a studio portrait, circa 1930, of a smooth-faced, handsome schoolboy — wide-eyed, expectant, hair neatly parted, comfortable in his jacket and tie. The effect of the piece goes far beyond its jarring juxtaposition of naiveté and sexual solicitation. It’s as though the artist were saying that the natural or inevitable outcome of middle-class convention is desire run amuck. The boy doesn’t exist below the waist; the man doesn’t exist above the shoulder, and though the two can’t be described as seamlessly joined, the scale and contours of the child’s upper body fit precisely onto his grafted adult form. The result is unnervingly credible, an all-human satyr, but instead of the mythic beast’s horniness belonging to his equine lower parts, in O’Reilly’s mythology it belongs to the passage of time. Given the implied eras of the man and boy, they could conceivably be the same person.

In the mind of the beholder

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 22:54:54 GMT

Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler at MIT
Groundbreaking takes on new meaning when it’s applied to the work of Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, the subjects of an important new show at MIT’s List Center.

Groundbreaking takes on new meaning when it’s applied to the work of Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, the subjects of an important new show at MIT’s List Center. In the course of their career they busted sidewalks, lifted stones from Mount Rushmore, suspended the lawn of a Los Angeles home onto a scaffold, and extended a stone wall into the living space of a residence in suburban Houston. They met as undergraduates. Ericson was studying painting at the Kansas City Art Institute; Ziegler was a sculpture student at the Rhode Island School of Design — until he transferred to Kansas City in 1977. Beginning with their thesis show, which paired Ericson’s coal chutes with Ziegler’s corrugated aluminum walls (Coal Chutes and Wall Piece, 1978), the two embarked on collaborative career hopscotching the United States. (Ericson died of cancer in 1995, age 39.) They created 19 large-scale public works, numerous museum and gallery projects, and an untold number of independent objects. So why have so few heard of this couple who made monumental imprints on such cities as Washington, Seattle, Chicago, and Philadelphia?

Part of the answer lies in their self-effacing, egalitarian æsthetic. The two were committed to public art projects that materially benefitted communities or individuals, projects that once completed were frequently intended to disappear. Loaded Text stirred controversy and Durham, North Carolina, in the summer of 1989, when the artists capitalized on the confluence of the issuing of the Downtown Durham Revitalization Plan and a four-day public-art conference. Having learned that only two copies of the plan were available to the public, the couple decided to write out the entire 65-page text on a spread of badly broken sidewalk outside the Durham post office. After a few days, and at their own expense, they hired a contractor to remove the dilapidated, inscribed sidewalk (which filled four dumptrucks that were parked in front of the Durham Arts Council for the duration of the public-art conference) and replace it with new cement. To complete the project, the dumptrucks deposited their debris by a nearby stream, where the artists used it to shore up eroding banks. In an interview in this show’s lucid and illuminating catalogue, Ziegler says, “It disappeared in an interesting way — we got to do an artwork, the people got a new sidewalk, there was a place where the erosion was being stopped because of the rubble; there were no loose ends.” Imagine: art meets public policy meets urban renewal meets conservation.

Everyday magic

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 21:05:50 GMT

Drawing takes flight at the Pepper Gallery
Expect no flash from Stephen Fisher, no canvases of dead insects, no frontal nudity, no puns, no effort to exaggerate, shock, disarm, or confront.

Expect no flash from Stephen Fisher, no canvases of dead insects, no frontal nudity, no puns, no effort to exaggerate, shock, disarm, or confront. Don’t even expect color. Expect instead something so simple and pared down that once you start looking you’ll have a hard time stopping. Fisher draws what (I presume) he sees, and what he chooses to look at — bell jars and hourglasses, globes and darts, fans and compasses — grows interesting not just because he gracefully crowds his varied, meticulously rendered objects onto whistle-clean table tops (they’re like shrines of what’s just come down from the attic) but because the objects themselves make us think about the magic of seeing.

We tend to think of magic as the manifestation of the impossible: the disappearing coin, the disembodied lady, the rabbit that materializes from a top hat. But maybe magic lives much closer to the real world; maybe it’s the dramatization of what we experience every day. Who doesn’t know that fortune is fickle? Who among us don’t leave our bodies behind each night when we sleep? Who hasn’t been startled by a creature that appears out of nowhere?

Stephen Fisher’s form of legerdemain involves placing apparently random objects together on a reflective surface. In all three of his drawings in the intelligent and gratifying exhibit at the Pepper Gallery, that same tiled table top is positioned beside a window. Through the open slats of the window’s venetian blind, horizontal stripes of light ripple on the table’s surface, which itself is making a double of everything it holds. The result is a circus act of shadow and light and refraction. The light also catches and bends in the other reflective surfaces that make up Fisher’s stately, dust-free clutter — the eyeglasses and magnifying lenses, the candy tin and the wind-up toy. Everything is a mirror of everything else, still lifes in which all comes alive in the orchestrated play of light.

Gem stones

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 02:54:22 GMT

Sometimes crusty and uneven as a horned toad’s skin, sometimes squat as a toadstool, sometimes misshapen and irregular as potholes on a city street, the MFA’s "Contemporary Clay: Japanese Ceramics for the New Century" is nevertheless pervaded by an air of monumental dignity.
Sometimes crusty and uneven as a horned toad’s skin, sometimes squat as a toadstool, sometimes misshapen and irregular as potholes on a city street, the MFA’s "Contemporary Clay: Japanese Ceramics for the New Century" is nevertheless pervaded by an air of monumental dignity. Commingled with the craggy vases and the platters that resemble slabs of roughly painted rock are their opposites: porcelain boxes so delicate and refined, they seem fit to hold only vapor; nesting bowls that begin as elegant troughs and then reduce in size to tea bowls, the smallest being no bigger than a fruit fly. Between those extremes of apparently random, found, natural forms and the meticulously hand-hewn is where most of the ceramic artists in "Contemporary Clay" weigh in. No matter what its style, each work is marked by a reverence for tradition and artistry that also allows for idiosyncratic expression.

A case in point is Kaneshige Kôsuke, the third son of a National Living Treasure of Japan, Kaneshige Toyo (also a ceramic artist and one credited for reinventing one of the two ceramic styles indigenous to Japan), whose contribution resembles a throw blanket. Saint’s Garments looks like a thick brown shawl that’s been carefully but not compulsively folded over a low-slung riser, two parts earth and one part garment. Its solidity is undeniable, but so too is its suggestion of an interior with the potential to stretch itself out, the way a chambered nautilus implies an inner surface that exceeds its outermost shell.

Far more orchestrated but still evoking the pliancy of fabric — in this case rope — is Sakiyama Takayuki’s thick, striated, light-brown 2004 vessel Listening to the Waves. Imagine a two-foot-tall ball of twine that’s been reshaped and ossified. That the work also can function as a vessel is almost beside the point; a non-hollow interior would make little difference to the appeal of its undulating form, that of a hefty stoneware basket that swells from a thick, circular base, opening to an elliptical aperture at its summit.