boston & surrounds: feature
The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park 51 Sandy Pond Road Lincoln, Massachusetts Through April 11
A DENSE WEB
Tine 2.010 DeCordova Bienniat CONNECTICUT ARTIST WARD SHELLEY WANTS TO GIVE YOU A TOUR OF HIS BRAIN.
'Archive,' his installation for the DeCordova Museum's inaugural Biennial, consists of a mountain of idiosyncratically labeLed cardboard boxes, each one representing a whim or memory Located somewhere in his cerebrum. Circuiting
the floor-to-ceiling form while inspecting its contents not only concretizes the process of huma n recollection but also recapituLates the viewer's experience of the Biennial itseLf. Just as Shelley has aggregated desultory
synaptic firings into a unified sculptural whole, so has the Biennial's curatorial team assembled a host of ostensibly disparate work from 17 New England artists into an impressively coherent exhibition. A dense we b of thematic connections hangs between the art, from architecture and the construction of history to ecology and abstruse schematic systems. Among the threads is a concern with archiva l practices that runs through not only Shelley's cardboard mountain but also Mark Tribe's ingenio us installation 'The Dystopia Files.' Tribe, who teaches at Brown University, has t ransfo rmed the DeCordova's photography study space into a simulated surveillance archive. From outside the unlit room, viewers witness video footage of conflicts between police and protesters rear-projected onto its closed frosted glass door. Before reading the curator's descri ption, they hesitate to enter. In fact I saw a man reprimand his daughter for trying. And this hesitatio n generates an aura of trespass around the work, one heightened by a motionactivated control syste m inside that unexpectedly stops the footage and turns on the lights.
The room's interior betrays 44 locked flat files (actually the DeCordova's photo collection), which Tribe has relabeLed with the names of political art coLlectives and activist groups, giving viewers the sense of having infiltrated the secret archive of a hegemonic, Orwellian regime. Perhaps obviousLy, the installation comments on the revival of COINTELPRO-tike federal surveillance practices in the U.S. following 9/11 and the Patriot Act. If you stand still long enough, however, more provocative interpretations emerge: the room darkens and the footage resumes (now mirrored in front projection) as you switch roles from threatened intruder to comfortable insider. Tribe gives you the opportunity to play both surveyor and surveyed, hinting at how the gap between the security culture of the state and its critics doses when the latter adopt what he calls 'a defensive posture that mirrors the logic of the forces they seek to resist.' Unfortunately, not all the Biennial's work is as innovative as 'The Dystopia Fi les.' For a show t hat promises, in the words of Associate Curator of Contemporary Art Dina Deitsch, artists who are 'forward thinking' and
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LEFT PAGE: Greta Bank, Biophilia Biophobio, 2010, wood, foam, epoxy, sparkle flake, paint. ABOVE: Phil lique, American Dream, 2008, resin, plywood, shingles, clamps, circular saw.
'exempla rs of key contemporary art practices,' t he inclusion of Otto Piene and Paul l affoLey remains a mystery. The career of the German-born Piene (who now lives in Groton, Mass.) peaked back in 1972 when he was commissioned to depLoy his helium-fiLLed Sky Art sculptures at the Munich Olympic Games. For the BienniaL, he dusted oft his 1969 inflata bLe piece 'Fleu r du MaL' which looks like an out-of-place old timer amid work 40 yea rs its junior. Meanwhile, the Boston-based Laftoley's arcane Kab balistic diag rams, t hough co mpleted more recently, find themselves in the same boat. They articulate an esoteric cosmological system Laffoley conceived in the '60s and '70s, and employ a style he began developing around the same time that draws heavily from the visual idiom of the New Age movement.
building site materials and tools: roof shingles. pLywood, plastic fencing, even a circular saw. The curators rightly observe a 'visual pun on predatory lending practices and the recent demise of the housing market,' but judging from the consistent visuallexlcon of home construction suppLies and fierce animal imagery in Lique's other work, 'Shark' also rethinks American Dream-chasing as a savage Darwinian struggle. Neither theme may be particularly original, but Lique's deft hand ling of materials is. Li ke Tara Donovan, he skillfully sculpts the quotidian, but whereas Donovan's alchemy com pletely defamiliarizes the original - transforming cups, for instance, into an icy landscape - Lique lays bare his ma terials' provenance, allowing their social and cultural resonance to路 reverberate thro ug h the work.
These curatoriaL oversights are easily forgotten in the envelope-pushing work of other Biennial exhibitors, most notably Phil Lique and Greta Bank. Liq ue, who hails from New Haven, Conn. takes the cake fo r the shows most visually arresti ng sculpture. His less-than-su btly titled 'Shark: American Dream' co nsists of a cast resin shark head mounted onto a sq ualiform assemblage of
The Maine-based Bank's multi-piece installation 'Biophilla Biophobia' is the Biennial's most conceptually fecund. 'Stumpy' - an antiqu e Victorian chair rendered both glimmering and grotesquely tumescent by a heavy application of foam, epoxy, sparkle flake and paint - is su rrounded by a garden of gooey, glandular 'Wallflowers.' The work, whose uniq ue aest hetic fuses Louise
boston 8: surrounds: feature
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Bourgeois-esque biomorphic creepiness with the chintzy glamour of glitter nail poLish, alludes to Victorian sexual repression while offering a feminist critique of that era's affiliation of women with the delicacy of flowers. (Early metaphoric usage of 'wallflower' referred to Victorian ladies who couldn't find dance partners.) At the same time, 'Biophilia Biophobia' is curiously Japanese, both in the animism of its fungalLy metamorphosed chair and in the way its monstrous/precious dichotomy echoes the creepy/cute subset of Japan's kawaii culture (think Tokyo Kamen's monsters or Takashi Murakami's 'Army of Mushrooms'). All told, the 2010 DeCordova Biennial provides an exhilarating and, with a few exceptions, accurate showcase of New EngLand's ever-evolving artistic scene. The 1989-2009 annual shows were important yearly snapshots, but with this new format the museum has stepped up to the plate as the region's chief arbiter of developing artistic trends. Based on this inaugural grand sLam, I think we can count on the OeCordova for authoritative curation and critical discourse in 2012 and beyond.
IMark Drummond Davis Colo Colo Gallery 25 Centre Street New Bedford, MA 02740 (508) 642-6026