The most exciting work — kinky, memorable, soothing and unsettling at the same time — of Korean photographer Bohnchang Koo’s straitjacketed retrospective at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem features good-looking, naked guys. And they’re big. In the Beginning #1, a giant, stylized work (if Koo were a composer, he’d write operas) measures in at about four by three feet; matted and framed, however, it’s over seven feet tall. In the foreground, two large, lithe, sinewy arms pose taut and parallel like prison bars before an obscured face and shirtless chest. The arms rise to a pair of clenched fists while the torso behind them ripples with the kind of articulation you see monthly in supermarkets on the covers of Men’s Health.
Sharing the same wall is In the Beginning #6, in which a fuller, more kinetic torso — its face obscured not by cloth but by the man’s upturned, folded arms — registers initially like a morning stretch or a moment in a modern dance. Gradually you realize that the arms’ positions — the right hand reaches to the left shoulder; the left hand, obscured in darkness, presumably reaches to the right — have taken the shape some of us assume when we’re peeling off a T-shirt, with the difference that the figure is already naked. The effect of the undressed, faceless male with his porn-star muscles seemingly taking off a shirt that he isn’t wearing proves richly puzzling. You can’t figure it out, and that nagging irresolution combines with the mysteriously missing visage and unassailable physique to keep the viewer, no matter how reluctant, engaged.
Koo’s ability to lure us into a gossamer web of Eros and artifice is further heightened by his technique. In both Beginnings, the artist sews together dozens of photos to create a single, overarching image. But in keeping with the ironic content of this sadly underrepresented series — #1 and #6 are all we get — with its one body imprisoned by itself and the other undressing its own skin, the composite pictures aren’t disjointed whatsoever. Something like three dozen separate photos make up In the Beginning #6, and yet not a fraction of the body’s outline or a fraction of its inner connections is out of place.
So why go to the bother of fragmenting a single image only to sew it back together? One answer is that when you fracture the whole, each component becomes a pane in a series of windows. By making every body part belong to its own separate, inner frame — one for the nipple, one for the crotch, one for the armpit, another for the navel — the artist heightens our own awareness of the nature of the voyeurism in which we’re taking part. We’re reminded at every glance that whatever we’re looking at has been removed from the whole; like it or not, we’re objectifying at every instant of seeing.
Further, the segments themselves aren’t taped from behind; they’re stitched from the front. Visible threads make the various segments cohere, and the threads drape randomly under the glass, untidy and uncut. In #1, their curves and twists serve to soften the otherwise vertical boldness of the image. In #6, the threads read like fine filaments of hair, echoing throughout the vast expanse of the upper body intimations of the pubic hair we begin to see at the base.
Koo is an artist of intimacy and formality, indirection and deliberate restraint — for all that he at first appears to be direct and unfettered, outgoing and experimental. Like these two Beginnings, his collages pay homage to, but ultimately disavow, narration; and though their imagery itself is commonplace — family snapshots, a tray of dead fish, unplugged Christmas lights festooning a leafless tree — their arrangements create subterranean tensions every bit as powerful as in the twisting torsos.
The problem with this exhibit is its size. Entire series that occupied years of the artist’s life, such as " In the Beginning " and his collages called " Clandestine Pursuits, " are represented by only two works each — hardly sufficient to support the show’s " first American museum retrospective " claim. Pivotal series in the artist’s career, such as his large self-portraits, go entirely unrepresented. As a result, a show that ought to come across as wide and deep feels fractured and spotty, particularly when you consider the spectrum of style and content that marks Bohnchang Koo’s career.
The Peabody Essex Museum is in the throes of reinventing itself in ways that both honor and break from its past. In a marvelous inversion of its connection with America’s imperial forays into the Far East, this historical showcase of art from previous centuries of the United States’ trade with China and Japan now has a new mission: to put forward the work of contemporary Asian photographers. From mid February until June, the museum will close for a substantive renovation that will create a greatly expanded space in which to exhibit new work. It’s a big deal, for Boston and for the United States, and an opportunity that I hope Bohnchang Koo will have a chance to enjoy.
TO GET A SENSE of what depth looks like in a contemporary photography exhibit, visit the Howard Yezerski Gallery. Amanda Means photographs light bulbs and only light bulbs. Their shapes — one series is round, one elliptical — don’t change; the direct, head-on perspective doesn’t change; and the format — oversized for the most part, measuring in, unframed, at about two square feet — doesn’t change. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the wattage doesn’t change. Yet within these confines, Means creates an arresting and playful sense of variety. The moods shift, the textures vary, the colors contract and expand, and with those exquisitely orchestrated changes, the very meaning of each frame appears unique.
Frequently I felt I was looking not at light bulbs at all but at human heads. I’d see a pair of lips whose filament wiggled horizontally, or I’d discern ears whose shadows rose in two symmetrical lines on either side of the bulb. I was soon convinced that the implied human form was at some level deliberate. After all, Means could have shot any shape of fluorescent or incandescent bulb, and yet it’s hard to imagine being as mesmerized by the exaggerated form of bulbs used for recessed lighting or make-up mirrors or halogen lamps.
Another pleasure of this work is the atavistic delight in rediscovering the almost living nature of harnessed electricity, as Means celebrates the inexplicability of what we take for granted. In Light Bulb 2 (CP), the diffuse white light emanates from the center of a darkened, almost black bulb, whereas in Light Bulb 5 (CP), the pitch-black background corresponds with all but the center of the luminous orb — the light, what little exists, looks like vapor rising from a pit.
In her color photographs, Means achieves an expected emotional range, from light-hearted to ominous. Light Bulb 0002C, with its indigo helmet and neck, could be the back of a performer’s head in Blue Man Group. Light Bulb 00017C, with its black sphere and super-luminous guts against a deep vermilion background, suggests an infrared image of an alien’s cranium.
IF MEANS’S SHOW resembles a chamber work by Philip Glass — tiny changes casting enormous spells — then " American Perspectives: Photographs from the Polaroid Collection " qualifies as Wagner’s Ring Cycle — vast, complex, and in its own way mythic. The two-part exhibit, half at the Photographic Resource Center and the other half up the street at the Boston University Art Gallery, traces almost a half-century of work by nearly 50 photographers; sporting some 90 pieces in all, it represents a small sampling of the vast Polaroid company headquarters’ collection in Waltham.
Each of the two halves of this pared-down exhibit — it began life as a much larger show at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography — has a distinct feel. The part at the PRC is the more self-consciously complex; the five themes around which it’s been organized include photo composites, manipulated imagery, and photos of photos. The show at the BU Art Gallery is simpler, focusing on traditional portraiture.
There are fine works at both venues, but the greater number are concentrated at the BU Art Gallery, where I found myself wanting to take home the self-effacing, heartbreaking work of Bill Burke, Shelby Lee Adams, Lloyd Moore, and Jim Goldberg. I get the sense from each of these four photographers that their art isn’t an end in itself but a means by which attention can be paid to the frequent sorrows and occasional joys of people’s lives. Burke’s 1975 Coal Miners, Brothers, Vogue Mine, Muhlenburg Co., KY features two beefy guys whose pugilism complements their acceptance of their own awkwardness — they’re dressed in clothes that don’t fit and poised before a camera they’re not quite sure what to make of. The unembellished truthfulness is humbling.
The three works from Lloyd Moore’s " Living Room " series enjoy a similar immediacy and pack a similar punch. In his 1984 Sisler, an overweight man in a T-shirt and shorts with a busted fly drinks beer from an aluminum can. On the nearby bed, the one piece of furniture in the room besides the chair on which he’s sitting, we make out the picture of a handsome young soldier. Suddenly the man’s corpulence and resignation belong to a far richer story.
Hardest-hitting of all perhaps are the three works by Jim Goldberg, whose work I saw for the first time years ago at the Yezerski Gallery. Goldberg asks his subjects to write their stories on the pictures he takes — in fact, you could say he doesn’t take pictures so much as give them back. Here his images involve bed-ridden seniors in the nursing home where his own grandmother lies dying. Far from self-pitying, one of the old men in the home writes a spirited, thankful, and funny message on the white mat of the picture that surrounds the white sheets of his bed. I found myself wishing for his good humor.
At the PRC, a fine collage by David Hockney and some powerful work by Alma Davenport — who upends time by doing such things as superimposing a young man’s adult-arrest photos onto the portrait of a little boy in rain gear — are unfortunately dwarfed by bombastic contributions from Robert Heineken and Thomas Young, among others. Go see them anyway.
