E-Mail This Article to a Friend Terrible beauty Barbara Gallucci’s Levittown, plus work at BU, Yezerski, and Naga BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

A few months ago, I was talking to a group of students in one of our local art departments when a question came from an audience member. How did I know what to say in a review? I begin by trying to pay attention to two events, I explained, starting with my own response to a work — just what is it? The next phase involves piecing together how much the artist had to do with making that response. Wrong answer, apparently. So I guess that means you just dis what you don’t like, the young scholar interpreted.

In fact, one of the toughest things about responding to somebody’s art (professionally) is recognizing how little one’s own taste matters, or ought to matter. Personal predilections be damned; what matters is quality. Michelangelo’s tomb to the Medici offends me for its bombast and its indelicacy, but I can’t look at the Academy Slaves without imagining he’s still alive. The drivel of early Mozart casts no shadow on my hearing of Die Zauberflöte, and neither do Yeats’s mystical poems spoil his lyrical verse for me.

My problem with some wonderful exhibits in Boston these days is that though they earn my respect and even my interest, my heart never skips a beat. And in the one recent instance when my pulse did flutter, looking back, I can’t be sure whether to attribute the palpitation to beauty or botox.

At Gallery Kayafas, the measured, geometric, color photos of the antiseptic, hideously appointed, and otherwise painfully banal interiors of people’s homes by Barbara Gallucci proved hard to take. Gallucci decided to return, on the 50th anniversary of its construction, to Levittown, New York, that prototype of suburban sprawl where countless thousands of identical homes on countless thousands of identically sized lots — themselves leveled to the flatness of a landfill and emptied of anything natural or manufactured that might indicate distinction or personality — allowed for the post-WW2 baby boom, whose offspring include the revolutions of the 1960s and the politicians currently vying for the White House.

In terms of urban design, Levittown represents the apotheosis of post-war American conformity, a place where the uniformity of people’s abodes combined with their precise proximity to their neighbors to produce Joe McCarthy and The Twilight Zone. The chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Rod Serling were obsessed, in different ways, by the same phenomenon: the secret evil of the completely familiar.

In Gallucci’s photos, the familiar looks secretly evil indeed. A wall, often paneled in flimsy, corrugated wood, stands decorated with Salvation Army bric-a-brac. And it’s not just any wall. I learned from Gallucci’s artist statement that the wall that’s transfixed her was the one designed to hold the built-in Admiral television. Everybody’s was the same. At the base of each wall, a nondescript, acrylic, wall-to-wall carpet — the industrial-strength kind, smooth as a soldier’s buzz cut — fits like a Tupperware lid over floors undoubtedly made of poured concrete. Even the personal artifacts that line the walls and the mantels, the family photos, the greeting cards signed "Love, Mom and Dad," read as if they’d come off an assembly line. These are barracks, not people’s homes.

Yet they are people’s homes, and they have been for half a century. Gallucci the artist is really a semiotician; she’s a reader of cultural signs. Her photographs want to be understood not as celebrations of beauty, certainly, but as testament to how architecture drives æsthetics and how æsthetics, in turn, reflect the soul. The first inhabitants of Levittown learned well from their surroundings. They and their children went on to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Sudan, and Afghanistan. Gallucci’s photos are deliberately, exhaustingly ugly, and they mean to be.

The only exterior shots in the exhibit are a group of no less pristine and exact color images of a Levittown community swimming pool. As with the shots of the insides of homes, no humans occupy the space; what’s different here is there’s no evidence of people either. The water lies flat and rippleless and blue under a cloudless sky and a blinding sun. And whereas the living rooms feel congested to the point of claustrophobia, the pools deliver a vast forlornness, an inverse appeal, the promise of a sensual experience that at the same time gets taken away. In its warmth and clarity and emptiness, the pool invites you in, even as the surroundings — a stingy spray of trees, outnumbered by phone polls, beyond which lies a wasteland of pavement as a water tower with the word "Levittown" looms nearby — make you want to run away.

Another important photography exhibit, a must-see for anyone interested in the history of the genre, Boston University’s "California Dreamin’: Camera Clubs and the Pictorial Photography Tradition," presents estimable difficulties of an entirely different kind. The early decades of photography, roughly from the 1890s to the 1930s, were marked by the new medium’s effort to establish itself as an art form as legitimate as painting and sculpture. Pictorialism refers both to a photographic style — soft focus and muted tones applied to landscapes and still lifes, manipulated developing techniques, and often highly stylized, narrative-rich portraiture — as well as to the æsthetic mission of securing photography’s place as a recognized vehicle of artistic expression. The Pictorialists made landscapes look like watercolors and portraits look like statues.

"California Dreamin’ " sets out to challenge the narrow view we’ve inherited about the Pictorialists as the holdouts against modernity by showing us that with their emphasis on sharp focus, unembellished developing techniques, urban and industrial subjects, and candid portraiture, the great champions of modern photography — significantly Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston — had their roots in the very Pictorialism they later renounced. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make their work of that period compelling to look at. Take Weston’s 1916 photo of the seminal dancer and choreographer Ted Shawn. The blurry, languid, and, for all his muscles, oddly androgynous Shawn is idealized to the point of caricature; the emotional charge of the image has been obliterated by the self-consciousness of the staged pose and the feathery technique. Would that Weston had caught him dancing.

The exhibit fares best when it introduces us to those Pictorialists whose largely unknown images begin to break from the tradition. Arnold Genthe’s portrait of the poet Nora May French transcends Pictorialist conventions — and not only for the piercing eyes, unkempt hair, and unusual beauty of his subject. Genthe’s photo indulges in both softness and sharpness; French’s face, with its chiseled nose and sharp lips, appears to rise from the distance of her shadowy blouse. Karl Struss’s sharply defined 1920 Portrait of George O’Brien makes you want to take a magnifying glass to O’Brien’s face — not, as with Weston’s Shawn, because you can’t see it but because it appears to have so much to say. Similarly engaging is Anne Brigman’s 1915 portrait of her husband, Captain Brigman, who appears to be toasting the camera with a look of daring bemusement, as if he knew better than to let a photograph keep him from his drink.

The weirdly stunning color photographs of birds at feeders by Neeta Madahar at Howard Yezerski Gallery also deserve attention. Madahar waits until a blue jay or cardinal or catbird lights on one of her back-yard feeders and then shoots it with an intense, split-second flash. The result is that nothing looks quite real — the shadows are too sharp, the colors are unfamiliar, the animals themselves teeter on the verge of perceiving they’ve been trapped. I was taken aback by Madahar’s images, and I’m still not sure whether what’s at issue here is her artistry or her technique. In the main gallery, Morgan Bulkeley’s colorful bas reliefs, paintings, and wood sculptures of naively rendered birds and human figures run amok — think Hieronymus Bosch meets Roger Tory Peterson — read like riotous, dangerous cartoons.

A more subdued exhibit down the street at Gallery Naga includes fine new works by Robert Siegelman and Bryan McFarlane. Siegelman rips into expanses of wood with power tools and then inks the surface. The resulting woodcuts pack the energy of a seismic event. In the inner gallery, Bryan McFarlane’s comparatively quiet and gentle abstract oil paintings — they look like eggs falling through space — deliver the soothing effect of a water fountain, muted, bubbling, relaxed.

"Ranch ’50: Photographs by Barbara Gallucci"

At Gallery Kayafas, 450 Harrison Avenue in Boston, through February 28.

"California Dreamin’: Camera Clubs and the Pictorial Photography Tradition"

At the Boston University Art Gallery, 855 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, through March 28.

"Morgan Bulkeley: New Work" and "Neeta Madahar: Sustenance"

At Howard Yezerski Gallery, 14 Newbury Street in Boston, through March 9.

"Robert Siegelman: New Woodcuts" and "Bryan MacFarlane: Egg Series"

At Gallery Naga, 67 Newbury Street in Boston, through February 28.