What’s the relation between art and artifact? What will our Tupperware tell future generations about life in our era? We learn about 17th-century Dutch and Flemish culture by the everyday objects depicted in their paintings. At the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston, you can see not only John Singleton Copley’s famous portrait of Paul Revere but also a teapot crafted by that noted silversmith. Both the portrait and the teapot tell us something about Revere and his fellow patriots. And four decades after Pop Art, we now take for granted the intersection of mass-media-generated imagery and art.
This week, three nearby museums are opening exhibitions that draw on imagery and everyday objects to bring into focus cultures ranging from long-ago Byzantium to contemporary Korea to one artist’s image of us here and now. In "Wolfgang Tillmans: still life," at Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum (October 25–February 23), the German-born, London-based photographer looks at things that are so familiar to us, we barely see them — one photograph has a corkscrew sitting on a shelf next to garlic wrapped in its plastic netting, near two plastic containers that are rather haphazardly stacked. Tillmans, who won the prestigious Turner Prize in 2000, first gained attention in the late 1980s with spontaneous-looking (actually carefully set up) "snapshots" of his friends in the world of underground music and fashion. Here he extends his fascination with contemporary culture to the often banal objects that surround us in our commodity-soaked lives. He’s notorious for drawing on the techniques of commercial photography to explore contemporary notions of beauty and representation — which means that his photographs speak as much about how we look at objects as it does about the objects themselves.
The idea of Byzantine art conjures elaborately decorated architecture and paintings rich in color, gold, and religious iconography. But "Byzantine Women and Their World," at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (October 25–April 27), seeks to go beyond surface impressions in focusing on daily life in Byzantium and the role of women role there. I’m not sure exactly how garlic was packaged in the Byzantine Empire, but it appears gold medallions from a marriage belt, weaving implements, and portraits of empresses on coins would have been familiar items from the fourth through 15th centuries, and a plethora of them will be on view at the Sackler.
In addition to housing significant collections of art from China, Japan, India, the Pacific islands, and Africa, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem boasts an outstanding collection of Korean art that it began to acquire during the 19th century — it was one of the first in this country to do so. The Peabody has concentrated on presenting historic art and objects, but it is now turning its attention to displaying contemporary art from Asia. "Bohnchang Koo: Masterworks of Contemporary Korean Photography" (November 6–February 28) showcases a broad spectrum of work by this Seoul-based artist, whose photographs make poetic use of images from our natural and cultural landscape.
The Peabody itself is about to undergo a transformation, in the form of an enormous renovation to its galleries and public spaces, including the addition of a new wing designed by Moshe Safdie and a late Qing Dynasty Chinese merchant’s house. The museum will be closing at the end of this exhibition; it will reopen in June.
"Wolfgang Tillmans: still life" is at Harvard University’s Busch-Reisinger Museum from October 25 through February 23; enter through the Fogg Art Museum, 32 Quincy Street in Harvard Square. "Byzantine Women and Their World" is at Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway in Harvard Square, from October 25 through April 27. For information about Havard art-museum events, call (617) 495-9400. "Bohnchang Koo: Masterworks of Contemporary Korean Photography" is at the Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square in Salem, from November 6 through February 28. Call (978) 745-9500.
