Turn on the bright lights

Art, women, politics, and food

By RANDI HOPKINS | September 12, 2007

“CLIFF EVANS: EMPYREAN” comes to the
Gardner in November.

Art this fall grapples with issues like gender and journalism, personal space and human survival, and what to have for lunch.

The many questions raised by the idea of “feminist” art are at the heart of “GLOBAL FEMINISMS” at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum and Cultural Center (106 Central St, Wellesley; September 19–December 9), a challenging, large-scale exhibition that launches the museum’s reopening after a year-long hiatus for renovations. The show features art created since 1990 by women from 40 countries including Ambreen Butt, Ryoko Suzuki and Fiona Foley.

Two biting bodies of work by pioneering XX-chromosomed artist Martha Rosler are the subject of “MARTHA ROSLER: BRINGING THE WAR HOME” at the Worcester Art Museum (55 Salisbury Street, Worcester; September 22–January 13). The show brings together Rosler’s historic series Bringing the War Home (1966-’72), montages that combine news photos of the Vietnam War with images from architectural and design magazines, and Bringing the War Home: HouseBeautiful,New Series (2004), which takes another stab at capturing the ironies of American domestic life now that we have a new (but hardly improved) unpopular war. And for a different take on an another war, there’s “KARA WALKER: HARPER’S PICTORIAL HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR (ANNOTATED),” which was shown at the Addison Gallery in Andover last January and gets a reprise at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum (32 Quincy St, Cambridge; October 6–November 11).

Fall preview 2007
“Happy endings: Bad news begets good tunes.” By Matt Ashare.
“Busy busy: Something for everyone this fall.” By Debra Cash.
“Stage worthies: Fall on the Boston boards.” By Carolyn Clay.
“Basstown nights: The new scene emerges; Halloween preparations.” By David Day.
“Bounty: The best of the season’s roots, world, folk, and blues.” By Ted Drozdowski.
“War, peace, and Robert Pinsky: The season’s fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.” By John Freeman.
“Trane, Joyce Dee Dee, Sco, and more: A jam-packed season of jazz.” By Jon Garelick.
“War zones: Fall films face terror at home and abroad.” By Peter Keough.
“Locked and loaded: The fall promises a double-barreled blast of gaming greatness.” By Mitch Krpata.
“BBC? America!: The networks put some English on the fall TV season.” By Joyce Millman.
“World music: The BSO goes traveling, and Berlin comes to Boston.” By Lloyd Schwartz.
“Singles scene: Local bands dig in with digital.” By Will Spitz.

The political and psychological implications of being a passive viewer — of art, war, genocide, immigration issues . . . whatever we watch — are examined in “EYEWITNESS” at Axiom Gallery (141 Green St, Boston; October 12–November 30), in which Denise Marika’s new video “Downrush” is paired with an installation addressing the debate around immigrant laborers by the activist collaborative Think Again (S.A. Bachman and David John Attyah). An activist from an earlier era (and the US representative to the 2007 Venice Biennale) is the focus of “FÉLIX GONZÁLEZ-TORRES” at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (24 Quincy St, Cambridge; November 8–January 4). Gonzalez-Torres, who died of complications of AIDS in 1996, invited viewer participation in a seriously old media way, transforming everyday materials that could be infinitely reproduced — candies, lightbulbs, beads — into glamorous and poetic works. At Harvard’s Sert Gallery, “AMIE SIEGEL” features two videos dealing with the representation of historical sites and with architecture and ideology (24 Quincy St, Cambridge; October 4–November 30).

Tom Sachs is known for re-creating objects from the worlds of commerce and consumerism; these include an airplane bathroom and chainsaws with Chanel logos. “TOM SACHS: LOGJAM” at Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum (415 South St, Waltham; September 25–December 16) presents a variety of Sachs’s less well-known “work stations,” obsessive structures that give insight into the artist’s process, and his “living stations.” Look for a handmade, working refrigerator, and a sink with a toilet-paper dispenser. Also opening September 25 at the Rose, “STEVE MILLER: SPIRALING INWARD” explores the boundaries between art and science. Occupying both the Rose’s Lee Gallery and Brandeis’s Women’s Studies Research Center (515 South St, Waltham; October 2–December 14), “TIGER BY THE TAIL! WOMEN ARTISTS OF INDIA TRANSFORMING CULTURE” looks at issues of feminism and gender through contemporary Indian art.

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Return to the edge of the world
Photography and new media loom large on the horizon in 2007, with cameras pointed in every direction.
The hollow man
The Swiss artist John Armleder fancies himself a slippery shape shifter.
Gods and monsters — and David Hasselhoff
The Museum of Fine Arts did big things with Napoleon and Edward Hopper, pictures of prostitutes graced the walls of Boston’s two biggest art museums, and all hell broke loose when the Mooninites invaded.
Whitewash
“Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture in Classical Antiquity” presents striking evidence that the white marbles were once painted in bold Technicolor.
Pushing up daisies
If the phrase "April showers bring May flowers" has any cred, it might ring true with a new installation at Boston Sculptors Gallery.
Chan we can believe in
If you’ve visited the Institute of Contemporary Art at any point in the last few years — in either of its physical incarnations — there’s a good chance you’ve seen Paul Chan’s work.
Making their mark
Universities need their ivy-covered red-brick towers and classical stone porticoes to remind students of their roots in the past.
The case of the zombie Pollocks
On Monday, Harvard researchers kicked a hornets’ nest that has been buzzing in the art world since the discovery of 32 drippy abstract paintings claimed to be previously unknown works by Jackson Pollock.
Harvard ‘ACT UP’ show gets rise from right-wingers
Taking a detour from directly bashing President Obama, right-wingers are now hot and bothered by a Harvard art exhibit. And they have an Obama administration foil toward whom they can channel their bile.
Bookworms
“Under Cover” is one of those lucid, edifying shows the Harvard museums excel at.
Fight the power
Art mixes it up with history and politics, peers closely at electronic surveillance, worries about its own usefulness, traipses down the fashion runway, and brings cool stuff back from China and Puerto Rico in exhibitions opening this fall.
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