E-Mail This Article to a Friend Art junkies Barry McGee and Noble & Webster take in the trash BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"Tim Noble & Sue Webster" Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through August 15 "Barry McGee" At Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, through July 25.

Something astonishing happens — you can count occasions like these on one hand over the course of a lifetime — with Real Life Is Rubbish, one of the installations by the celebrated pair of British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster that’s now up at the Museum of Fine Arts. For a second, you can’t believe what you’re seeing. A sharp beam of light shoots upward from the floor across a waist-high mound of garbage — at least, garbage in the museum sense of the word. The soda has been washed from the crushed cans, and nowhere do you detect the smell of tuna or paint. But garbage it is anyway: busted table legs, twine, rusted tools, nails and sticks, two-by-fours and wire brushes. And it’s all been assembled into a large, haphazard, perfectly meaningless shape, a bilaterally asymmetrical heap of stuff that couldn’t be given away at a yard sale.

Then you catch sight of the wall where there’s a crisp, almost life-size silhouette of two youths, presumably a man and a woman but maybe not, their backs turned to each other. Proximate yet at odds, they suggest either strangers on a subway platform or lovers in a quarrel. But that’s not the first thing you can’t tell. Where do they come from? What’s projecting these figures? And then it hits you that the jagged mass that’s been before your eyes since you entered the space, the lit pile of twisted and torn refuse, has been so meticulously wrought that the shadow it casts could be a scrim in front of living people.

For a while, I worried how to describe Real Life Is Rubbish without giving away its visual punch line, but eventually I realized that its value goes deeper than inducing a double take. For the first few minutes, you study the contours of the garbage to see whether you can identify what shard of aluminum accounts for a forehead or shoe or elbow. And though all the elements are directly before you (no barriers surround the piece, and you’re invited to do everything but touch it), it yields no secrets. There’s no telling what discarded shard or protrusion is responsible for this one’s hair or that one’s sleeve. The work is at once utterly visible and entirely mysterious.

If the brilliance of Andy Warhol can be attributed to his making us appreciate the perverse beauty of the banal, then perhaps the brilliance of Noble & Webster’s Real Life Is Rubbish lies in making us appreciate that art lives at the intersection of labor and play — no matter what the material or the medium. What I ended up most admiring about the work is neither the enigmatic shadow, no matter how articulate or suggestive, nor the crazily balanced pile of junk, which in its own right holds no interest. No, it was the thought of their working on it, adding a hacksaw here or a baster there until — presto! — a human form takes shape.

Real Life also stands as a dramatic reminder that art isn’t about the kind of esoteric expertise the appraisers bring to Antiques Road Show any more than it’s about how much Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe pulled in at Sotheby’s last week (for the record: $104 million). Instead, it’s about people making sense of their lives — and the things we throw away do reflect our shape and our relations. What better way to say we’re strangers to one another than by casting a beam of light over a hill of rubbish?

The problem with something as startling and original as Real Life Is Rubbish is that it becomes a standard against which the rest of the show gets measured, and the one other so-called shadow sculpture, Sunset over Manhattan (2003), seeps into the predictable and sentimental. An array of cans and cigarette packs neatly line up on a low-slung bench to produce a shadow that purports to be the skyline of New York City, except it isn’t New York City and it isn’t well done. The only recognizable form is a pair of tall, boxy skyscrapers, but the Twin Towers came down in 2001, and Sunset dates from last year. Perhaps if any other silhouette called to mind a specific Manhattan building (I suppose an argument could be made that the Chrysler Building is the one off to the right, but it’s hardly identifiable), then the two that are identifiable wouldn’t register as a gross ploy to tug at our griefstrings. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

The five other works in the MFA exhibit are made of lights. Two look as if they’d come off marquees in Las Vegas. Excessive Sensual Indulgence describes a fountain with lights sequenced to mimic flowing water; $ is a six-foot dollar sign whose bulbs pulse as if blood were coursing through it. The three others look like what a graffiti artist with a considerable trust fund might produce — elegantly stylized, didactic affairs fashioned from neon lights but shaped in the manner of spray paint applied to buildings and subway cars. Does it matter that Fucking Beautiful takes the shape of a five-foot-tall heart whose circumference spells out the title in pastel-colored neon? I doubt it. There’s nothing excessive about Excessive Sensual Indulgence any more than there’s anything sexy about Fucking Beautiful. They’re merely pretentious, play-acting at being confrontational when in fact they’re innocuous.

FOR CONFRONTATION OF THE REAL SORT, you need to travel to Waltham, where the raw, cacophonous, extraordinary work of San Francisco–based artist Barry McGee is on exhibit at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum.

Long before you enter the Rose, however, McGee sets the stage for what you’re about to experience. Drive past the guard booth and the campus directional signs, pass the strolling undergraduates, the manicured lawns, the shade trees, climb the driveway where the museum perches on the edge of a flower-bordered cul de sac and you’ll spot a smoking dumpster with a wrecked car sticking out of it. And what’s most amazing is how natural, how in keeping with its surroundings, the wreckage looks. In a single gesture, McGee reconciles violence with calm, decay with composure; the smoldering junk looks as if it had been there forever. In fact, nowhere is this masterful, sprawling, uneven and exciting show more deliberate and pitched than at the building’s entrance. Everything McGee is up to as an artist — his indictment of our casual ability to accept the pain of others, the homeless we step over to get to work, the images of torture beside the cosmetics ad, the car wreck we’re about to walk by to enter the museum — takes place in the moment you spot his seamless conflation of town dump and ivory tower. You might be surprised by how unsurprised you are.

McGee fills the three gigantic rooms of the Rose’s Lois Foster Wing with crude junk that he transforms into poignant, theatrical orchestrations of quotidian material whose recurrent theme is the demise of art and the proliferation of brutality. In the first room, he’s built what’s both a shack and a theater. Crouch to enter the space and you’re standing in a room painted in interlocking red, white, and blue parallelograms. Against the far wall, a video projection shows a bald, pot-bellied, middle-aged man scrubbing graffiti from the wall of a cinderblock building. The video loop is short; all the man does is scrub. Gradually, you realize the rumble you’re hearing is the sound of applause that’s interspersed with a brief eruption of guffaws from a laugh track. I felt embarrassed. McGee hadn’t just made me a spectator of an urban Sisyphus; with the soundtrack, he’d turned the story of Sisyphus into a sit-com.

What the laboring man does, however, makes him more than an object you’re tricked into ridiculing. He’s the first person you meet, and his task is the methodical elimination of art — the graffiti he’s washing away is the building’s only æsthetic attribute. Like the rest of us, he’s both victim and perpetrator.

And the inability to distinguish victim from perpetrator stands out as one of the overriding and unsettling themes of McGee’s show. In the next room, a circle of 49 TV monitors stacked up on the floor — half of them are on and blaring, half are blank — creates a technologically updated version of Guernica. Instead of smashing bodies, the televisions eat into our humor and our sympathy and our ability to pay attention. On one screen, cars smash into each other in a ritual game of mayhem; on another, a reporter interviews children about why kids deface property with graffiti. On the most disturbing screen, from which no sounds emit, shirtless gang members make signs with their fingers while they point out their tattoos. Every so often, the video cuts to the same group beating someone, maybe to death. Rarely does an art exhibit ask with such intelligence and fervor what we’re really about.