E-Mail This Article to a Friend The quick and the dead Warhol and AIDS permeate the ICA’s compelling ‘Likeness’; plus Kanishka Raja BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists" and "Momentum 3: Kanishaka Raja" At the Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston Street in Boston, through May 1.

Like the Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, two spirits — one benevolent and generous, the other malevolent and cruel — dominate the new show at the Institute of Contemporary Art. And though the two forces oppose each other like Heaven and Hell, what they have in common is their power — ferocious, mutable, enduring. The result is that "Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists" has the feel of a mythic power struggle, a stage where titanic forces clash.

The first of those spirits is Andy Warhol, whose dramatic, skeletal likeness in Neil Winokur’s 1982 photograph turns out to be merely his most obvious incarnation in the exhibit. He’s everywhere. Warhol the stylist is to be seen in the derivative and relatively puerile silk screens by Deborah Kass. (Her version of Cindy Sherman so closely mimics Warhol’s Liza Minnelli, she could have done it while multi-tasking.) Warhol the 20th-century totem is ironically and painfully deified in the bullet-riddled fractured print by Richard Misrach, who enlarged a Playboy ad in which Warhol is hawking a Vidal Sassoon product and used it for target practice. And Warhol the conceptual artist and social critic, the man who made the pursuit of fame and the embrace of commercialism central to his æsthetic, is evident in David Robbins’s wry and amusing set of 18 black-and-white head shots called Talent. Smooth-skinned, perfectly coiffed, staring into the camera with that look of a dog hoping to be adopted, these aren’t actors looking for work but visual artists, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, and Frank Longo among them. Some smile; others appear pensive, bemused, or seductive; one smoking a cigarette on a barstool looks as if he were channeling Dean Martin. All are part of the simultaneous spoof and worship of the god Fame, whom Warhol served slavishly, like some kind of John the Baptist preaching redemption in notoriety and dollars. And the photos present the artists themselves as products.

What "Likeness" lacks in scope — historical antecedents like Edward Steichen’s photos of Georgia O’Keeffe, or more obvious recent work such as anything by Warhol himself — it makes up for in its focus. Although the amount of quality work isn’t especially high, this is an intense and thought-provoking exhibit.

Oscar Wilde called criticism the only civilized form of autobiography. What’s both civilized and exciting about these portraits is their ability to reveal the passions and preoccupations and interests of painters and photographers when they’re looking into the mirror of their friends and associates. One of the most apparent concerns is the need of younger artists to establish a relationship to the generation before them, and we witness a range of attitudes in that pursuit, from the obsequious and flattering to the appreciative and reverential. The former, no surprise, turn out to be the least inspired, the latter the most engaging.

A noteworthy dud along these lines is Heather Cantrell’s inert and pretentious photograph of art professor and artist Mary Kelly. Thirty years her junior and a recent student at UCLA, where Kelly is a prominent faculty member, Cantrell has attempted to recast her hard-boiled mentor as a poolside babe. Singing Sirens (Mary Kelly) is the name given the 2002 work, which registers as at best strained and at worst bathetic. The wall text accompanying the photo carries on about "a highly glamorous image," saying that "it looks as though she were modeling for a magazine cover." Similarly uninteresting — one of the ironies of flattery is its essential inattention to its subject — are Tacita Dean’s interminable (eight and a half minutes) 2002 video "Mario Merz" and Dave Muller’s doodles on an ad for a Chuck Close show.

But "Likeness" includes work by other aspiring artists who don’t appear to be networking or appropriating or sucking up, portraits that depict mentors not as static icons but as workers, makers of art. Elizabeth Peyton’s 1997 watercolor shows a youthful, crouching David Hockney in thick-framed glasses and a suit as tight-fitting as a tattoo concentrating with his entire body on whatever’s happening at the red tip of his paintbrush. Two other splashes of red in this mostly blue and brown sketch, Hockney’s lips and what looks like a thumb print (Peyton’s own?) on a piece of paper at his feet, speak to the physicality of making art; the red of his body is the red of his work.

Matthew Antezzo’s 2001 Nach-Bild ("After Image") depicts a crouching Frank Stella at work on one of his geometric "black" paintings from the 1950s. It’s interesting to compare how Antezzo and Peyton treat their respective luminaries. Both depict painters at work; both set up a correspondence between the art and the artist. (Stella’s T-shirt fuses with the unpainted area of his canvas while his arm extends in the same flat black color as the concentric squares he’s painting.) The difference between the two is focus. Peyton zeroes in on creative passion; Hockney’s intensity and birdlike perch suggest a raptor about to feed. Antezzo seems all over the place, distracted, as if he were in a room with multiple mirrors and couldn’t figure how to get out. Antezzo’s painting is based on a 1959 photo by Hollis Frampton, and that may explain why it comes across as comparatively distant and disengaged. Stella seems so nonchalant, you wouldn’t be surprised if he put down the brush to step out for a coffee.

The other spirit, the one we wish didn’t exist, is AIDS, and its presence goes beyond the number of artists included or depicted who have died of the disease, Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, and Paul Thek among them. The first thing you see on entering the ICA is AA Bronson’s seven-foot-tall, 14-foot-wide wall of a lacquer-on-vinyl photo transfer that shows the emaciated, open-eyed, open-mouthed, dead Felix Partz. The corpse stares out against a backdrop of brightly colored pillows and pajamas and sheets, a skeletal rag doll just a few hours removed from the ordeal of his passing. Bronson created Felix Partz, June 5, 1994 as a gigantic memento mori of his long-time collaborator and fellow founder of the three-person collaborative General Idea (Jorge Zontal died of AIDS the same year), and like Theresa Frare’s controversial similar photo four years earlier for Benneton, it woke us to the human suffering that lay behind the epidemic’s statistics.

A decade later, it seems remarkable how accustomed we’ve become to the most gruesome imagery. In my two visits to the ICA last week, not once did anyone seem surprised by or even particularly interested in the photo despite its gargantuan dimensions, inescapable placement (straight ahead, the moment you walk in), and inarguable sadness. Perhaps its diminished impact lies in its lack of subtlety. Bronson said of the image of his friend that he wanted "to take his death and return it to the public sphere, in which we had spent so much of our life together." He didn’t. He took his friend’s face to that sphere, confusing the privacy of one person’s experience with a universal metaphor. They’re not the same.

KANISHKA RAJA, this year’s winner of the ICA’s Artist Prize (part of the Momentum series "helping artists who have achieved momentum"), wants to mess with your head. Raja creates delicately fractured interiors that combine M.C. Escher and The Twilight Zone in a color palette evocative of his native India. Raja builds his own kind of momentum in the space designated for his strangely connected paintings by beginning with 13 small works that read like details or studies. Gradually, the works escalate in size, until by the end you feel you’re in a hotel atrium on Planet Claire.

One of the cornerstones of Raja’s technique is the way he makes identifiable objects belong to phantasmagoric contexts (imaginary gardens with real toads in them, as Marianne Moore put it). A boy’s bed with warplane-patterned sheets extends into a room that becomes an airplane terminal. Horses gallop just outside the open doorway of a room into which they might any second begin to stampede. A staircase that cannot be climbed because it narrows to the width of a pen connects floors of different buildings. In Raja’s world, terror is just barely under control.