Funhouse
Last week the Institute of Contemporary Art — founded in 1936 and self-described as "one of the oldest art museums devoted exclusively to the presentation of contemporary art" — celebrated convulsions of change: a new exhibit, a new building, a new curator.
At a January 21 press conference, the ICA unveiled three new exhibits: "Carsten Höller: Half Fiction," "Building a Vision: Diller + Scofidio in Boston," and "Artifacts of the Presence Era." The first of these, which presents the Belgian-born (1961) Höller in his major US museum debut, includes the giant plexiglass-and-steel Slide #6, the 40-foot-square pitch-black space Choice Corridor, and the right-angle Light Wall, with its 1792 light bulbs all flickering at a frequency of 7.8 Hz. Visitors are invited to slide down the slide, wander into — and attempt to find their way out of — the blackness of the Choice Corridor, and stare through closed lids at the intense, multi-colored, strobe-like after-images of the wall. A wall text explains that Höller at one time studied to be a scientist and that "comparable to the way a scientist works, Höller employs the audience as subjects, so to speak, of perceptual and psychological experimentation."
If that brings to mind Mike Myers’s old Saturday Night Live "Sprockets" routine, well, so be it. (In his e-mail newsletter, long-time Boston artist and critic Charles Giuliano compared the exhibit to an episode of Fear Factor.) The press gamely stumbled through the dark ("Will they send someone in for us?"), slid down the slide ("It’s fast!"), and squinted into the light.
Höller himself was gracious and unassuming. The museum’s press material had mentioned "doubt" and "uncertainty," and curator Jessica Morgan had talked about a museum experience that is "neither one thing nor another." Höller suggested, "You don’t have to make up your mind. Fear is not what everyone will experience." In fact, he said, anxiety in the dark room can give way to a reassuring surrender of control. The idea behind Choice Corridor is not that of a maze, he pointed out — there’s a handrail to guide visitors, and "you can’t get lost." Rather, he said, there’s an element in which all his exhibits offer some kind of reassuring containment. "One is more joyful, one more fearful, but the basic experience is the same."
There’s no argument about the Diller + Scofidio exhibit. The architects’ design for the new ICA on the Fan Pier (scheduled for groundbreaking in 2003-2004 and completion in 2006) has won raves in the press, from the Globe’s Robert Campbell ("This is a design in which all the elements click together in a deeply satisfying way") to the Times’ Herbert Muschamp (Diller + Scofidio "have defined a new building type for the contemporary city").
At the ICA, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio were as down-to-earth as they were heady and metaphorical, crediting ICA director Jill Medvedow’s "fantastic instinct for architecture" as they gave an overview of the exhibition space’s various process models and a schematic model of the finished product, a cantilevered "viewing platform" (Muschamp’s term) at the interface of Fan Pier’s proposed Harbor Walk and the sea and sky of the Harbor itself. Diller and Scofidio will give a free talk at the ICA on March 13 at 6:30 p.m.
The third exhibit, by students at MIT’s Media Lab, is an interactive display based on digitally sampled images and sound from the gallery itself. Projected on the wall as photo-images and a graph, it suggests a visual cross-section of time. The exhibit is interactive, but it’s best experienced with the guidance of the enthusiastic MIT students who helped design it.
Immediately following this press opening, the ICA announced that Nicholas Baume, curator of contemporary art at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, will succeed Jessica Morgan (who recently decamped to London’s Tate Modern) as the ICA’s chief curator. A native Australian, Baume was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney from 1993 until coming to the Atheneum in 1998.
Pal Joey
This year marks the 100th birthday of the museum Isabella Stewart Gardner created, and to honor the occasion, the Gardner hosted a gala opening reception last Thursday to introduce its new "Artist, Curator, Collector: James McNeill Whistler, Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner — Three Locations in the Creative Process: A Centennial Project by Joseph Kosuth," which will be on view through April 6. A pioneering Conceptual artist, Kosuth is known for scrutinizing the intersection of art and language, and on the dark, cold night of the opening, his neon transcription of one of Whistler’s famous "Ten O’Clock Lectures" twinkled brilliantly on the outside wall of the museum, spelling out mysterious fragments in white neon script and setting out Whistler’s ideas about art — which were, when he espoused them to his colleagues in 1885, controversial and provocative.
Inside, the text-laden contemporary art looked elegant, from the dove-gray lettering of the information-heavy time lines around the special-exhibition gallery to the embroidered velvet display-case covers throughout the museum. Kosuth circulated wearing a black-and-white-striped tie that suggested the stripes worn by Venetian gondoliers. His contemporary edge mirrors both the polish and the adventurous natures of Mrs. Gardner and her friends Whistler and Berenson, and he brings the spirit of Mrs. Gardner’s own times into his art, as with this entry for 1904: "Gardner studies jujitsu and, accompanied by a courier, sets off for Spain, which is considered a somewhat dangerous place at the time."
War games
A bumper sticker on Danielle Hanrahan’s car declares, "If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention." The sticker has been there for years, she explains, but these days, with war looming, new levels of relevance and urgency underscore the message. Hanrahan, the head of exhibitions at the Harvard art museums, is outraged. And she wants more people to start paying attention. In both public and private ways, she’s making an effort to get people to pay attention, to think, to question, and to criticize.
"I’ve been thinking about war," she explains. "War has been on my mind a lot. I feel outraged by the hypocrisy of the administration. And I want there to be more outrage." On Martin Luther King Day, Hanrahan stood on a bridge in Northampton with a group of other protesters holding anti-war posters and flashing the peace sign to people driving by as part of Bridges Across the Connecticut River, an event aimed to express King’s anti-war sentiment. "People need to realize that it’s our right and duty as Americans to critique this country. I can still love my country and stand outside holding peace signs; you can love this place and want to change it. We have a moral obligation to think and to express what we think."
Recently, Hanrahan also expressed her outrage in a more private way. For the second year in a row, the people in her department exchanged handmade holiday gifts. Hanrahan presented her colleagues with "War Games," a series of three hand-held toys with a political bent. "They’re critiques of our government, a response to some of what I see going on. I wanted them to be interactive. I wanted them to be thought-provoking."
The goal of the games is familiar: you tilt the board to roll tiny silver balls into indentations. But their point is a good deal less playful. In "Wanted," black-and-white mug shots of Osama bin Laden and Henry Kissinger are sandwiched between a "WANTED for Crimes Against Humanity" banner at the top and a photograph of a piles of skulls at the bottom. The eyes are hollowed out to serve as the indentations for the balls, so the faces look eerily empty-eyed. But once you maneuver the balls into the depressions, the faces take on a zombie-like life. A few of the skulls also have hollowed-out sockets. "Beady eyes" was never so accurate a description.
"Daisy cutter" is the name for a type of bomb that plunges to earth in a parachute, laterally releasing a chemical agent that acts as a defoliant. "It’s such an innocuous-sounding name," says Hanrahan, "but such a devastating type of weapon. It’s like Double Speak. The administration is systematically undoing all the environmental regulations and calling it something like the clear-sky act."
The backdrop for Hanrahan’s "Daisy Cutter" is an image of the bomb being detonated. Parachutes carrying bombs with indentations for the balls fall from a plane. When the balls are in place, they become the tips of the bombs, the parachutes telling your score. For every point you score, you created a bomb.
There’s a similar no-win-situation feel to "Collateral Damage." Instead of maneuvering the balls into indentations, you have to maneuver them into U-shaped pockets — miss and they fall into slots at the bottom of the board, each of which is labeled with the number of civilian casualties in Vietnam, Dresden, Cambodia, the Gulf War, Kosovo, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Afghanistan. Hanrahan mentions a comment made by Colin Powell during the first Iraq war when someone asked him about civilian casualties: " ‘That’s not a figure I’m particularly interested in.’ " She goes on, "We look where we want to look, do what we want to do, and there’s no culpability for our actions."
In "Collateral Damage," there’s no way you can maneuver all the silver balls into the target U-pockets. Civilian deaths are unavoidable. "There can’t be a positive outcome to war," Hanrahan says. "You can’t win."
