A wide net is cast by the ICA’s upcoming exhibition " Pulse: Art, Healing, and Transformation, " which opens May 14, and the related performance and video work Remedy, by choreographer Ann Carlson. " Pulse " presents 15 artists whose work explores healing and the creative process, a fitting theme in a city that’s a leader in medicine and research. The show takes as its starting point the groundbreaking work of two artists: Germany’s Joseph Beuys, whose real and metaphoric wounds suffered during service as a young combat pilot in World War II influenced the innovative art he developed in Düsseldorf in the 1960s; and Brazil’s Lygia Clark, whose work has woven a link between artistic and therapeutic activity since she began using her open-ended, interactive sculpture in group-therapy sessions in the early 1970s.
Beuys and Clark were moved to use both their own bodies and those of their " spectators " in their art, and audience participation is likewise a fundamental element in " Pulse. " Cai Guo-Qiang’s installation invites viewers to walk across a pebble path that runs alongside a series of drawings explaining theories of foot reflexology and ends at a vending machine dispensing bottled herbal cures. The therapeutic potential of ritual is also a recurrent theme: Wolfgang Laib meditatively lines up 33 brass plates, filling 32 with rice and the 33rd with hazelnut pollen. And some artists drew on their own experience: Hannah Wilke chronicled her battle with cancer through life-sized color photographs in what was to be her last project before her death. " Pulse " is especially apposite in an era when our own relationship with illness and death has grown both increasingly technological and increasingly spiritual.
John Currin began to emerge in the early 1990s, when the depiction of the human figure in art was in critical condition — it had arguably been ailing through much of the 20th century, as American fascination with Madison Avenue and Hollywood replaced ostensibly more elevated models for figuring the body, like, say, the Renaissance masters. Currin has been rethinking figurative painting with Baroque, Rococo and Mannerist painting in mind (okay, he also seems to have " girlie " photos and maybe Norman Rockwell in mind). Now the Museum of Fine Arts has invited him to rummage through its permanent collection and pick out historical works that resonate for him. " John Currin Selects, " which also opens May 14, will include paintings like the hunky 16th-century Blood of the Redeemer, by Bartolomeo Passarotti, and the rather sour portrait of poet Don Luis de Góngora y Argote by Diego Velázquez. Together with these, Currin will show one of his own fascinating paintings; the feast of flesh, muscle, and attitude that goes into each of these images should be restorative.
" Pulse: Art, Healing, and Transformation " is at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston Street, from May 14 through August 31. Ann Carlson’s Remedy will be presented on a mobile LED screen on May 13 from 1 to 4 p.m. in the Longwood Medical Area, and from 5:30 to 9 p.m. on Boylston Street, across from the ICA; on May 14 from 1 to 8 p.m. in Copley Square; and on May 15 from 1 to 5 p.m. in Copley Square. Public participation is invited on May 14 and 15 from 1 to 5 p.m. Call (617) 266-5152. " John Currin Selects " is at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue, from May 14 through January 4. There’ll be a free gallery talk by MFA assistant curator William Stover at 11 a.m. on May 29. Call (617) 267-9300.
