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North by northwest
Goodies at the DeCordova and in Fitchburg
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
"Self-Evidence: Identity in Contemporary Art"
At the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln, through May 30.
"New England/New Talent"
At Fitchburg Art Museum, 185 Elm Street at the Merriam Parkway, Fitchburg, through March 21.


Two thoughtful, ambitious, uneven group shows north and west of Boston point to the potential and the pitfalls of the art world’s version of the multiplex. Like any solo exhibit, of course, the group show is only as good as its parts, and what it takes away in depth — on average each artist is represented by four pieces in these exhibits — it gives back in variety. If you aren’t taken by one person’s vision, you may be by another’s.

Unlike the solo show, however, the multi-person exhibit has to tangle with its theme. Why bring these particular 12 or 28 artists together in the first place? And themes get tricky fast. Too broadly defined, the grouping seems meaningless. Too narrowly defined, the curator’s selection standard can overshadow the art. (I’m reminded of a show a few years ago in which a gallery director insisted all the work be white, whether it started out that way or not.)

Something like narrowness describes the difficulty I had with "Self-Evidence: Identity in Contemporary Art," a far-flung, highly accomplished, and in a few instances staggeringly wonderful affair on the theme of self-portraiture, though the inflated title would lead you to understand it differently. Twenty-eight artists contribute to "Self-Evidence," and that in itself may be part of the problem. How do you pay attention to the quiet and unobtrusive — those works that are small in scale, technically subtle, muted in pitch and color — when the big and the bright and the boisterous clamor for your attention in the same space?

I’m a shameless fan of Gerry Bergstein’s outrageous Screams Throughout Art History, an over-the-top oil painting in which the artist’s open-mouthed, cross-eyed, splayed-tongued, screaming face appears to be exploding out of the firmament. Bergstein’s disembodied head is surrounded by body parts, paint brushes and images of other artists’ screaming faces (Munch, Michelangelo, and Homer Simpson foremost among them). It’s a furious, incendiary, and largely silly confection that measures in at five feet long and over two feet tall. After seeing it in the main gallery space with a number of other powerful, sizable, in-your-face works, who will have the energy or the peace of mind to climb the stairs and take in the dreamy, muted, letter-sized watercolors of Ambreen Butt? Moreover, if you don’t pause at the mezzanine level on your way up to the main gallery, you’ll probably miss the seven exquisite, miniature photo collages by John O’Reilly. And that would be a shame.

The best work in "Self-Evidence" takes the artist’s self-portrait out of the mirror and into the world. In O’Reilly’s case, the world is simultaneously real and imaginary, nightmarish and hilarious: he cuts and pastes his own body (scrawny, bald-headed, often naked) into old photographs of renowned artists or their masterworks. In With Bonnard, O’Reilly stands with his backside visible to us, as if in a performer’s worst dream, naked before the great painter. Bonnard, in turn, appears to be staring aghast at O’Reilly’s crotch. In As Rimbaud and Verlaine, O’Reilly grafts the two poets’ faces onto his own hairless, underfed body. It is the accomplishment of his art to transform shame into power and vulnerability into strength — through humor. He insists on his own place among the masters, no matter how foolish-looking he is, no matter how-out-of place.

"Self-Evidence" suffers when it takes itself too seriously. Bill Viola’s 17-minute film of his unmoving, unchanging, uninteresting face — punctuated every so often by a deafening gasp (surprise! he’s been holding his breath!) — finds its self-absorbed complement in Linn Underhill’s attitude-drenched photographic versions of herself in men’s clothing. Even Sage Sohier’s color photos of herself with her mother register as grim and ultimately self-absorbed — her interest in her mother appears strictly a function of how mom resembles her camera-packing child.

On the other hand, I have seldom laughed as hard, been as dismayed, or done as abrupt a double take as I did when I beheld Chrissy Conant’s installation Chrissy Caviar. It took me a full minute to figure out that the ’50s-style circular advertisement on the wall with a smiling woman in a strapless evening gown is modeled after the lid of a caviar jar. It took me another full minute to appreciate that the hard-to-see black letters on the dark-blue background, "PRODUCT OF THE CHRISSY CONANT OVARIES," relate to the glowing white orb rising from the woman’s extended hand and refer directly to what’s in the jars in the nearby refrigeration unit. Still, only when I forced myself to read the wall text ("refrigeration equipment containing a series of twelve jars, each jar containing one human egg . . . ") did it dawn on me that Conant was selling her own eggs as caviar. (A nearby lap-top sports the Web site for placing your order.) Not since Andy Warhol has anyone taken the visual language of the marketplace and made it so thoroughly her own; not since Cindy Sherman has somebody so radically recast her likeness as to become something else.

Other marvelous work in "Self-Evidence" includes Harriet Casdin-Silver’s astonishing holograms, Randall Deihl’s wry Self-Portrait with Imaginary Tattoos, and Susan Hauptman’s accomplished drawings.

At the Fitchburg Art Museum, 12 artists and one artist team make up the seventh biennial "New England/New Talent." A relatively small and remote treasure of an art museum, the Fitchburg space offers its artists the breathing room that few venues closer to Boston can provide. The abstract installations of Cambridge artist Nancy Murphy Spicer, for instance, are able to occupy walls and hallways, ceilings and floors, over enough square feet so that her strangely elegant confections read like elaborate lichen or fungi. Spicer applies acrylic paint to the walls she’s given or the walls she manipulates to create three-dimensional drawings. One part of Drawing Object looks like a six-foot-tall, upside-down musical note; another suggests melting skin as fleshy-pink strings drip from the ceiling into indecorous pools on the floor.

Another tripartite abstract wall installation by Susan Prince Thompson enjoys a less visceral, more cerebral feel. Thompson’s three contributions look as if they should always be displayed together, implying as they do a mysterious development or progression. Canto, made mostly of paper (random book pages embedded in thick, handmade paper that resembles cloth), looks like the front of a little girl’s dress. Beside it, Meander is a wall-sized network of feathery wire webs; the end of each wire is tightly bound by a thin wrap of paper like a Q-tip. On a separate wall at a 90-degree angle to Meander, The Riddle of Memory sprawls flat and tendril-like, an immense nerve cell.

Three other artists stand out in "New England/New Talent." Mark Heitzman’s photo-realist graphite drawings — a stack of bricks, an old tool, a rotted milk can — do more than testify to his superior skills as a draftsman. These images evoke lost worlds. One of the bricks is dated "1952," and the milk can’s decay and the tool’s obsolescence make his drawings poignant as tombstones. Engaging, too, are Dorothea Van Camp’s abstract drawings of wax, graphite, and crayon; they look like a cross between industrial designs and aerial views of hurricanes, alternately orderly and tumultuous. And in his black-and-white photographs, Nicholas Johnson arranges flagstones and pools of water in his studio to create pictures that look like tremendous glaciers.


Issue Date: March 5 - 11, 2004
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