"Superpower," an exhibition opening at the Gallery @ Green Street in Jamaica Plain this Friday, carries the descriptive subtitle "Regional Artistic Responses to the Imagery, Horrors, Power and Powerlessness of ‘A Preemptive Action’ War." With this packed phrase, Green Street founder James Hull attempts to express the mixed emotions felt by many members of our star-spangled empire as it wields its might against smaller nations. As Hull explains, "This show forced itself on me when I saw so much work everywhere that was so specific and timely. I did not know I was going to do a ‘war’ show — the show spontaneously generated."
And the work he has assembled is no simple matter of war protest; Hull’s seven artists have a wide range of approaches and backgrounds. Ominous collages by Lina María Giraldo look like a desert version of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1960s media-based collages, with cut-out newspaper images of George Bush and the American flag in surreal juxtaposition with pictures of Iraq and its leadership and citizenry, the World Trade Center, the United Nations, Israel, the Pentagon, and more. Hull describes Giraldo’s work as having reference to "the collages of Hanna Hoch and Richard Hamilton — gone ‘Boston Globe front page.’ " In fact, much of "Superpower" focuses on the war as we saw it in the newspapers and on TV. Emil Corsillo’s Code Orange and Trent Miller’s 48 Hours respond to Bush administration policies and statements issued via the press. Nicholas Higbee riffs on our childish (boyish?) fascination with violence through digital refigurings of downloaded images of fireworks; these are flatly rendered the way you might find them in a comic book, or in a Roy Lichtenstein painting if Roy had lived to go digital. And Hisashi Oguchi’s paintings of tanks set against swirling flags and blended into camouflage-patterned grounds suggest the murkiness of the concepts of security and sovereignty in times of military aggression. Like the rest of us, artists have been unable to ignore the war; the work in "Superpower" displays complex responses to the use — and misuse — of force by a forceful nation.
The Busch-Reisinger Museum (which you enter through glass doors on the second floor of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard) is dedicated to showing and collecting all things German (or at least from all people German-speaking) — which in terms of art history is a rich mission. The museum offers occasional, informal weekend "close-up" seminars on its "study-room collections" of works that are not regularly on view because they are on paper or are otherwise delicate. This Saturday’s "Women, Minimalism, and Conceptualism in Contemporary German Art" should be an eye opener — spend an hour with five to 10 rarely seen objects (primarily works on paper) by Rosemarie Trockel, Isa Genzken, and Karin Sander, among others, as curatorial intern Adrian Sudhalter draws back the curtain on these important artists.
"Superpower" is at the Gallery @ Green Street, 141 Green Street in the Green Street MBTA Station on the Orange Line, Jamaica Plain, May 16 through June 21; there’s a public opening reception this Friday, May 16, from 7 to 9 p.m., and a talk by exhibition artists this Saturday, May 17, beginning at noon. Call (617) 522-0000. "Close-Up: Women, Minimalism, and Conceptualism in Contemporary German Art" takes place at the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University, 32 Quincy Street (enter through the Fogg Art Museum) in Harvard Square, this Saturday, May 17, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Call (617) 495-9400.
