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Cerith Wyn Evans and John Coplans
BY RANDI HOPKINS
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Crystal chandeliers have a lot of associations, whether you picture them swinging in elegant dining rooms or clustered in furniture showrooms, but perhaps the last place you’d expect to see them would be gracing the ceiling in a contemporary art gallery — they’re too garish, too historical, too bourgeois, too flickery, too distracting. Which must be why conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans has focused on them in "Cerith Wyn Evans," which opens this Wednesday at the Museum of Fine Arts. It’s clear that Wyn Evans sees the camp in chandelier as well as the glamor, and that for him, "illumination" is both a physical and an intellectual state: his chandeliers (seven will be on view in this site-specific installation) not only sparkle, they also flash Morse-code versions of texts ranging from film to literature to philosophy. Translations of the heady material can be found on computer screens embedded in the gallery walls. Born in Wales in 1958, Wyn Evans graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 1980 and then made his first artistic splash with the experimental films and music videos he directed for bands like the Smiths, Throbbing Gristle, and the Fall. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to do sculptures and installations, employing such unusual and evocative media as neon, orchids, mirrors, and fireworks. The MFA is planning to set off one of his famed fireworks pieces outside the building prior to the opening — if all goes well, the resulting artwork will be on view throughout the show’s run. In a possibly unprecedented and in any case totally intelligent stab at cultural cross-pollination, the MFA has coordinated its efforts with MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, where "Cerith Wyn Evans: Thoughts unsaid, now forgotten . . . " opens next Thursday. This one features a convex mirror sculpture called Perverse, Inverse, Reverse (1996) that will throw viewers back on themselves in weird ways (there’s an alternate version of the sculpture at the MFA), along with installations that ruminate on the nature of science and art, including an MIT audio recording from the ’60s of a man who traveled between tech-y schools inscribing students’ names on their slide rules and a neon work commissioned by the List that will reflect off a gallery window so that it appears to caption or subtitle the view of the busy courtyard outdoors. Whereas Wyn Evans’s mirrors turn a disturbing eye on viewers and their surrounds, photographer John Coplans excelled at the art of unblinking self-reflection. A noted art critic and curator through the ’60s and ’70s (he was the founding editor of Artforum), Coplans picked up a camera in 1980 — at the age of 60 — and turned it on his own nude self, documenting the physical process of aging in monumental photographs that describe a wondrous, humbling landscape of flesh, life, and decay. "Body Parts — A Self-Portrait by John Coplans" also opens next Thursday at the List, and it will present the final series of 26 large black-and-white photographs completed by the artist before his death a year ago in August. "Cerith Wyn Evans" is at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue in Boston, October 6 through January 30, with a lecture by the artist at the MFA on October 9 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $10 for members, $13 for non-members; call (617) 267-9300. "Cerith Wyn Evans: Thoughts unsaid, now forgotten . . . " and "Body Parts — A Self-Portrait by John Coplans" are at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street in Cambridge, October 7 through December 31, with an opening reception October 7 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.; call (617) 253-4400.
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