A friend of mine says Wurm’s work is about human isolation. Perhaps that’s why my favorite Wurm photos depict awkward acts of physical intimacy: a man on a street putting his hand in another guy’s mouth; a woman in a restaurant sticking her hand down the fly of her jeans; a man in a restaurant shoving his head down the front of a woman’s shirt; two standing women pressed together trapping a bunch of oranges between their bodies; a woman lying atop a man on a city sidewalk. Several of these come from his 2003 series “Looking for a Bomb,” and they touch on the sacrifice of privacy in the name of security, but at a basic level they seem mysterious metaphors for our desperate longing for sensual — and mental — connection.
Wurm packs many of his concerns into Fat House (2003), a doughy-looking two-story-tall cottage bulging out from under its red roof. On one hand, it’s a satire of wealth and excess, but in the darkened interior there plays an animation of the cottage worrying about the nature of its existence. “Am I an artwork? I am a house, yes, but if someone would want to buy me, what would they get? A house and an artwork? Just a house? Or a double house?” The cartoon rambles on in a female flat-affect voice. “Oh, that’s so confusing. And why am I fat? A house cannot be fat.”
These theoretical puzzles are fun for a while. “Maybe it is art to be fat, maybe that makes me being an art piece,” the Fat House goes on. “But then there are many creatures fat in the world. Are all overweight people art pieces?” Before long, though, all this existential fretting starts to sound like echoes inside an ivory tower. When you reach that point, cover your eyes, plug your ears, and ponder: is a philosopher without fresh ideas still a philosopher?
SOLAR RADIUS: The appeal of Walker’s work lies in her painterly take on the look of Internet-era technology.
|
Sarah Walker’s abstractions often have a sci-fi look. Her three Transit Section paintings from 2002 feature pairs of staring electronic eyeballs hovering one atop another and cells bubbling up toward you from staticky layered grids. Grain Boundary (2004) and Core Sample (2005) suggest galaxies or the orbits of planets. A white planet appears in the blue space at the right of Test Spot (2004), a nebula at the center swirls around a dense circuit board pattern, and all this is laid under a grid as if viewed through a starship’s radar screen.Usually hunting for hidden pictures in abstract paintings is a faux pas, but here the imagery reveals the inspirations for the dozen or so acrylics from the past four years that are assembled in the Rose’s “Sarah Walker: Paintings,” the Boston artist’s first museum survey. The 42-year-old, who won the DeCordova Museum’s $20,000 Rappaport Prize last year, is fascinated by the imagery of math and science, diagrams that aim to make sense of chaos, views of stuff too microscopic or too telescopic to be seen by the naked eye. Her work’s appeal lies in her painterly take on the look of Internet-era technology, a take infused with memories of space-age design.
