Two big trends in avant-garde design are ignored: green building (a missed opportunity to be an environmental role model) and computer-age rococo (Frank Gehry’s MIT Stata Center, Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum, Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum). And the architects ante up no new ideas instead. The overall tone is gray. The lighting tends toward gloomy. Raw concrete floors give the ICA a refurbished factory æsthetic, but one built from scratch for people who don’t want to get sullied by real refurbished factories. It’s desperately seeking to impress you with the brute force of its macho modernist “megatrusses” and 80-foot cantilever. This isn’t cutting-edge architecture, it’s butter-knife-edge architecture rehashing stuff people were building two or three generations ago.
A room-sized, glass-walled elevator (the glass had a four-foot crack during the first week) takes you to the fourth-floor galleries, offering water views on the way up. The signature characteristic of contemporary art is its diversity of styles, subjects, materials. The new ICA galleries could reflect that, offering tantalizing options and letting you to choose your own adventure. Instead you step off the elevator and a sign in the lobby directs you toward the main exhibit, chief curator Nicholas Baume’s “Super Vision,” in the west galleries. A door on other side offers only a blank wall.
“Super Vision” presents a couple of lovely pairings: Jeff Koons’s landmark 1986 stainless-steel cast of a dimestore inflatable Easter Rabbit (on opening day, there was a great first-floor sign warning visitors: “No touching of the art [this includes the bunny]”) with Anish Kapoor’s mesmerizing 1995 stainless-steel blob; James Turrell’s 1989 mysterious red void, New Light, with the computer-lab window. But on the whole this is a dull and timid premiere, with too few surprises and too many usual suspects — Gursky, Koons, Oursler, Polke, Richter, Ruscha. The works average 10 years old, and the ideas are even dustier. Chalk it up to opening-season jitters, but it’s a bad omen for a museum that bills itself as “audacious,” “fearless,” a forward-looking institution for the 21st century.
The west and east galleries are linked by a long hallway, with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the harbor, called the Founders Gallery. The curators don’t know what to do here; it’s too sunny for delicate art and the view likely trumps anything they could bring in. Since the opening, benches have been added. I suggest commissioning temporary murals or installations for this space.
Poor signs make it easy to miss the Mediatheque and the video rooms off the main galleries. By the time visitors get through “Super Vision,” the Founders Gallery, and the permanent collection (mostly a yawn) in the east galleries and wind up at the elevator again, many are likely to leave, missing the most of-the-moment and compelling shows: “Momentum 6: Sergio Vega” and the ICA Prize exhibits.
As you head back down, you realize, sadly, that the art is confined to the top floor. Roughly half of the two middle floors is occupied by the 325-seat Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, with windows on two sides affording stunning harbor views that seem likely to distract from what’s being presented inside. The available blackout shades have all the charm of accordion walls in high-school gyms. An opening-day dance troupe performed with the shades down and then during their bows raised them to let sunlight pour in. Will performers find ways to incorporate the view into their acts without its overpowering their work? (Marcia Siegel’s review of the Stephen Petronio Company’s performance last weekend in the Barbara Lee is opposite.) Or will the view consistently be shut out?
