Here’s the first line of the wall text that accompanies Anri Sala’s video Natural Mystic: “An insistent slippage between sight and sound, forging a poetic alliance of absence and presence, plays a vital role in Albanian artist Anri Sala’s early docudramas and prefigures the synaesthetic facet of his recent work.” You may not have figured out that that means Sala whistles and makes puffing sounds into a microphone in a room with a set of drums. But to witness the emperor’s new clothes in all their finery, check out Sala’s Now I See in which a writhing teen rock band, seen from the waist down, share the screen with a balloon twisted into the shape of a long-eared dog.
The two other components of “Sensorium II” are so unobtrusive as almost not to be there — in fact, one isn’t. Feeling bold, I announced to the attendant that I wanted to participate in Mi(pi) Bar, the contribution from François Roche, Stephanie Lavaux, and Jean Navarro. One of five elaborate ceiling-to-floor panels says that “individual containers will be accessible at the List Visual Art Center” for the purification of one’s urine, which I would then be invited to drink. All in a day’s work. I was informed, however, that the project was never actually executed (the cost proved prohibitive) and that the exhibit was “just a thought.” Returning to the wall text, I realized my mistake. R&Sie(n) — that’s the cool acronym they go by — “proposed a project about sustainability that is also designed to provoke a phobic response.” That is, a real response to a fake situation. This could have major repercussions in places like MassArt if students start passing off proposals as projects, but that’s for others to worry about.
You might miss Natascha Sadr-Haghighian’s Singing Microscope — it’s small and it’s gray and it’s in a corner where it calls no attention to itself. The wall text says that the artist “critically engages systems of knowledge and belief,” and maybe that’s true. What isn’t true is what comes next: “when one approaches with the eye, nothing happens.” In fact, no matter what body part you choose to put forward, the microscope emits a faint, computer-generated voice “singing” Sting’s “Every Breath You Take,” and though it’s easier to hear if you cock your ear to the lens, I don’t recommend the effort.
From 1886 to 1913, Francis Greenwood Peabody served as the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Department of Social Ethics (later the Sociology Department) at Harvard University. Professor Peabody’s efforts to impart a fuller understanding of the American social experience to his privileged undergraduates took several forms. Among them, he focused on social ills (disease, criminality, income inequities), and as documentation he amassed a huge collection of materials, photographs mostly, to give a scientific air to his study of “social evolution” and “social progress.”
The several hundred photos on display in “Classified Documents: The Social Museum of Harvard University, 1903–1931,” a fraction of the complete holdings of the Social Museum, gradually reveal the substratum of Peabody’s politics, which are made clear in the wall text: “ . . . crime, chronic unemployment, overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, alcoholism, etc. — were caused by the moral, physical, and mental deterioration of its [the city’s] impoverished inhabitants, and their inability to take responsibility for their circumstances.”
