Anna Schuleit — who has bounced around New England, with studies at RISD and Dartmouth — won a 2006 MacArthur Fellowship (the “Genius Grant”) and spent the past year in New York. But back in 2003, she wowed the art world when she filled the halls of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston with 28,000 flowers. The following year, the ICA invited her to create an island installation; she picked Lovells, and she spent parts of the past two summers there developing a proposal, Intertidal, inspired by four massive batteries where 10-inch cannons nested at the turn of the 20th century. For Schuleit, the departed guns, with their reported nine-mile range, “pull one’s eyes off and beyond the map. . . . I wish to reverse this directional pull. And fold these axes back unto themselves.” She proposes placing mirrors upright in the water just offshore to reflect the island back to itself. A second proposal, Sightlines, calls for etching copies of Schuleit’s drawings of Lovells beachgoers on giant panes of glass inside the massive abandoned cannon emplacements.
ICA officials judged both ideas too expensive and time-consuming (Intertidal, it was estimated, would cost $1 million and take three years to negotiate and build), so a vinyl yurt not far from the Lovells Island dock displays Schuleit’s written proposals and models. The mirrors might create intriguing mirages, but I’m not sold. And mock-ups of her beachgoer drawings copied onto acrylic panels look lousy. Lovells feels overgrown, as if nature were reclaiming the cracking fortifications, growing over old anxieties and angers. I’m not convinced that either of Schuleit’s plans would make the island more fascinating than it already is.
My final stop was Spectacle Island, which has been home to farming, a quarantine hospital, resort hotels, and most recently a garbage dump topped with 3.5 million cubic yards of clay, dirt, and gravel dug up during the construction of the Big Dig. Last summer the island opened as a public park with the typical landscape of a former landfill: two round hills ringed by concentric trails. Cambridge artist Teri Rueb’s two-part installation Core Sample taps this history.
CORE SAMPLE: Teri Rueb’s Spectacle Island
project dramatizes the tension between the
outdoors and the head trip. |
At the ICA, Rueb has installed a long metal tube running before harbor-view windows with sounds seeming to emanate from the floor beneath it. The result is just okay, but her island installation is the best of the bunch. Borrow a radio and headphones at the Spectacle visitor center — when you walk around the island, a global positioning system plays sounds corresponding to your location: wind, waves, buzzing bugs, a jet, a man recalling working on the island, earth movers rumbling, birds chirping, an electronic whine, maybe a cow. Higher up the hill, a recorded voice aptly explains, “It’s an extension of Boston, including all the fill. . . . They built a little piece of the mainland out there. You can’t fool the vegetation. They recognized that it’s an urban island. . . . The whole island from top to bottom was disturbed. It has no history.”Rueb’s recipe is pretty cool, with room to grow even richer. Her sounds tend toward the illustrative — walk by water and hear water, climb up fill and hear the rumble of earth movers. What would happen if she included more tangents that somehow imitated the way your mind wanders on such walks? But Core Sample sticks with me because of its tension between live and recorded, between the outdoors and the head trip. We go to the islands to be outdoors. Rueb draws us outside while fascinatingly, frustratingly, shutting us back inside our own heads.
