Out the back and down the stairs, you enter what appears to be an excavation. At the end of a dirt-filled room stands a giant mushroom-looking thing, apparently made from clay, rising from floor to ceiling. The monumental brass of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra started up in my head. It was all cosmic and kind of silly, like the black-monolith thingy in the film 2001:A Space Odyssey.
The installation seems oddly vacant and somewhat tedious — which feels both spot-on and kind of tedious. With all their make-believe, the Kabakovs are playing at inventing a new religion here. And as with many religions, they aim to ease our doubts with important-looking architecture and signs. The design evokes the future circa 1969, the year 2001: A Space Odyssey came out.
Signs at the end of the exhibit explain that Ilya Kabakov has shifted his focus from dystopias to utopian dreaming. But I wonder whether his subject hasn’t shifted from the demise of the Russian Revolution’s utopian dreams to America’s space-age utopian capitalist dreams. These seemed triumphant in the 1990s, but since 2001 they appear to not be doing so well.
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Across the Universe, Tempo tantrum, Flash without fire, More 
- Across the Universe
Intuition tells us that certain places are powerful, that certain spaces are sacred, and that we are sometimes in the presence of cosmic energy.
- Tempo tantrum
In 2008, the fourth dimension, time, steps to the fore in the art world.
- Flash without fire
The aim of the DeCordova Museum’s Annual Exhibition is to round up “some of the most interesting and visually eloquent” New England artists.
- Built to move
The Institute of Contemporary Art, clearly in a nomadic frame of mind as it gears up for its own move to a new building on the Boston waterfront next fall, looks at the surprisingly long history of adaptability in domestic design.
- Wild things
One hundred corrugated cardboard monkeys hanging from trapezes greet visitors to “Going Ape: Confronting Animals in Contemporary Art,” which opens at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park on September 2.
- Talent shows
Amazing but true: each year since 1989, the tireless curatorial team at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park have scoured the New England area to put together a show highlighting artists from the area.
- Everybody poops
Recently selected as one of 17 regional artists to exhibit at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park's Biennial in January 2010 (alongside fellow Mainer Randy Regier), and awarded a grant from the Maine Arts Commission in support of her interactive sculpture "The Cashmere Iron Maiden," Greta Bank is struggling to find studio time on top of being a mother of two.
- Monkey see, monkey do
So thorough and deadpan is the joke that Catherine Chalmers pulls off in her ravishing color photographs of insects crawling across flowers they resemble that when I read the wall text I was sure there had been a mistake. Slideshow: Going Ape: Confronting Animals In Contemporary Art at DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park
- Ah, painting!
“Big Bang! Abstract Painting for the 21st Century” rounds up 15 painters who reinvigorate abstraction by drawing inspiration and imagery from computers, stars and constellations, quantum physics, data mapping, the Internet, genetics, squiggly microscopic critters.
- Beautiful disaster
What we think of as “progress” — urban development, industrialization — has been proceeding at a rapid rate in China over the past decade, with significant environmental and human consequences.
- Dreaming of celluloid
Of the handful of contemporary Asian shows on view in and around Boston this winter, that of Dinh Q. Lê should prove unique — if only because the Vietnamese condition is so far removed from the rest of East Asia’s cultural boom.
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Museum And Gallery
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