WHEELBARROW: Lane’s content is iffy, but her design and craftsmanship dazzle. |
“Cal Lane: Sweet Crude” | Judi Rotenberg Gallery, 130 Newbury St, Boston | Through July 6
“Harriet Casdin-Silver: Self Portraits” | Gallery Naga, 67 Newbury St, Boston | Through July 11 |
Beauty is back.Twentieth-century Modernism’s main line wound up in a final march toward Minimalist and Conceptualist asceticism. But by the 1990s, the art world was buzzing with talk of a return to beauty. It was mainly a reserved Minimalist beauty — think Félix González-Torres. But now we’ve got lush, bubbly, decorative, rapturous beauty.You can see it in Ranjani Shettar’s bubbly hoops dangling from the Institute of Contemporary Art’s ceiling. Or in Mary O’Malley’s drawn fantasias of birds and flowers and cascading dots that look something like jellyfish. Or in the work of Boston graffiti artist Pixnit, whose stenciled spraypainted mural of a chaise longue, birdcages, and chandelier was on view at Judi Rotenberg Gallery last month. Or in Cal Lane’s current show at the Rotenberg, which gets its oomph from one majorly neat trick: she uses a blowtorch-like-thing to slice I-beams and oil drums and shovels into lacy designs. The upstate New Yorker has called them “industrial doilies.” It’s beauty for beauty’s sake.
A few trends are braided into Lane’s art. Most prominent is feminism, beginning with echoes of 1970s feminist Pattern and Decoration art, which challenged macho æsthetics by embracing floral, decorative, domestic (i.e., “feminine”) designs. This idea continues to play out in third-wave feminist art’s embrace of the girly and its confidence that anything a guy can do a gal can do as well — or better. In Lane’s art, there’s a tension between “feminine” lacy patterns and “masculine” metal welding.
This reconsideration of gender roles is also apparent in the enthusiastic hipster (gal and guy) embrace of traditional lady crafts, as Stitch ’n’ Bitch and Etsy attest. Crafts are a way for people to assert their humanity. It’s a thrill — as I pointed out last week in my review of the “Keepers of Tradition” show at the National Heritage Museum — to see what people can produce with their hands.
That how-did-they-do-that magic is what really grabs me in Lane’s wheelbarrow. It stands on end, its black and rusty-brown metal body perforated with an intricate lacy floral pattern. It looks so delicate that it should crumple. But it defies logic and holds its shape.
There are pieces into which Lane has injected more-explicit content. She slices open oil drums and presses them flat — the body a horizontal panel, with the round ends placed above and below. Untitled American Map (2008) depicts a map of the United States surrounded by curious images: a woman with a chicken, houses, people, a couple kissing, ladies and bunnies, a car, a puppy, a chair.
An oil drum seems to unspool up the wall in Untitled Prayer Rug (2008). The body of the drum is perforated with a rug-like pattern depicting what might be some martyr’s imagined heavenly harem — naked ladies (they look like the silhouetted women on truck mudflaps) lying about and what looks like girl-on-girl action. Splayed, flattened oil cans are carved with patterns of fighting and leapfrogging women (I kept thinking: “Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling”) and animal-people hybrids, as well as dogs, bunnies, frogs, a lamb, plants, guns, angels, a cross, and what looks like a baptism in a river. Pug and the Proposition has four lady legs at the left and at the right a very smily dog with its tongue hanging out and what I gather are decidedly, uh, inappropriate intentions.
Lane’s symbolism feels by turns simplistic (America and oil and religion, oh my) and random (all that stuff surrounding the map of the US). But her designs and her craftsmanship dazzle. They convey echoes of Art Nouveau ironwork, tattoos, lace, embroidery, lingerie, classical pottery, Javanese shadow puppets, antique maps, maybe a dash of Nancy Spero. She balances deliciously between rough-and-tumble metal dissected by flaming plasma cutters and delicate neo-rococo designs. I just wonder whether she mightn’t get a better handle on her content by thinking more about sex. It’s already there in her pervy pug and prayer rug. And really it’s the foundation of her project, if you consider that beauty — from the birds and the bees to the flowers and the trees — is all tied up in this thing called “love.”
70 + 1 + 2: Casdin-Silver was driven by a
feminist mission — in this case, coming to
terms with and celebrating the aging female
body. |
Harriet Casdin-Silver’s self-portrait show at Gallery NAGA was scheduled before she died from complications of pneumonia in March at age 83, but now it serves as a memorial. The Brookline artist began making holograms in the late 1960s, and she was called “America’s foremost art holographer” (are there others?) by DeCordova Museum curator Nick Capasso when the museum mounted a retrospective of her work in 1998.Casdin-Silver was part of a tradition of Boston-area artists — including Harold Edgerton, Berenice Abbott and, today, the Collision Collective — who push science toward art. For her, techno razzle-dazzle was a means to an end. “A lot of people use light to get technical effects,” she told me last year. “That was never my mission. My mission was to help women grow in every way — psychologically, sociologically, and in belief in themselves.” This feminism helped drive her work of the past two decades, which focused on coming to terms with and celebrating aging and the body, and particularly aging human female bodies in all their imperfections.
