Is New England better than the DeCordova’s Annual Exhibition?
By GREG COOK | May 13, 2008
VENUS: Yana Payusova’s magic-realist cartoons are finely rendered, but her characters, all with the same exaggerated eyeshadow and bags under their eyes, are, well, repulsive. |
The aim of the DeCordova Museum’s Annual Exhibition is to round up “some of the most interesting and visually eloquent” New England artists. If that’s what the DeCordova’s Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Nick Capasso, Dina Deitsch, and Kate Dempsey have actually found in the 11 individual artists and one collective they’re featuring in the 2008 edition, the result is a depressing report of the mostly bland state of art here.You’d think an exception would be the Boston collective the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, which by local curatorial and critical consensus (including me) is making some of the best art here these days. But those folks’ brand of conceptual art, which seems so funny and rascally and trenchant in tall tales passed by word of mouth and Web sites, falls flat here. Their formats suffer in a gallery. Shelves are lined with copies of the Institute’s The New American Dictionary: Interactive Security/Fear Edition, which professes to redefine the vocabulary of the “War on Terror.” It’s an acid satire of the Bush administration’s penchant for redefining terms like “torture” until they’re meaningless. But books don’t work well in art galleries, and if you crack these open, you’ll find that most of the words have been left with blank boxes for you to create your own definition. It’s an anti-climax.
A modest video shows Instituters, dressed in their trademark research lab coats, carrying piles of white boxes labeled “unmarked package” around Chicago last May in an absurdist quest to interview people about their post-9/11 fears, from lack of money to urban crime to terrorism. “I feel like somebody’s trying to make me feel more scared,” says one woman. The piece that works best as a gallery object is a Soviet-propaganda-style poster in which the Institute offers to transfer its patriotism to any interested foreign buyer in exchange for plane tickets to the buyer’s country and logistical costs. The transaction requires the parties to share an American drink and a local drink, repeating “those drinks until we all are drunk. At that point the transfer of patriotism will be complete.”
Swampscott’s Mitchel Ahern also addresses “War on Terror” lingo in linoleum-block-printed banners in the stairwell running from the lobby to the second floor. The text-based banners resemble letterpress prints or an ambitious A.C. Moore stamp-pad project. “I was dreaming of concentration camps.” “Don’t vote — you may be committing fraud.” “Mission Accomplished.” “Blue states secede.” “Free Martha ([Stewart].” The messages are not novel, but they are charmingly cheeky. A pair of scrolls reproducing texts from versions of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road fill a narrow three-story-tall wall. They’re just illustrations, but if you’re a fan of the book, they’re appealing ones.
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Time after time, Wild things, Built to move, More 
- Time after time
The DeCordova Annual has been going strong since 1989, indefatigably showcasing work by New England artists chosen each year for the quality of their individual work.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Locomotion commotion
The DeCordova Museum’s “Trainscape: Installation Art for Model Railroads” is a great, wild, flawed 14-artist circus.
- 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.
- People get ready
Fourteen New England artists/artist teams hook up to produce a variety of interconnecting installations.
- My Baby Shot Me Down
“Abstract painting” is a broad historical category that takes in everything from the utopian spiritual and formal purity of the early decades of the 20th century to the macho of the purely visual as championed by Clement Greenberg later in that century.
- Art beef
Bostonians are plenty familiar with the collaborative video works of choreographer Ann Carlson and video-installation artist Mary Ellen Strom, but the DeCordova is the site of their first major museum show.
- Less
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