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Museum And Gallery

Good behavior

As is so often the case with group shows that are not organized by theme or in any other formal way, the big and the splashy tend to dominate while the small and the subtle go overlooked. The curators appear to have addressed that issue: if the work’s small, there’s an abundance of it. More disappointing is the confined emotional range of much of this year’s Annual. I had the sense of being in a primary-school classroom on parents’ night. An overarching tidiness and look-what-we’ve-done formality told me I was there to admire, not engage. Little that was gritty or tense or raw — including Jon Sarkin’s room chock full of R. Crumb–like graffiti-influenced drawings (too many names of modern masters written beside the druggy cartoons) — got past the decision makers. We’re left with art by and for the well-behaved.

That said, a few renegades hint at an edgy underside. Joe Johnson looks down from the roofs of city buildings to take 40-by-40-inch color photographs. He’s set himself a difficult and interesting task: to shoot architecture that’s charged by human presence without including much in the way of people. He succeeds by taking nighttime photos of apartment complexes without a flash, so that whatever light we see suggests occupancy. Ten Windows, 2004 is both his most populated picture — there’s a probable body in one window, a possible body part in another, and, of all things, a miniature skeleton on the ledge of a third — and his most captivating. He makes us shameless voyeurs, not only by goading us with the nebulous human elements we have to struggle to identify and make sense of (who keeps a skeleton on the other side of a drawn shade?) but also by messing with our expectations. The title implies a predictable grid formation and uniformity, not to mention the likelihood of a visible building. Yet by cropping the photo as he has and by angling the camera to catch an exterior wall perpendicular to the one we face, he’s ensured that no two windows will measure in identically. And the building itself exists only as pure blackness. Ten Windows is an arresting marriage of proximity and distance, intimacy and alienation, symmetry and disruption.