GREG COOK

Photos: Bread and Puppet Theater

GREG COOK — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 18:01:22 GMT

Photographs from Bread and Puppet performances in Vermont

This week, thePhoenix.com art critic Greg Cook visits Glover, Vermont to report on Peter Schumann, 74, "one of America's greatest living artists," who is stepping down as the director of the long-running Bread and Puppet Theater, whose mixture of papier-mache, populist angst, and radical politics have been a staple of New England folk culture since the 1960s. Below are Cook's photographs of Schumann and his troupe in action.

Peter Schumann on stilts. His Bread and Puppet Theater is about sustainable, communal living, about redemption and acceptance — while also being a strict hierarchy devoted to producing Schumann’s vision. In recent years, Schumann has said he wasn’t concerned about what happened to the theater after he retired or passed on — that it was papier-mâché, not built to last. But he’s now decided that he must consider the people who have helped him achieve his vision. Over the past winter, he began talks with his family and Bread and Puppet’s inner circle about maybe perpetuating the theater’s museum, archive, print shop, Vermont performance spaces, and perhaps even some sort of repertory of shows.
Photo credit: Greg Cook

The Gadfly

GREG COOK — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:45:08 GMT

Bread and Puppet Theater founder Peter Schumann is a national treasure. Maybe that’s why George W. Bush wants to bury him.
Nestled in the verdant mountain valley of Glover, Vermont, way up in the northern part of the state, is a farm of rolling meadows, pine forests, and gray barns, all under vast skies.

DADDY LONG LEGS: Peter Schumann, 74, is the father/founder of Bread and Puppet Theater, and is one of America’s greatest living artists.

Nestled in the verdant mountain valley of Glover, Vermont, way up in the northern part of the state, is a farm of rolling meadows, pine forests, and gray barns, all under vast skies. It’s the home base of Bread and Puppet Theater, the landmark political troupe that has been pricking US presidents and policies with a unique brand of street theater since John F. Kennedy was in office. The theater has been resurgent since George W. Bush took the reigns in 2000, so I ask founder Peter Schumann, now that the ghastly Bush era is mercifully lurching to its end, what’s next? “To protest the new era that’s coming after the Bush era,” he says in his native German accent, “which is the same era as the Bush era.”

Schumann warns of a continuing era of gluttonous, bullying American consumerism, no matter who sits in the Oval Office. “It’s the sad late stages of this form of capitalism that can’t possibly be longer with us,” he says. “That will kill us for sure. . . . It just doesn’t work.” And he dismisses the notion that the advisors to a potential Barack Obama administration would be much different: “The same old mass murderers that were responsible for incredible events in this world like East Timor or the starvation of the Iraqis during the [’90s] blockade.”

Photos: Bread and Puppet performances in Vermont. By Greg Cook.

Such fiery rhetoric is evidence of the continuing radicalism of a theater born in New York in 1962, when the fledgling experimental troupe made its name protesting the Vietnam War with papier-mâché masks and giant puppets. Many imagine that’s where the theater ended. Others know it’s still active, but write it off as a quaint hippie relic.

Perhaps that’s because Bread and Puppet pulled itself off the art world’s radar by relocating to Vermont in 1970, far from major theaters and galleries. It pursued a rigorous but populist “cheap art,” the most magnificent expression of which was an annual epic outdoor summer pageant featuring casts of hundreds and audiences of tens of thousands at the Glover farm. This single giant weekend extravaganza was discontinued in 1998 — the crowds grew unmanageable and that year a man was killed in a fight — but since then, the theater has presented an annual series of smaller shows on summer weekends. Many in New England grew up seeing the performances, but often, upon reaching adulthood, came to dismiss them as fluff for children.

A history of violence

GREG COOK — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:36:20 GMT

Ron Pownall’s photos of the ’68 Democratic Convention
It was August 28, 1968, and Ron Pownall could feel the storm brewing as he arrived at a Vietnam War protest during the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

THE FACE OF A NATION? Mayor Daley’s finest assemble.

“The Whole World Was Watching: Images From The 1968 Chicago Riots” | Panopticon Gallery, Hotel Commonwealth, 502 Comm Ave, Boston | Through October 6

It was August 28, 1968, and Ron Pownall could feel the storm brewing as he arrived at a Vietnam War protest during the Democratic Convention in Chicago: “The police were chomping at the bit to bust some butts. It was in the air, palpable tension all day.” That afternoon and night it exploded in what a national commission later declared a “police riot.”

Twenty-five of his photos of that day — 40 years ago today — are on view at Panopticon Gallery in “The Whole World Was Watching.” (The title alludes to the demonstrators’ chanting of “The whole world is watching” as the violence was filmed by television news cameras and broadcast around the world.) The anniversary coincides with this week’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, as we look again to replace a Texas president who led the nation into an ill-considered war.

Pownall, who lives in Weston, is best known as a rock-and-roll photographer. (Three of his music photos — one a shot of Jimi Hendrix — are featured here.) His finest stuff freezes rockers in mid motion, in hot, sexy, ecstatic instants. He began photographing big concerts in ’68, when he was 21. That same year, he landed a summer job photographing for the Chicago Tribune.

On Wednesday August 28, the Tribune sent Pownall out with a 35mm Nikon F to photograph a rally that was trying to draft Ted Kennedy to run for president. Kennedy announced he wasn’t interested, whereupon Pownall called the newspaper from a pay phone and was sent downtown to Grant Park to check out the anti-war rally.

“As long as I am mayor,” Chicago’s Richard J. Daley had vowed more than once in the run-up to the convention, “there will be law and order in Chicago.” Daley marshaled 25,000 armed police, National Guard, and security men against an estimated 5000 protesters throughout the city.

Pownall arrived at the park around two in the afternoon. He photographed dozens of Chicago police assembling. He photographed National Guard troops with rifles arriving by truck, panning his camera to follow the movement of the vehicle, subtly blurring a crowd of protesters in front and trees behind while keeping the ominous truck in focus, thereby drawing our attention to it.

Street art

GREG COOK — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:47:51 GMT

Boston’s Caribbean Carnival at 35
The exhibit’s 37 color photos from 2005 to 2007, plus three plumed headdresses, serve as an appetizer for the Carnival, which celebrates its 35th anniversary this month.

QUEEN, WARRIOR, SHOWGIRL: Smith’s subject matter outshines his technique, radiating
megawatts of color and fabulousness and sexy heat.

“Michael C. Smith: Streets of Color” | Marran Gallery, Lesley University, 47 Oxford St, Cambridge | Through August 30

Slideshow: Michael C. Smith’s Carnival photography

The battery powering Michael C. Smith’s “Streets of Color” photography exhibit at Lesley University — and electrifying its subject, Boston’s Caribbean Carnival — is spectacle.

In one photo, the queen of a mas (as in masquerade) band grooves down a street during the Carnival parade. Her swaying hands up, a smile across her face, she’s wearing an orange outfit, with gold boots, and giant green and orange wings and red plumes. Another shot shows a mas-band king as a riveting dream in black and gold, trailing great green flags, with green heads sprouting from the end of curving arms on his costume, and three lion heads scowling down from a pole. King and queen costumes rise as much as 15 feet tall — so big that they’re built as wheeled carts that hitch to the performers.

The exhibit’s 37 color photos from 2005 to 2007, plus three plumed headdresses, serve as an appetizer for the Carnival, which celebrates its 35th anniversary this month. The main event, the Carnival parade on August 23, offers streams of vividly costumed, scantily clad masqueraders shaking their booties to DJs and steel-drum bands playing soca and calypso plus some spooge, reggae, salsa, and zouk.

Smith, who lives in Milton, has photographed the festival since 1983. He’s an electronics engineer who grew up in Trinidad before moving to Boston in 1977. He’s served on the event’s organizing committee, the Caribbean-American Carnival Association of Boston.

Here he presents photos of costume designers paired with shots of their sketches, images of teams of dancers, a shot of a girl with her face painted with pink and orange butterfly wings. His best photo is a monumental shot of a monumental woman in a red bikini, beaded epaulets, and a crown decorated with orange plumes, red pompons, and peacock feathers. An army of similarly dazzling women follow behind. Smith photographs their leader from below, giving her an epic look — part queen, part warrior, part showgirl.

No sex, please, it's Boston?

GREG COOK — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:02:44 GMT

Nicholas Hlobo tones it down at the ICA
It’s a big, curious, floating object, a leaping whale, a flying squash, a makeshift anatomy display, with a bit of carnival atmosphere.

THOBA, UTSALE UMNXEBA When he finished his performance, it seemed Hlobo could use a hug.

The South African artist Nicholas Hlobo quietly walked into the hallway at the Institute of Contemporary Art, sat down in a corner on a nest of curry bush, and put on a black headdress or crown that was connected by braided cords to plant-like suction-cup-looking things clinging to the walls. The July 29 performance, Thoba, utsale umnxeba (in Hlobo’s native Xhosa language it means “to lower onself and make a call,” or, as the wall text described it, a “gesture of respect and diplomacy”), was part of his new exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art. “It’s about the idea of communication,” Hlobo says of his act when I telephone the next day. “I was trying to make some sense of the space and the idea of the space, the museum, the gallery, the location of the museum, the culture — the culture is almost foreign to me.”

He sat on the circular nest and fussed for a long while with the hat, adjusting its fit over his dreadlocks, shifting the red tassels on the side, and pulling on his goatee. Then he settled into a long silent sit, seeming to meditate, eyes closed and then open, rocking forward and then sitting upright again, repeat. VIPs arrived for the show’s opening reception, watched him for a while, then wandered into the gallery to see the rest of his art and chat.
The exhibit, “Vula zibhuqe” (which means “to turn a blind eye”), was organized by ICA associate curator Jen Mergel. The 11th in the ICA’s Momentum series, which showcases emerging artists from around the world, it features the props and the costume from Hlobo’s performance, a soft sculpture, and two “drawings” in colored satin ribbons stitched into 10-foot-wide sheets of white paper. Pink scrims, placed over ceiling lights to give the gallery a fleshy feel, make the room seem murky, underwater.

“In my works,” the 32-year-old Johannesburg resident explains, “I celebrate my identity as a South African, a gay man, a Xhosa man, which is my ethnic identity, and I also celebrate my colonial heritage.”

The best piece here is Umphanda ongazaliyo (2008), an 18-foot-long black sack made from old-rubber-tire inner tubes, with pink ribbon stitched along ribs that run from its head to tail. Veins of colored ribbon wander the surface. Pockets and protrusions grow along the sides and the bottom. Metal nozzles sprout from the skin. The whole thing dangles from the ceiling by wires. A tube tail burrows into a gallery wall, with a ring of pink fringe, and emerges on the other side as a large black “orifice” — as the wall text politely describes it.

Peabody rising

GREG COOK — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:42:21 GMT

Bold leadership and an ambitious curatorial vision have vaulted the Peabody Essex Museum into a spot among the country’s best
Could the Peabody Essex Museum be the Boston area’s most exciting art museum right now?

The Peabody Essex's atrium

Slideshow: Peabody Essex Museum exhibit highlights

Could the Peabody Essex Museum be the Boston area’s most exciting art museum right now? It’s a question nobody would have asked five or 10 years ago. But a string of excellent shows — in particular this past summer’s landmark Joseph Cornell retrospective, but also the current “Wedded Bliss” — has placed the Salem museum squarely in the same league as the Museum of Fine Arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and other top-rank museums around the country.

The transition, which Boston is only beginning to recognize, has been some 15 years in the making, including a merger, a building expansion, more exhibitions, and increasingly ambitious shows. The Cornell show, Peabody Essex chief curator Lynda Roscoe Hartigan told me this past December, “really is about signaling, in as direct a way as we could think of, that we mean business about doing work in the modern- and contemporary-art arena.”

It’s a striking transformation. The Peabody Essex evolved out of the East India Marine Society, founded in 1799 as a repository for cool stuff brought back by Salem’s China trade. In 1992, it merged with its neighbor, the Essex Institute, a locally focused antiquarian society dating back to 1821.

The new Peabody Essex Museum was the sole-surviving Enlightenment-era cabinet-of-wonders museum from the early American republic, but it felt dark, dusty, and stodgy. When Dan Monroe arrived from Oregon’s Portland Museum of Art to become director in 1993, it was a backward-looking, colonial institution concentrating on New England, Native American life, natural history, and the cultures Salem touched via the China trade.

Between 1996 and 2003, Monroe tripled the museum’s operating budget, and led a capital campaign to renovate and expand the museum, which culminated in the opening of a new Moshe Safdie–designed facility in 2003. It offered new galleries, a soaring glass atrium, and a 200-year-old merchant’s house that was shipped from China and reassembled on the museum campus.

Signs of a new curatorial vision could be detected in such exhibits as a 1997 show that mixed works by contemporary Native Americans with historical Native works from the museum’s collection. Barbara O’Brien, director of Simmons College’s Trustman Art Gallery, says a turning point came with the renovated museum’s 2003 opening exhibit, “Family Ties: International Contemporary Artists Interpret Family.” In it, freelance curator Trevor Fairbrother — a former contemporary-art curator at Boston’s MFA — assembled a “provocative” and “subtly conceived” (according to The New York Times) but accessible theme show of contemporary art by Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Kerry James Marshal, Zhang Huan, and others.

Kickstart art

GREG COOK — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:37:29 GMT

Galleries band together
The straightforwardly named Boston Contemporary Group aims “to support an environment in Boston for critically relevant contemporary art.”

After a brutal spring in which each week seemed to bring the depressing news of another Boston art outlet shuttering, a new consortium of galleries announced its formation with the launch of a Web site this past week. It was a quiet but clear signal of an effort to jumpstart the local scene.

The straightforwardly named Boston Contemporary Group aims “to support an environment in Boston for critically relevant contemporary art.” Just what that means is under discussion, but the group hopes to cultivate new clients, generate excitement about art, spur dialogue, and bring in much-needed revenue.

“We’re trying as much as possible to build a contemporary art scene in Boston,” says Russell LaMontagne of LaMontagne Gallery. He dreamed up the idea a couple months ago, and enlisted Steve Zevitas of Steven Zevitas/OSP Gallery and Camilo Alvarez of Samson Projects as co-founders. The final charter member is the not-quite-year-old Proof Gallery.

The group is so new that its members haven’t even gotten together to vet ideas yet, but proposals include joint advertising, organizing talks and studio tours, sponsoring public art, and giving out awards. Its first baby step is bostoncontemporary.org, a centralized Web site that members hope will become a hub for the arts in the Hub. The site will not only publicize the group’s own projects but also offer information about other notable area exhibits.

It is hoped that the site will manifest the foundation of a vision for the city’s art that LaMontagne is just beginning to articulate — something younger, fresher, more challenging, more conceptually oriented. Julia Hechtman, who arrived from Chicago a year ago to co-found Proof, notes that a lack of do-it-yourself spirit in Boston has people less engaged, but says, “I have a feeling that this community is really ripe for something new and something exciting.”

One might say that the founders are young (none older than 40), emerging leaders of the city’s art scene. But in fact they’ve already emerged as significant players: Alvarez through his respected four-year-old gallery; LaMontagne for formerly being co-owner of hotshot LFL Gallery in New York (he was one of the L’s) and then opening up his own Boston gallery in spring 2007; and Zevitas for his 15-year-old journal New American Paintings and his seven-year-old gallery, which he’s in the process of moving from a third-floor space inside 450 Harrison Avenue to a more prominent storefront space downstairs. The fact that 10 galleries have recently closed or reduced operations, at least temporarily, has only increased their stature.

Getting hitched

GREG COOK — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:47:37 GMT

‘Wedded Bliss’ at the Peabody Essex Museum
It's a show that stretches from va-va-voom to the solemn roots of marriage in our culture. And maybe says a bit about — if I dare be so grand — the magical, irresistible force of love.

BEAUTY REVEALED: Was Sarah Goodridge’s 1828 painting a self-portrait? And a token for
Daniel Webster?

“Wedded Bliss: The Marriage of Art and Ceremony” | Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square, Salem | Through September 14

"Peabody rising," by Greg Cook, July 25, 2008

Slideshow: Peabody Essex Museum exhibit highlights

Picture two wedding dresses. On the left is a slinky Vera Wang number from 2004. It’s a sleek, strapless couture creation in satin and silk jacquard, with white-on-white stripes that wrap around it and show off the lady’s curves. It looks like something Cat Woman would wear on her special day.

On the right is a prim, pleated, hand-sewn white cotton dress that Sarah Tate wore when she got married, probably in the 1840s, maybe in Texas. It’s as plain as the Wang dress is flashy. What’s extraordinary about it is that Tate was an African-American slave. It’s a rare surviving relic from a time when slaves could not legally wed but some owners allowed them to marry informally. Wow.

What we have here in the opening gallery of “Wedded Bliss: The Marriage of Art and Ceremony” at Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum is a show that stretches from va-va-voom to the solemn roots of marriage in our culture. And maybe says a bit about — if I dare be so grand — the magical, irresistible force of love.

Despite its cheesy title, “Wedded Bliss” is a dramatically displayed collection of fabulous stuff from the museum’s collection and lots of loans, and it’s given ballast by the scholarly recognition that weddings — as one of the ancient, common, and fundamental rituals of societies around the world, a celebration of the union of existing families and an elemental building block of communities — call forth some of humanity’s greatest artistry. The show is not so much about fine art as about the creativity that goes into gowns and crowns, ritual gifts, the ceremony’s pageantry. It’s rich territory because, of course, in many cultures weddings are events on which no expense is spared.

In the art world, there is much love of folk art, and lip service is paid to the Duchampian notion that anything can be art, but fine art still ranks higher than folk. The Peabody Essex’s definition of art is broad and non-hierarchical, so we get dresses and quilts, wedding trunks, and things like Cile Bellefleur Burbidge’s Architectural Fantasy Cake. Executed just for the show, Burbidge’s creation is an astonishing stepped tower of flowers and garlands and swans and a giant pot bursting with flowers on top, all made of stiff white icing mixed from eggs and sugar. Burbidge, who’s from Danvers, is a celebrated cake designer, but what other local museum would have the guts to put her piece in its show rather than unveiling it at the VIP reception?

Here comes trouble

GREG COOK — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:08:48 GMT

Street art pisses off neighbors, meat pisses off PETA
There’s nothing like a brouhaha to make art feel relevant. And the Boston art scene has just been blessed by two.

ART OR ADVERTISEMENT? Ron English’s Abraham Obama caused a stir when it traveled beyond
gallery walls.

Slideshow: "a politic" at Gallery XIV

There’s nothing like a brouhaha to make art feel relevant. And the Boston art scene has just been blessed by two. First, Gallery XIV caused a stir with its “a politic” show, the first thing it’s really done to turn heads since it opened last fall. Let’s hope that’s the beginning of something. Then PETA got riled about Pierre Menard’s “Meat After Meat Joy” group show. What else is new?

The Gallery XIV show has 40 artists exploring political themes. That didn’t freak anyone out. What got people in a tizzy was an appearance at the July 2 opening by New Jersey’s Ron English, who’s (in)famous for (illegally) pasting over commercial billboards with his own slogans: “Jihad is Over! (If you want it)”; “Jesus drove an SUV/Mohammad pumped his gas/The new H2 Hummer”; “Support our CEOs.” (An outdoor video screening at the gallery on July 25 will include Pedro Caravajal’s documentary POPaganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English.)

That evening, on a construction fence across the street from the gallery (with permission from the landlord), English pasted up 11 13-foot-tall reproductions of his painting Abraham Obama, which merges the features of President Lincoln with Barack’s. Guests were given smaller posters of Abraham Obama. Within hours a number of these were plastered to South End lamp posts and buildings and the front of the Boston Center for the Arts. Police were alerted. A week later, the Globe announced on its front page: “Fans’ unauthorized ad blitz draws fire.” That night, it was on the local news.

It was a marvelous hubbub given that Gallery XIV director William Kerr says he only got four complaint calls and police didn’t bother to contact the gallery. Some suspect that the whole thing was a planned stunt. Kerr says it was just overzealous fans.

As for the art, Abraham Obama is catchy, cartoony, and cute. Your mind seesaws between the twin likenesses. Each poster has a different color; that creates a rainbow of variations, and a pleasing Warhol effect. It’s not trenchant, just an advertisement saying Obama equals Lincoln.

Stop the bastards!

GREG COOK — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:30:45 GMT

African exiles get political.
If you’re unfamiliar with the history of Ethiopia, you’ll probably be lost. (Try skimming a summary before you go.)

FORCED REMOVAL: Ilona Anderson’s subjects are domestic violence, as a by-product of apartheid,
and AIDS.

“Reflections In Exile: Five Contemporary African Artists Respond To Social Injustice” | Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, 300 Walnut Ave, Boston | Through July 27

Slideshow: Reflections in Exile

In recent weeks, Chaz Maviyane-Davies has been e-mailing out broadsides again. His “graphic commentaries,” as the Zimbabwe native calls them, are vivid digital posters indicting Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, as a craven thug and the international response as feckless.

Zimbabwe has been riven by violence since opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai won the first round of a presidential election in March. Tsvangirai dropped out of the June 27 runoff vote because of violent physical attacks on his supporters. On July 1, the African Union called for a government of national unity in Zimbabwe to heal the nation’s political wounds. Maviyane-Davies’s response: flies crawling over a cut in a slab of red meat shaped like Africa, with, across the top, “Another slice of African unity.”

Eight earlier posters are the highlight of “Reflections in Exile: Five Contemporary African Artists Respond to Social Injustice” at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury. The show collects work by five immigrants, four of them now living in Greater Boston, the fifth a former MassArt student.

Maviyane-Davies left his homeland in 2001. “It was because I was doing those commentaries that I had to leave for my own safety,” he tells me. He had been designing graphics promoting social justice for women’s and environmental groups and other nongovernmental organizations. During the run-up to the 2000 referendum vote and parliamentary elections, he’d spend nights designing one or two graphic commentaries and then e-mailing them to some 500 people. They are sharply composed, boiling big issues down to a few visceral visual metaphors.

In Flag, the red stripes of Zimbabwe’s flag drip down like blood. DRC, a photographic-looking image of diamonds and blood balanced on a scale, charges that Mugabe sent troops to fight in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s civil war because Zimbabwe was profiting from diamond mining there. Medals of Dishonor uses an image of silvery skull medals pinned to the breast of a green military uniform coat to criticize the Zimbabwe military’s fealty to Mugabe.

“I put them on the Internet, and anyone that could use them could use them,” he says. “There were times when I did worry about the risk. But as far as I’m concerned, everybody’s got to do something.”

Road trips

GREG COOK — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:09:08 GMT

Luisa does Isabella in China, Gohlke does America
In the fall of 1883, Isabella Stewart Gardner — more than a decade before she would develop her museum on Boston’s Fenway — traveled to China.

DREAMSCAPE: Rabbia creates a montage of images from Mrs. Gardner’s Chinese scrapbook
intercut with her own video and animation.

“Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008” |
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 280 The Fenway, Boston | Through September 26

“Accommodating Nature: The Photographs Of Frank Gohlke” |
Addison Gallery, Phillips Academy, 180 Main St, Andover | Through July 13

In the fall of 1883, Isabella Stewart Gardner — more than a decade before she would develop her museum on Boston’s Fenway — traveled to China. As she toured Shanghai and Beijing, Hong Kong, Canton, and Macao, she purchased photographs from local photographers of sights she’d seen as well as of people and things she hadn’t. She pasted all these sepia-toned pictures into a scrapbook, and that became a spark of inspiration when Luisa Rabbia was an artist-in-residence at the Gardner Museum last summer. The result is “Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008,” in which the Italian-raised, Brooklyn-based 37-year-old transforms Gardner’s old travel photos into a dream journey.

Rabbia’s 27-minute video, which is now on view at the museum along with Gardner’s scrapbook, begins (and also ends) with an image from the cover of the scrapbook before proceeding in one long, leisurely pan past Gardner’s photos of temples, pagodas, and palaces. Rabbia cuts out sections and inserts her own video (gliding birds, billowing clouds, rolling waters, waving branches, fire) and bits of animation.

Water floods a lavishly appointed room (the home of a British regional governor). A whirlpool (perhaps the drain of a bath) spins in the center of a harbor. A pair of men hold guitar-like stringed instruments. Growing branches of a tree burn. Sculptures of dragons hold a globe in an astrological garden. The photos are organized not by chronology or geography but by the way one flows visually into the next, as in the disjointed order of memories.

Rabbia’s primary addition is blue lines that snake across the ground, wiggling around feet and landscapes and buildings, sometimes sprouting upward. She sees them as trees and roots. “The tree is a collection of time in itself, and roots are an expression of that,” she tells me at the museum. “And these roots have rings all around which are like the rings of time past. It’s a link from the past to the present.”

Interview: The DeCordova’s new director holds forth

GREG COOK — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:47:11 GMT

Voice of Kois
Dennis Kois (rhymes with voice) began work as the new executive director of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln on June 2.

Dennis Kois (rhymes with voice) began work as the new executive director of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln on June 2. The 38-year-old Milwaukee native has worked as an exhibition, print, and Web designer at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian, and most recently he was executive director for a year and a half at the Grace Museum — a combo art, history, and children’s museum in Abilene, Texas. We spoke about his hopes to make DeCordova a major player in sculpture, adapt its New England focus, and change the building to showcase better the work it presents. Which is why fundraising will be a chief concern.

What are your plans?
DeCordova’s got some incredible strengths, obviously, that I think need to be maximized and leveraged in some different ways from what it’s been doing. Particularly the sculpture park is a resource that nobody in the immediate region has something quite like. We need to build more of our identity around sculpture and the sculpture park. I think in some ways it’s one of the few areas in the museum world left where a museum still could take a leadership position. That said, sculpture is hugely expensive, outdoor sculpture in particular — hugely expensive, hugely time-consuming, and labor-intensive to do. So it’s going to require a leveraging of our fundraising, a leveraging and growth of our capabilities and our staff on every level.

One of the things the DeCordova does well is attract a big crowd of art people to its openings.
I agree. I think that raises the question of where we exist in the range of museums as far as supporting and having a relationship to a local community — “local” meaning Boston-area — and regional community, meaning New England. Which is actually written in as part of our mission. Suffice to say it’s clear that that’s a core part of our identity. On the flip side, in some ways I think it’s also been explored on a very limited basis. We haven’t made ourselves a center for art in Boston, or a center for art life in Boston, in a way that we could. Some of it may come down to other types of programming, making connections between local artists and national-level artists. We may also bring in shows that are really interesting relative to what’s happening here — national shows from other institutions, shows that we organize. I think ultimately it needs to become a much more holistic view of how we relate to local and regional arts.

Arts and science

GREG COOK — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:00:36 GMT

Cal Lane’s dazzling metalwork and Harriet Casdin-Silver’s holograms
The power of Casdin-Silver’s work was in her eye for compelling bodies and their fleshy, otherworldly presence in her holograms.

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.

The folk and the fine

GREG COOK — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:09:07 GMT

‘Keepers of Tradition’ and Alexis Rockman
Here in Massachusetts, our old ways tend to reside in ethnic islands and pockets. They may be famous on their street or in their neighborhood or town, but they’re often unheard of outside it.

MULTI-WATERSPOUT The microcosmic gestures of paint in Rockman’s work speak to the grand
forces he’s depicting.

“Keepers of Tradition: Art and FolkHeritage in Massachusetts” | National Heritage Museum, 33 Marrett Road, Lexington | Through February 8, 2009

“Alexis Rockman: The Weight of Air” | Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 415 South St, Waltham | Through July 27

There is always a tension between the old ways and the new. And maybe never more so than in a culture like ours, an immigrant society based on getting up and leaving the old behind, but still homesick. We’re a nation that’s by turns a melting pot in which the old ways dissolve into the new and a crazy quilt of one tradition bluntly stitched to the next.

Here in Massachusetts, our old ways tend to reside in ethnic islands and pockets. They may be famous on their street or in their neighborhood or town, but they’re often unheard of outside it. So part of the thrill of “Keepers of Tradition: Art and Folk Heritage in Massachusetts” at Lexington’s National Heritage Museum is the news it brings of magic that’s close at hand but under the radar.

“Keepers of Tradition” collects work by 70 artists from across the state: Armenian lacework; African mud cloth; Puerto Rican masks; Cambodian dance; Native American, English, and colonial-style American ceramics; pottery; baskets; musical instruments; tin men; a fieldstone wall; a cow weathervane; scrimshaw; ship models. A pieced quilt by Sally Palmer Field of Chelmsford has 176 squares, each one with a different star or leaf pattern. The autumn browns make it seem sedate, but it’s a tour-de-force of design and quilting. Thomas Matsuda of Conway carves a traditional Japanese Buddhist Bodhisattva out of wood. His technique is crisp and neat, as if he’d made the essential cuts and not one more.

Curated by state folklorist Maggie Holtzberg and organized by the museum (which is operated by the Masons) and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, “Keepers of Tradition” is the first exhibition to come out of the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Folk Arts & Heritage Program, which began in 1999 with financial help from the National Endowment for the Arts and the goal of ferreting out and documenting folk artists and their work across the state. (The whole show is archived atwww.massfolkarts.org.) The program picks up the pieces of a state project that was begun in the late 1980s and then fell apart in the early ’90s, a casualty of one of our budget crises. It has since gone on to give grants to folk artists as well as pay them to train apprentices. It’s the sort of project that makes you proud of your government.

Fringe festival

GREG COOK — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:01:38 GMT

Galleries off the beaten path
Off the beaten path, the fringes of Boston's gallery scene are seeing new development, and even expansion.

LUCY Lucy Beecher Nelson’s women are life-size, so they feel curiously present.

All the talk in Boston’s gallery scene over the past few months has been about the big upheaval. Nine galleries have announced plans to close or reduce operations: Allston Skirt, Bernard Toale, Space Other, Rhys, Judy Ann Goldman, Pepper, MPG Contemporary, artSPACE@16, and Julie Chae. Nine is a lot — and the list includes several of Boston’s most respected galleries.

All but one of these reside in the Newbury Street or Harrison Avenue gallery districts, both which are also seeing a musical chairs of location changes. But off the beaten path, the fringes of the scene are seeing new development, and even expansion. In these sort-of-out-of-the-spotlight corners, new ideas often arise. Last week I went to see some of what’s going on.

AXIOM GALLERY, which opened in Cambridge in 2006 and moved to Jamaica Plain in 2007, is offering one of most satisfying new-media shows I’ve seen around here in a while: “From the Electric Studio: Work by Artists from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design” (141 Green Street; through June 21). There’s a handful of standout new-media artists around Boston — Denise Marika and Brian Knep among them — but most new-media exhibitions are like May’s group show of the Collision Collective at Axiom: promising in their bubbling inventiveness, but always in such a state of becoming (or breaking down) that you wonder whether they’ll ever get somewhere. “From the Electric Studio,” on the other hand, offers works developed in MassArt’s “Electronic Projects for Artists” class, and it favors the type of new-media art I find most intriguing — crackpot-invention stuff.

Many the 11 artists combine intriguing gizmos with nods to larger subjects. Kristen Kyper’s stuffed blue lump of a doll slowly, jitteringly moves its head to focus on the people watching it. Kyper also presents a head harness with hooks for the corners of your mouth to force you to smile. Her To Feel What You Feel is a set of metal cuffs for two people to wear; the cuffs monitor the wearer’s pulse and tap it out on the other person’s wrist. The pieces are by turns endearing and creepy — they grope toward emotional connection, but they don’t mind if they get there by force. David Thacker’s His Long Illness is a table with a lamp and five pill bottles on top. The bottles glow and the table hums, and then the bottles dim and the table quiets as you get close. It’s an affecting — if rather simple — metaphor for illness and loss.

The illusionist

GREG COOK — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:45:37 GMT

Anish Kapoor at the ICA
Kapoor’s work looks like nothing in reproduction; you have to experience it in person to get it.

S-CURVE Kapoor evokes the sublime by deploying the sleight-of-hand and spectacle of carnival fun
houses and science-fiction special effects.

Slideshow: Images from "Anish Kapoor: Past, Present, Future."

"Kapoor speaks," by Greg Cook

“Anish Kapoor: Past, Present, Future” at the Institute of Contemporary Art | 100 Northern Ave, Boston | Through September 7

Over the winter, I made my third or fourth pilgrimage to Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Chicago. People there have affectionately nicknamed it the “Bean” because it resembles a giant floating bean of liquid mercury that’s drifted down into the middle of the downtown plaza from outer space. Bemused crowds stand around and stare and snap photos and giggle.

The 2004 sculpture is Kapoor’s masterpiece, and one of the best public sculptures in the country. It’s a metaphorical gateway arch to the city, tall enough for crowds of people to walk under. Like the best public art, it identifies and then embodies the meaning of its location — in this case a park that showcases the city’s skyline to one side and its lake shore on the other. The sculpture’s polished steel surface mirrors and frames and swallows these vistas, and the people standing around it, like, as a friend says, a giant snow globe turned inside out. The roof inside is concave and operates like a funhouse mirror, warping the reflections of the people underneath and seeming to funnel up into some portal to another dimension.

“The modernist tradition in form is mostly phallic, mostly upward and onward, and it leads to the rocket and the spaceship,” the London artist told me at the Institute of Contemporary Art last week, where “Anish Kapoor: Past, Present, Future,” which is billed as his first major US survey in 15 years, opened on Friday. “I have a feeling that the truly modern — meaning modern of today — the ultramodern form is inside out. And I’m trying to look for it. I try to look for inside-out forms. If one could say there’s a shape to the Internet, I’d say it was inside out. Or rather, involuting.”

The 14 works here — 10 of which, according to the ICA, have never been exhibited in this country before — lay out Kapoor’s primary motifs: velvety pigment-covered geometric and architectural forms, which he focused on from the late ’70s to the mid ’80s; voids or black holes, which became a focus in the mid ’80s; magic mirrors and resin blocks with Rorschach-test bubbles trapped inside, which enter his work in the mid ’90s; and big blobs of sticky red gunk that he’s produced this decade. They’re not as astonishing as the Chicago sculpture (what could be?) but they’re quite fetching.

Toy stories

GREG COOK — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In the galleries, artists keep their distance
Tokyo photographer Noaki Honjo turns Japanese metropolises into adorable li’l things.

TOKYO, JAPAN (TAXI STAND) Naoki Honjo’s photographs at the Bernard Toale turn the real world into a toy.

Tokyo photographer NOAKI HONJO turns Japanese metropolises into adorable li’l things. In his show at Bernard Toale Gallery (50 Harrison Avenue, Boston), which is up through June 28, camera trickery makes a bullet train, an amusement park, a giant swimming pool, and a baseball field at night look like cute models or toys. A line of taxis resembles Matchbox cars.

So many people are using this gimmick that it’s acquired a dreadfully dull name, “tilt-shift miniature faking,” because it involves tampering with the tilt of the lens in relation to the film — though people also fake it with digital editing. (In a related development, other photographers are shooting models to make them look like real scenes.) Usually this technique creates a band in focus across the image while the rest of the scene falls into sweet fuzziness. That shallow zone of focus combined with elevated views makes it seem you’re looking down on a dreamy model train set populated by little plastic figurines.

It’s intriguing to see the world from a bird’s-eye or God’s-eye or Google Earth view, to note how it’s organized, to recognize patterns. But why is it so charming to imagine the world as a toy? There’s nostalgia in it, for sure. Maybe it makes life feel more manageable?

Also up through June 28 at the Toale are photographs by Brookline’s ABELARDO MORELL, one of the region’s most prominent artists. He’s long explored the nature of representation and perception; here that takes the form of close-up details of paintings, and shots of ink drawings on glass plates that resemble aerial views of continents. Morell is best known for astonishing black-and-white shots inside rooms that have been turned into giant pinhole cameras, so that the scenery outside projects upside down across the interior. They feel like the rooms’ memories made manifest. In the past few years, he’s begun making color versions as well as versions in which he flips the projected image upright. This is the first time they’ve appeared in a Boston gallery. The four here are good, but not as vivid as his past black-and-white shots. Those were animated by a dramatic range of dark to light, whereas these color pictures are more mellow. And with the projected images right side up, they don’t seem quite so wonderfully otherworldly.

Balls

GREG COOK — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:45:10 GMT

Interview: Stefan Sagmeister goes the limit
Design geeks bow before the 45-year-old Austrian-born, New York–based designer’s witty topographical experiments and bad-ass stunts.

You may not know Stefan Sagmeister’s name, but you’ll likely recognize his firm’s lion design for the Rolling Stones’ 1997 album Bridges to Babylon, as well as album covers for Lou Reed, Talking Heads, and Aerosmith. Design geeks bow before the 45-year-old Austrian-born, New York–based designer’s witty topographical experiments and bad-ass stunts — a poster for a talk he gave in 1999 was a photo of all the event info carved into his chest. His new book, Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far (Abrams), collects a series of billboards, magazine spreads, and short videos in which musings from his diary — “drugs are fun in the beginning but become a drag later on,” “trying to look good limits my life,” “assuming is stifling” — were spelled out in flowers, yellow “caution” tape, drink glasses at a party, and chopped-up hotdogs.

What was it like to work with Talking Heads, the Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, and Aerosmith?
All completely different. Aerosmith was by far the most difficult. The worst job I’ve ever done in my life. It had nothing to do with the band. It was much involved with the management at the label. The one-sentence version would be: I’d rather do another 10 posters where I have to cut my breast up than do another Aerosmith CD.

Which band were you most intimidated to work with?
Definitely the Stones. Mick Jagger is very very much in charge of these things. He was very marketing oriented. Surprisingly. He talks very much like a CEO, you know, there was “synergy.” He actually didn’t care that much about the CD cover itself, he much more cared that a symbol would be created on that cover that would look good on baseball hats. Because the Stones actually are — and it’s been written many times, but I never quite believed it — it’s truly a corporation. They also make much much much more money, in magnitudes, selling merchandise than in selling music.

Tell me about cutting the balls off the Stones' Bridges to Babylon lion.
We presented to Jagger a lion that was not specified, but it had no balls. And he suggested why don’t we put a big pair of balls on there. And I in my unbelievable stupidity, and just coming out of the Aerosmith disaster, where we had to paint little bathing suits on tiny snake creatures that were on page 12 of the booklet because Wal-Mart wouldn’t take them if they had itsy bitsy nipples showing. But we’re talking about things you could only see with a loupe. I said to Jagger, well, the record company’s only going to make us cut them off anyway, why even go through the trouble? And he understood that. But I, of course, could have slapped myself. Because that’s exactly the way bad work is made. You have one bad experience and you think that’s how it’s going to be.

Flash without fire

GREG COOK — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:47:41 GMT

Is New England better than the DeCordova’s Annual Exhibition?
The aim of the DeCordova Museum’s Annual Exhibition is to round up “some of the most interesting and visually eloquent” New England artists.

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 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition” | DeCordova Museum, 51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln | Through August 17

Slideshow: Images from the 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition

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.”

Fact and fantasy

GREG COOK — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:52:08 GMT

Walid Raad’s installations seek the “truth”
Walid Raad’s installation feels like a Borgesian detective story in which truth is elusive, and cities themselves shiver with post-traumatic stress disorder.

EVIDENCE? Raad/Boueri’s I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again.

“We Can Make Rain but No One Came To Ask” | Brown University’s Bell Gallery, 64 College St, Providence, Through May 25

Walid Raad’s installation, We Can Make Rain but No One Came To Ask, at Brown University’s Bell Gallery, feels like a Borgesian detective story in which truth is elusive, and cities themselves shiver with post-traumatic stress disorder.

For several years, the Lebanese-born New York-based artist has made art about the Lebanese Civil War of 1975 to 1991. This installation, Raad writes, focuses on a single car bombing in Beirut in 1986. The gallery is filled with five long tables, with 44 sheets of paper laid atop them like evidence. A fractured, impressionistic 17-minute video projected on a wall of the gallery seems to cover some of the same territory.

“My photographs [of Beirut] began to manifest colors and lines that were, at times, significantly different from the ones available to my eyes,” Raad writes in a group of pages that depict buildings mirrored, turned upside down, cut-up, and blurred. “I came to believe that something in . . . the time and space of the [bombed] neighborhood may have been affected not only by the 1986 detonation but also by every other war, skirmish, and assault in Lebanon since 1975 . . . I decided to print my photographs even if I still doubted what I was seeing in them.”

That doubt between fact and fantasy is central to Raad’s project. Working in his own name or seeming to collect information about the Lebanese civil war under the banner of his fictitious foundation, the Atlas Group, Raad mixes facts and invented tales to toy with the nature of history, of memory, of rumor, of evidence. One message is, perhaps, that history is a slippery thing, and “truth” changes depending on who’s telling the story.

Each set of papers offers a page or so of text and then images stripped across the top of the rest of the sheets. The small type is difficult to read, making the already dry text somewhat tedious. Raad tallies bombing data, discusses the fear the attacks inspired, insists the motives and culprits can be deciphered, identifies people allegedly behind the attacks, and adds that he’s surprised that no one tried to piece it together before. Perfunctory pictures show bomb damage diagrams and photos of bodies on the ground, rescue crews, and smoke rising from buildings.