Adam and Eve mannequins and dinosaurs wander under an arch of orange trees. A human-ape hybrid couple wander a desert landscape, beyond an arch of skulls. American troops patrol. Then a monster — perhaps the Beast from the Book of Revelation — flaps into the center panel. It has a leopard head, naked woman’s breasts, and skulls.
Lots of artists have been mining the Internet for material. Often the result is an aimless jumble that simply reflects the Web’s chaos back at us. But Empyrean is one of the rare Internet-inspired pieces with rich, complex, coherent form. Each time I watched it, I found new images, new layers, new connections. All this Apocalyptic stuff feels somewhat easy and reductive, however. Apocalyptic fervor has been one of humanity’s favorite pastimes for ages. What makes our version special? But dreaming of the Apocalypse is always fun. Here it’s a thrilling, seductive, action-packed romp.
The video’s final section opens on a bomb-blasted car. The wreck is flanked by rubble and giant concrete walls resembling the barrier erected in recent years between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Apache helicopters hover. A tank rumbles past followed by a guy driving an ox cart. A man in the orange garb of Guantánamo prisoners waves. Another man holds up his purple-stained finger, indicating he voted in Iraqi elections. After six minutes, the videos end with a white-out and timpani and a feeling of relief. And then they begin again.
PLACEBO: Is González-Torres’s piece meant to comfort, or to confront? |
| Cliff Evans: Empyrean | Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 280 The Fenway, Boston | Through January 13 | Felix González-Torres: Untitled (Placebo — Landscape For Roni) | Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge | Through January 4 |
Félix González-Torres’s 1993 sculpture Untitled (Placebo — Landscape for Roni), a single-work exhibition in the lobby gallery of Harvard’s Carpenter Center, is a floor-filling sea of hard candy in gold wrappers.González-Torres, a Cuban-born, Puerto Rican–raised, New York conceptualist minimalist sculptor who died of AIDS at age 38 in January 1996, provided few instructions for how the work was to be installed: an “endless supply” of candy in gold wrappers, arrange it however you want, visitors can take pieces, but the gallery must replenish them so that it maintains a weight of about 1200 pounds. He liked leaving things open to interpretation.
Helen Molesworth, contemporary art curator for the Harvard Art Museums, emptied out the room and laid the candy in a large rectangle between a pair of office doors at one end and a built-in concrete bench at the other. The shape, for her, was dictated by the width of the bench and the distance between the bench and the office wall, all from Le Corbusier’s original 1963 stark modernist design of the building.
The candy sparkles under the gallery lights. And you notice the contrast between the gold wrappers and the red office wall. If you try one of the candies, you find they’re coffee-flavored. The taste lingers in your mouth. It’s easy to take it all in with a quick glance and feel as if you were done.
