rite of spring

Some remarks on the DeCordova Annual:

As I noted already, overall the quality is pretty good.  While every viewer will have their own favorites, I certainly didn’t feel any of the work was embarassing or infuriating.  I’ve mentioned Lalla Essaydi, about whom Gregg and Marja-Leena have more to say as well.  She’s shown (recently) at the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston, as well as in New York and Chicago.  Her photographs of Muslim women covered in decorative Arabic script were large, close to life-size, and eloquently alluded to the harshness and beauty of the North African climate and its culture.  The quiet eloquence of Converging Territories #21, in which four women in ascending (from right to left, as in Arabic script) order of (apparent) age and concealment look out at the viewer, impressed me the most.  It was especially hard to turn away from the final figure, effaced to the point of blending in with the background, her gaze lost to ours by an impenetrable barrier.  In its absence, the power and pathos of her presence resonated that much more.  As I've said before, I expect to see and hear a lot more about Essaydi’s work as time goes on.

I had arrived at the Museum, I'm sorry to say, prepared to dislike the sculptures of Jean Blackburn (please note: the work at the DeCordova was more interesting than that found at this link.)  To my pleasure, I found that I enjoyed a number of them a great deal.  Blackburn, who teaches at RISD, works by taking apart common household objects or furnishings, working and reconstructing them in different ways.  This could be dull, dimestore found art but for her formal inventiveness and sense.  Cornered was one of several works that played off of the work’s relationship to its ground.  Another, for which I can’t find an image, was a series of silver spoons in descending order of size stuck together end to end in a long downward curve that turned up at the end and then mounted to the wall.  Sticking out in space, the spoons themselves echoed a spooning motion.  In the cut or missing back chair spokes for the work shown at the exhibition website, the same sort of visual intelligence, turned toward ordinary material, can be seen.  While not every work grabbed me, enough held surprises or twists that felt aesthetically right despite the potentially dull materials for me to be quite favorably impressed.

David Byrne would love Michael Lewy.  His witty PowerPoint charts offered a humorously dystopian view of human nature as seen through the banal tools of knowledge management.  I can’t find an image of my favorite, so let me link to this one, with its typical mix of witty nonsense satirizing our attempts to control our world.  I don’t have the catalog of the show at hand right now, but if I remember correctly, Lewy suggests that his work originated in part through his fascination with charts in medicine, and grew as he worked at MIT, surrounded by visual display of information that he himself did not necessarily understand.  I’m also reminded of the models and drawings, alternately dismaying and amusing, of modernist visionary architecture.  No more than one-liners?  Perhaps.  But they were very entertaining one-liners, which made them better than a lot of what one sees.

Nao Tomii’s Japanese pop inspired sculpture would have felt right at home in the DeCordova’s Pretty Sweet exhibition, or at Murakami’s Japan Society show.  I’m more indulgent regarding this sort of stuff than I expect; it must have something to do with the jumbo-plush Pikachu on my dresser.  I was amused, I can’t really say why.

Two installations will round out this highlight reel. Nadya Volicer covered the hallway outside the Museum cafe with bits of wood in a receding curl.  It’s a little intimidating, a vortex (to use the catalog's term) that one enters into.  Fun, but more to my taste was Mark Wethli’s Elevator, a 41-foot tall effervescent abstraction that runs the height of the main building.  Standing at the top of the fourth floor and looking across at the colored circles that seem to ascend the elevator shaft, then walking down the stairs and feeling them move above one, was a giddy, happy feeling.  To look out the windows at the DeCordova’s lovely sculpture park at the same time was pure pleasure.

Comments

[Franklin]

No shit - Jean Blackburn was one of my teachers at RISD (IL '90). Jean, if you read this, Franklin says hi.

[JL]

Oh, how cool! I need to go back and take another look (and some notes, so I can describe them better.) It was good stuff.

Let's see, 1990 . . . I was living across town, on Smith Hill, near the State House. And going to the RISD Museum a lot, for the first time in my life. I liked that time in Providence very much. The Museum had a number of good exhibits around that time, too.

[Franklin]

Strictly speaking, I was in la Prov from '86 to '89, after which I did RISD's European Honors Program in Rome. I would have had Jean either '87 or '88. I lived in what was hands-down the crappiest apartment building on Main, right over Geoff's Sandwiches and Mutt's Pizza, shared with a girl who dated skinheads until we decided that we needed our own respective living arrangments. Junior year I shared an apartment with a friend of mine somewhere near Gano. I miss it up there.

[JL]

hands-down the crappiest apartment building on Main, right over Geoff's Sandwiches and Mutt's Pizza

Oh my god. I know that building well - it must have been awful (though unless Main is some RISD slang I don't know, I believe it's on Benefit.) Mutt's is long gone - another pizza place is there now, not much change - but Geoff's lives on, awful service and all.

Gano Street: where Portugal begins. And I'm not compaining, mind you. And named for a distant ancestor of the Violent Femmes Gordon Gano.

[Franklin]

Of course you're right, it's Benefit. Yeah, the ceiling fell down over the bathtub and the landlord never fixed it; when I left, he withheld $60 of my security deposit to haul away a couch that was in there when I took the apartment. If there was a hell, it would have a cubicle waiting for that guy.

I worked at Geoff's one of those summers, and we had explicit instructions to be rude to the customers. I hit someone's arm with a wet crash towel because he was chatting up his friend and didn't pay attention when I asked him if he wanted mustard, mayo, or Russian on his sandwich. (What qualified a mixture of mustard, mayo, and ketchup as "Russian dressing" escaped me. He laughed, by the way; people kind of came in there for the abuse.) The food was great, though, especially to a college student with easily satisfied tastes. If I remember right, Geoff's now has a second location that really is up the hill on Main. Providence is supposed to be a whole new place now - all that renovation downtown, around the former circle of doom between RISD and the office district, happened the year after I graduated.