ICA visit

Rob Folan

Please forgive the formatting here. I did the piece in a newspaper review format.

New ICA Shows its Stuff
Rob Folan-Johnson

Boston may be a cultural Mecca but it has had a justifiable reputation as a bastion of cultural conservatism: area art lovers have had a century long reluctance to embrace any post-impressionist era art. As a result, the country is littered with living artists who once called the region home but gave up trying to make it here and so moved on.

That may have been then, this is now! The torch appears to have been passed to a new generation of local art patrons willing to recognize the value of contemporary art.

Symphony Hall, once a haven of blue-blooded Bostonians in old hats, listening to the three B’s, now packs the house with James Levine and a renewed BSO, frequently performing the three C’s: Cage, Carter, and Corigliano.

In Cambridge, sold out productions of the firmly established American Repertory Theater regularly soar beyond the bounds of standard theatre.

And on the Boston waterfront, the new, improved, Institute of Cotemporary Art, occupies an exciting new edifice; a building where underappreciated local, and internationally known, living artists, can be showcased in a manner and setting that matches the enormity of their talents.

Getting to the new ICA, at least on foot, can seem confounding. Fan Pier’s development was in perpetual limbo until last weeks groundbreaking ceremonies. Still, on a Tuesday afternoon, it remains a sea of parked cars. The new ICA, however, makes traversing this auto gauntlet well worth the effort.

The museums lobby has a sort of corporate headquarters look that belies the brilliance of the institute’s artworks. That brilliance soon becomes apparent with Japanese artist’s Chiho Aoshima’s gigantic sacred/profane, Mac-art, lobby mural, The Divine Gas.

Produced, then printed up piecemeal off her Macintosh, it features a giant, cartoon inspired, misty eyed, waif, lying naked and prostrate in joyful pastoral surroundings. Meanwhile, a huge plume of “divine” flatulence emanates from her bare bottom. Within the “holy” gas cloud, another naked female sits in Buddha-like repose as smaller human figures nosedive off the cloud. Are they in free fall from her graces or merely passing out from the divine fumes?

Aoshima’s mythical construct should startle, amuse and excite all but the most staid, proper-Bostonian. It is a wonderfully inspired international edition to the cities vast array of art and after viewing it I could not wait to see what else the new ICA had to offer.

After riding up to the fourth floor galleries on the museum’s gigantic main elevator, I headed right into the Bourgeois in Boston exhibit. Considered among the worlds great living artists, the exhibit did not disappoint.

I was momentarily captivated as I entered the exhibit by her Personages series piece, the wooden carving, Untitled (1947-1949). It consisted of a sensuous pole-like figure, thin and limbless, with grouped levels of rotund male and female body parts. The tactically carved, breasts, testicals, teeth, a navel, combine the work into male, female, barebones sexual uniformity.

Also on display was an eerie, yet compelling, early painting. 1932 was painted the year the artist’s Mother died. A small crib, or is it child’s sized coffin, sits in a dark nursery, or funeral parlor, while an hat rack sized figurine, (nanny, or grieving parent) overlooks the scene.

Similarly ambivalent, was her more recent Spiral Woman (1984), a possible illustration of human developmental progress, or lack there-of. A half human female, half spiral shaped bronze figure, in transformation from, or to, either figure or spiral, as it hangs precariously by a thread over a black circle on the floor. Is the changing figure rising from, falling to, or just hanging over some abyss?

And assuming you have no aversion to insects, the Bourgeois exhibit included both drawings and a most imposing steel sculpture Spider (1996), which demonstrates her fixation on spiders. Bourgeois’ feels the industrious creatures have gotten a bad rap and the huge sculpture, which takes up an entire room of the exhibit, seems of suitable scale for a 50’s sci-fi B-movie. Its intimidating dimensions turns the tables on the viewer by offering a bug’s eye view of how humans might appear -- in size, that is -- to the insect world.

The ICA’s own assortment of works is not significant in number, but of what is currently on display (Accumulations) demonstrates that it has both depth and breath.

Upon entering this collection one sees Julian Opie’s computer animated Suzanne walking in leather skirt (2006). Both a paean and critique on societies obsession with the female form, its ordinary movements appear overtly sensuous, with the head (mind) reduced to a nonspecific circle and the extremities to practically non-existent appendages.

Nearby, the mesmerizing Czech Modernism Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely (2005) by Bostonian Josiah McElheny, provides a fun-house mirror view of silver decanters in a mirrored container. Viewed through a one way glass/mirror, the haunting beauty of the work casts a prolonged spell.

For humorous multiplicity, Lucy McKenzie’s Untitled (2004), simply appeared to me as the shadows of gallery viewers partaking of an abstract painting but the joke was on me. As I read the accompanying description, it revealed the underlying layers of McKenzie’s amusing vision, including robot figures in passionate embrace.

Other laugh out loud works included videos by Rachel Perry Welty mouthing extracts from her own telephone answering machine (Karaoke Wrong Number, 2001-2004) and Christian Jankowski’s frat-boy stunt, film short, The Hunt (1992/1997). This exhibit and other ICA accumulations make the trek to Boston’s newest cultural gem well worthwhile.