Harvard Square Art: Three for free
ONE
• Quantum Grids, Carpenter Center for the Arts, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
October 15, 2005 - April 16, 2006
http://www.ves.fas.harvard.edu
TWO
• Lumen Eclipse, an outdoor video installation set over the Information Booth next to entrance to the T in the epicenter of Harvard Square
Daily 5 A.M. - 1 A.M.
www.lumeneclipse.com
THREE
. "Red", a juried show sponsored by the Cambridge Art Association,
University Place, 124 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA
Monday - Friday 9 A.M. - 6 P.M., Saturday 9 A.M. - 1 P.M.
November 18, 2005 - January 19, 2006
www.cambridgeart.org
The retail stores in Harvard Square may have become a look-alike patchwork of national franchises but the artwork in the neighborhood is just as eclectic, unique, or opaquely incomprehensible as ever.
pt @ large recently spent a couple of hours sampling three exhibits within a bit more than a three minute walk from the Out of Town News kiosk, the square’s epicenter. The free exhibits ranged from the abstract to the whimsical to what most mortal galleristas would quantify as something they’d recognize as ‘art’. By sheer dumb luck, the order in which I visited them proved restorative to my sense of aesthetics and faith in the world of art.
PART ONE
Quantum Grids, Carpenter Center for the Arts
The leading edge of art revolves around a different sun than most of what you’d find in the halls of the MFA. Like life, art is always in a state of flux, change is a necessary ingredient for growth, and the results are not always comforting. Ergo, we can employ viewing modern art as practice for dealing with life’s complexities and curves. Hey, it’s cheaper than a fifty-minute visit with your favorite therapist.
Most mortals enter exhibits of modern abstract art at their peril. We’re confronted with representational art with grotesque subject matter; or paintings with no discernable subject matter; or use of experimental or “found” materials; clusters of wires, metals, stones, or paper maché that resemble, well, piles of wires, metals, stones or paper maché.
The muse that fired the artist’s imagination is often mute when it comes to whispering meaning and intent into our ears as we gape and wonder, “what is this and why is it here?” Turning to the gallery’s guide for elucidation is a descent into a cave with a cerebral echo chamber in which curators speak in tongues as they labor to explain the voice of the muse to bewildered visitors (more on this below).
pt @ large, always game for a view of art at the edges, visited the Sert Gallery in the Carpenter Center. The four artists represented are Cai Guo-Qiang (Chinese, b. 1957); Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929); Sol Lewitt (American, b. 1928); Fred Tomaselli (American, b. 1956).
Guo-Qiang considers the Atomic bomb to be the iconic image of the 20th century. His “The Century with Mushroom Clouds” gets him in touch with his inner Feng Shui and his Chinese hometown’s reputation as the gunpowder capital of the world. His concept is to balance Feng Shui, the optimal flow of energy to a structure, with the deadly flow of energy produced by the A bomb. Guo-Qiang covers an 18’ by 10’ parchment paper with scores of mushroom cloud images he’s made by burning the surface of the parchment paper with gunpowder. The clouds he burned have a similar mushroom shape but differing sizes and gradations of blacks and grays. Whether an optimal flow of energy was achieved is unanswerable by this writer although I do think it was mounted auspiciously on the west wall.
What makes the piece resonate beyond one dimension is Guo-Qiang’s black and white video installation of 1940’s A bomb tests in Nevada. Even sixty years later, watching the bomb’s thunderous impact, the gargantuan upheaval of a piece of the planet into the stem of that mushroom cloud inspires awe, fear, and despair over the deadly force we introduced that day. Part of the clip shows a regiment of army grunts kneeling miles away from the original ground zero. The rush of wind and dust that, like a wave whooshes past them and then rushes back toward the blast, actually rocks them back and forth. The scene of the soldiers in the foreground dwarfed by the mushroom cloud darkening the sky in the distance stirs a gut feeling of how we’ve become the servant of what we created. The unsettling question Guo-Qiang’s work inspires is, “Can we protect ourselves against ourselves?”
“Accretions II, 1967”, by Yayoi Kusama, is a 3’ by 6’ oil on canvas. What has been accreted are hundreds of tiny white dollops of white over a deep rose base. If you let yourself gaze at it with your third eye, it takes you far into the cosmos as you imagine speeding past stars and into space at hyperspeed.
Sol Lewitt’s “Four-Part Geometric Structure” is a set of twenty individual white painted structures placed on five gray painted wood panels. pt @ large imagines the geometric shapes might be the focus for a field trip for a high school geometry class.
Fred Tomaselli’s “Guilty, 2005”, an inkjet digital print that superimposes a color design over a New York Times page one headline, is an artistic jab at the greed that brought down Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski.
The Carpenter Center is at the ivied edge of Harvard Yard, right next door to the Fogg Museum, Harvard's oldest art museum, that covers the history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present. The Carpenter Center’s sunlit lobby with several small tables lined in front of a huge plate glass window, offers a great view of ivy league pageantry - professors, students, tourists, and UPS trucks as they make their daily rounds. And a good place to relax before heading to the middle of Harvard Square, the second destination for the day's artistic trifecta.
But wait. The lobby is also the place to contemplate one of the most prodigiously rarified versions of “art speak” that pt @ large has encountered: the small brochure that accompanies the exhibit.
Describing the exhibit, associate curator Linda Norden writes, “The title ‘Quantum Grids’ with an emphasis on the quantum, refers to just one of the ideas the juxtaposition of these four works proposes formally and conceptually: if the word “grid” usually conjures an image and implies a desire to contain and order, “quantum” is often inseparable from “leap” and the ungraspable range that “leap” would describe.”
Oh, I see.
The centuries old proverb “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is nowhere as valuable as in an exhibit like this. You just have to lighten up, not try too hard, and let your random access memory take charge. Surprisingly, Norden seems to echo that when she concludes her explanation of the exhibit by saying, “Each of the artworks here invokes the grid less as container than as counterpoint, as a mechanism through which to imagine the irrepressible, irrational, and incomprehensible human behaviors that define our moment.”
I pondered that all the way to Harvard Square.
Schoeller zeroes in on the eyes and anything within that plane - cheeks, lips, mouth. All else - tip of the nose or ears are not in focus. With enlargement on this scale, you’d think we could see a hint of what makes the subject tick or wonder about the curl of a lip, an arch of the brow, a glint in the eye or a concerto involving all three.
That’s as close a hint we have as to their humanity. Perhaps that’s what Schoeller wants, to strip them of their trappings of power or success and present only their naked faces, well known but with the same pores and lines as we have on our own.
Schoeller appears to be similar to his onetime boss Annie Leibovitz. He has strong opinions about his methods and how his photos are presented. “The number and identities of his photos were a mystery to us until the day before we got them,” the Griffin curator said. He insisted on arranging the sequence of the photos and even the height from which they’d be mounted from the floor, she said. An artist is entitled to that.
Recent Comments