Contemporary art is something that I cannot appreciate a great deal, since its conceptual frameworks and means of representations are usually not immediately accessible to an uninitiated viewer such as me. But I have been trying to understand it more nonetheless. The reason is simple: Art and humanities are inseparable. As a historian sympathetic with post-modern approach, I think there should exist common grounds between historical and artistic views of the world. Indeed that is what I found.
Early today, I went to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston (this is the third museum I explored in Boston, besides MFA and the Gardner's Museum). The museum is located along the seaport. With its vast glass walls, it offers a spectacular view of the sea (there is an awesome computer lounge in the museum where you can sit on a stair-type structure, with a huge window facing the sea, creating a visual illusion that the lounge descends to the water.) Overall, the museum is not very big, with a few galleries on the fourth floor. My first impression was that there are almost no paintings in this museum. Instead, multi-media production, photography, sculpture and performance art prevail. This perhaps bespeaks the current fad of western contemporary art, a strong sensitivity toward materiality.
Although most of the works did not appeal to me (not surprisingly), several pieces in the sculptor room attracted my attention. One piece presents two wooden boxes with hollowed centers. Along the inside walls at the centers are a series of lightened bulbs stretching down to the floor, where a mirror is placed. Viewing from a distance, I could only see the exterior of two boxes, which were rather non-descriptive. Yet once I approached the items and looked down through the central hollows, something nauseatingly spectacular happened: I saw lines of lights extending infinitely to the abysmal! In other words, the mirror created a visual effect that expands space infinitely. How fascinating! The work is created by Ivan Navarro and Courtney Smith, with the title "11 Upside Down." In fact, this visual gimmick has dark message to convey: the artists intend to use the visual vertigo to mimic the psychological terror created after the collapse of twin towers, and more generally our psychological anxiety derived even from the most mundane things.
There is another piece in the room created by Mexican artist Damian Ortega called "Olympus." The artist meticulously dissembled an Olympus camera into multiple layers, and hung them within a series of glass chambers. Here Ortega acted as a surgeon, skillfully using his scalpel to dissect apart his "eyes" -- the camera. It reminds me of the confocal microscope I used in the biology lab, where a laser-camera scans through a sample and re-constructs a 3D image from a series of 2D images. Ortega's approach is the reverse, that is, he flattens a functional 3D object into its minute constituents. There is ineffable beauty in it. Somehow I found some tiny pieces from this dissembly resembled the appendages of the insect specimen that my friend made. Perhaps it is proper to contemplate further the relationship between art and science in history, at the focal point of dissection. When Andreas Vesalius published his On the Fabric of Human Body in 1543, he was particularly meticulous on the anatomical images of the body. Indeed, he hired a professional artist Jan van Calcar to illustrate his book, and paid out of his own pocket to employ the most reputable print shop in Basel to publish his book so as to guarantee the high quality of the art work. His effort paid off: On the Fabric of Human Body became the foundational text for modern anatomy, with its many "accurate" illustrations of the body. Coming back to the present, we can view Ortega's work as a continuous fascination and perhaps a modern subversion of this conjunction of art and dissection.
Another piece by Josiah McElheny also plays with mirror's effect. Here the artist positioned a group of shiny, beautiful decanters in front of a mirror. Similar to Navarro and Smith's work except a different dimensionality, these decanters infinitely extend toward the posterior. Yet since there exists a glass window in front of the decanters, I could only see one reflection of my face. In other words, the viewer by no means could catch up with the speedy, and seemingly infinite extension of these desirable objects. Surely we can regard this piece as a revelation of the psyche of modern consumerism; the customers' insatiable needs, seduced by modern materials' never-ending allure, are doomed to lead to disappointment. The glass window even resembles the one in the shop, which separates the costumer and the object he/she desires. But I think that we can even go beyond the layer of consumerism, and take this piece as an exploration of human desire (yes, "that obscure object of desire"). Isn't it true that deep in our psyche, we all desire things that we cannot get? Isn't it also true that we ourselves create those never-reacheable objects, not unlike the infinite shadows of the decanters in this piece, so we can satisfy this basic need of us? But can we truly be satisfied, as the process undoubtedly entails disappointment?
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