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I’ve noticed lately that the site has become a little New York-centric, which all and all is not a bad city for an art magazine to be centered around, but there is art elsewhere (if you know where to look.) I’m constantly on the road, investigating other art scenes and I thought I’d begin to bring some of my findings to you. This week I visited Boston (that’s in MA for those of you who haven’t looked at a map in a while) home of the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), the third largest in the country and the newly built Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA.) Here are a few highlights…

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Tara Donovan’s Untitled
For her first major museum retrospect the sculptor Tara Donovan, with a troupe of assistants and museum personnel, transformed the fourth floor gallery into a playground for her bizarre monumental installations. Using a seemingly endless supply of ordinary objects (ranging from tooth picks to scotch tape) the thirty-five year MacArthur fellow created a peculiar universe around her massive biomorphic forms where mountains are made of plastic and styrofoam cups double as cloud configurations.

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Gerard Byrne’s A Country Road. A Tree. Evening.
In another show at the ICA, the twelfth in a series of solo-shows called Momentum, the Irish artist Gerard Byrne mounted an exhibition as a series of documents in an ongoing investigation. Byrne who employs photography and film to investigate fictitious narratives, drove the Irish country side in search of the ambiguous local of Beckett’s famous play, Waiting for Godot. Framed only by “A Country Road. A Tree. Evening.” Byrne documents his attempts to find Beckett’s nondescript local, photographing the Irish scenery under vague parameters with eerie filters in compositions as ambiguous and absurd as history itself.

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Joe Zane’s Ti Amo Anche
Ever since New Yorker’s stopped showing up to award shows, we’ve given out a surprisingly few art prizes (with the possible exception of the Hugo Boss Award.) Luckily Boston is full of awards like The Foster Prize given biennially to a local artist by the ICA. Ahead of the actual award (which will be announced next month), an exhibition is held for the four finalists. This years finalists, Catherine D’Ignazio, Rania Matar, Andrew Witkin and Joe Zane, represent the cream of the Boston art-scene crop working across mediums to investigate issues of contemporary art. While Each artist was given free range and an exhibition space, some used the space better than others: Andrew Witkin filled his room with remnants of his apartment, while Rania Matar mounted flat photographs across the walls. Each artist offered some insight, but none with the humor and thoughtfulness of Joe Zane, MIT professor and recent Cornell grad. Zane’s installation of two and three-dimensional work explores issues of authenticity and identity, engaging in a dialogue with history, at once recalling the nose-less busts of ancient Rome and responding to Pistoletto’s “Ti Amo.”

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Rachel Whiteread’s Village
In the only contemporary show at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) the Turner Prize winner, Rachael Whiteread (of YBA fame) took a break from her signature concrete and rubber impressions and turned her attention to another architectural investigation, building a small village of dollhouses. Stripped bare of all their furnishings, lit only from within and vacant of any life, the installation comes to resemble a miniature ghost-town from the set of a horror film, caught somewhere between the past and the present.

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Abdel Abdessemed’s Practice Zero Tolerance
The Harvard Museum of Art was closed for the holidays, so I walked down the street to the List Center for the Visual Arts, housed in the monumentally ugly I.M Pei building on MIT’s west campus. Despite its unfortunate exterior, Pei’s cavernous building is an excellent setting for installations like the Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed’s show Situation and Practice. The exhibition occupies nearly the entire space of the center’s main floor with a few monumental drawings and a room full of projections, the floors are littered with television sets surrounding a life sized concrete cast of a burned out car chassis. The individual works, which ranges from serious to whimsical, explore issues of identity, religion and urbanization; in one video the artist walks a lion through an African city, in another a kitten bites the head of a rat and in a performance reminiscent of Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraints we see the artist dangling from a helicopter drawing on massive wooden panels.

For more info on the local scene take a look at Big Red & Shiny, a great webzine focused on contemporary art in Boston at http://www.bigredandshiny.com.

Hope you enjoyed the post, let me know if you have any suggestions…I’ll be in LA next week, email me if you have any suggestions.

Posted on January 26th, 2009 in The Populist

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