In 'Domestic Archeology' show, everyday items are commonplace
By Christine Temin, Globe Staff, 3/10/2004
WALTHAM -- The theme of an exhibition can also be its downfall,
as it is with the Rose Art Museum's current "Domestic Archeology:
Boston and Beyond."
There have been so many similar shows over the past decade that this one seems redundant. What has by now become the formula is to take a quasi-scientific approach to material culture: Mark Dion, a Boston-area native not in the Rose show, has achieved international success in this genre by unearthing, cleaning, and classifying ordinary objects from a particular site and presenting them as 19th-century collectors did in their cabinets of curiosities.
"Domestic Archeology" includes five variations on the above, with objects that range from an old toy to dryer lint. What is new in the show is not the idea but the mix of participants: For the first time in the Rose's quarter-century tradition of an annual exhibition devoted to Boston-area work, artists from elsewhere are included: Haim Steinbach, based in New York, and Karsten Bott, from Frankfurt, Germany. Although both have higher international profiles than the three Bostonians in the show -- Davis Bliss, Edythe Wright, and Douglas Weathersby -- neither rises to the level of the locals because neither is represented by his best work.
Steinbach is particularly ill-served by the show. His contribution is a rather confusing documentation of a project that involved his removing highly idiosyncratic collections from their home settings and placing them in the neutral chill of a large industrial scaffolding. The transfer from a warm, personal, residential setting to an anonymous one transforms these objects, which suddenly seem vulnerable.
On one wall of Steinbach's installation are four videos in which you see the collections in their homes (items range from magazine clippings to Asian antiques), with loving, detailed narration about them by their owners. On the other wall are photographs of works in the scaffolding. Alas, a direct one-on-one comparison -- which would seem to be the point -- isn't always possible because the collections in the videos don't always correspond to those in the photos. (Adding to the problem is that the labels accompanying the videos are supposed to read left to right but somehow got scrambled, so it takes a while to figure out what you're looking at.)
You can navigate this show from either end, but I'd recommend starting with Steinbach and finishing with Weathersby. Wright comes just after Steinbach. Her work is a hoot on the surface with a hint of horror underneath, as in so many fairy tales. Her point of departure is what she calls her "Institute of Domestic Archeology," which dissects and analyzes common objects. In the Rose show it's a chair, a vacuum cleaner, and a cuddly toy "Slumber Bunny."
The Slumber Bunny installation includes a fictitious printed interview with the toy's owner, a child accidentally separated from his parents at the 1960s World's Fair in New York, at Expo '67 in Montreal, and at the supermarket. What goes unsaid is that the reason a child needs a Slumber Bunny -- or a teddy or blanket -- is for comfort in a big, lonely world.
Along with the interview is the bunny dismantled, like a dream torn apart, and a rather clinical video of that process, starting with the hands of a figure in a lab coat, face unseen, who begins by snipping out the stitches to reveal the stuffing. It's trussing the Thanksgiving turkey in reverse.
Bott also founded his own institution, the "Archive of the History of Everyday Living," which he describes, in the brochure accompanying the show, as "historical documents of contemporary life which are missing in museums" -- which isn't at all the case: There are numerous museums, worldwide, that do nothing but display objects of everyday life. And in art museums, the tchotchke show has become a cliche.
Bott's Brandeis piece occupies a huge amount of floor space. He's created a sprawling "neighborhood" of identical little houses, each isolated by a cardboard picket fence, each dedicated to a different theme. "Building," for instance, includes wallpaper, bricks, and a carpet sample; other patches of real estate are devoted to such topics as sports, sex, and science, with each space jammed with related objects.
Bott's work is so crammed with non-precious yet all-but-indestructible plastic that it makes you yearn for a cleanup. You get that in the last room, which Bliss and Weathersby share. Like Wright, Bliss likes labeling, numbering, and sorting, all significant parts of contemporary art practice. Like Bott, she is interested in cleaning, but on a far more obsessive level. She stuffs an old-fashioned library card catalog with used sponges, sorted according to color, their filth and bedraggled state making them seem like martyrs to germs.
Her large installation "Form Follows Function: A Diary" consists of wallpaper and a table loaded with petri dishes. The blue-on-white wallpaper depicts a woman on washing day, surrounded by old-fashioned washboards, wringers, and other labor-intensive paraphernalia, repeated over and over, like the endless chore that washing was in the 19th century.
The petri dishes hold lint from an automatic dryer, evidence of the comparative ease of doing the laundry nowadays. The lint comes in a surprising array of colors, with the odd scrunched-up bit of paper that didn't get removed from someone's pocket in time. The dishes are engraved with the date of the lint's collection, as if they were scientific specimens.
The founder of a company he calls Environmental Services, Weathersby has come in for a lot of attention lately, mostly thanks to receiving the Institute of Contemporary Art's 2003 Artist Prize. He's an anomaly in the Rose show, the only artist whose work is actually practical. He cleans and sorts the messes in people's homes. His Rose piece chronicles, through videos and photos, his whipping a boiler room into shape, with lists of materials, hours, prices, and exchanges with the homeowner. The boiler room is pretty spiffy once he's done.
Along the way, though, he's created visual poetry. Cracked red linoleum is a study in shapes; the gesture of a finger circling in black dirt, liberating the linoleum underneath, is as erotic as a lover caressing the beloved's skin. Shadows are made temporarily tangible as Weathersby re-creates them in dirt; his lighting effects are celestial.
He concludes the show on a fitting note -- a literal clean sweep.
Christine Temin's Perspectives column appears on Wednesdays.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.