Arts Around Town
Gallery as Environment
The Boston Sculptors Gallery smells like horse. Using such pungent materials as earth, manure, and hay in her show “Postcards from the Field: Contemporary Pastoralism,” Nancy Winship Milliken transports visitors to a muddy New England pasture immediately upon their cracking open the gallery’s door. Hung as a multi-sensory installation that exposes visitors to the world of husbandry, Milliken’s sculptural work draws unexpected parallels between farming and visual artistry. “Postcards from the Field” demonstrates how artists can transform commercial galleries into environments in a manner that most museums rarely do.
“To the Barn and Back,” a 16 foot-wide matte print with a thick band of leaf-encrusted mud running through its center, looms over the gallery’s short staircase. To create the work, Milliken laid the canvas on the ground and, to simulate the rhythm of the farmer’s routine, repeatedly walked down its length on trips to an oxen barn, constructing with her boots a thick line of mud. Coming across as a clever riff on Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage’s 1953 “Automobile Tire Print” and seemingly rejecting that work’s mechanical gesture and removal of the self, “To the Barn and Back” turns the gallery wall into a site of agricultural tradition.
Nights at the Museum
After seeing a 20 percent boost in attendance following the release of the first “Night at the Museum” movie in 2006, the American Museum of Natural History in New York began a sleepover program. Inspired by Ben Stiller’s raucous adventures with Easter Island Heads and Attila the Hun, children between the ages of eight and 12 flocked to the AMNH’s sleepovers, which sold out months in advance. It’s unlikely that many kids expected the museum’s objects to come to life, but their curiosities were surely piqued by the film’s central premise: What happens in the museum galleries after the doors are shut?
In its description of the sleepovers, the AMNH says it offers children and their parents the opportunity to “head out with flashlights in search of a variety of adventures.” On these nocturnal escapades, young museumgoers can “meet” their ancestral relatives in the Hall of Human Origins, “encounter” live animals, and “settle down” beneath a 94-foot blue whale. The use of such intimate verbs is noteworthy, as the museum recognizes the importance of the contextual rather than the substantive differences between daytime and nighttime visits. The same displays are open for viewing during regular hours, but the opportunity to get to know an object personally, uninhibited by mob-like crowds and the pressures of time, is unique. In short, experiencing museums in a different context elicits excitement.
Lessons From an Art Carnival
Peter Schjeldahl, the New Yorker’s mustachioed art critic, describes the ideal museum as “a place where we can go en masse and be alone.” When I first read those words, I thought that they extended to the practice of art-viewing in general. Possibly because nearly all of my meaningful experiences with visual art have taken place in museums, or possibly because I always appreciate justification for my introversion, I took Schjeldahl’s comment to heart and determined that I would need to be alone, or at least feel alone, to achieve a deep connection with a piece of art. Illuminus, a locally organized nighttime contemporary art event, forced me to question my reliance on solitude. For if the museum is pushed into the street, its walls torn down, and thousands of non-museumgoers ushered in, can one still expect to be alone with the art?
In its second annual iteration, Illuminus is Boston’s contribution to the increasingly popular “nuit blanche” movement, featuring “installations and performances by artists who manipulate light, sound, and projection to create an immersive, multi-sensory spectacle.” The 30 “projects”—predominantly large-scale art installations—are geographically centered on Lansdowne Street, the corridor sandwiched between two of Boston’s most prominent venues of spectacle, Fenway Park and the House of Blues. Indeed, the nocturnal festival seems to take spectacle as its starting point, primary medium, and ultimate goal.
Barbara Krakow’s Kunsthalle
Barbara Krakow Gallery doesn’t need you. Like Dolce & Gabbana, Burberry, and many of the other commercial establishments on Newbury Street, it is a luxury retailer. But unlike those businesses, Barbara Krakow Gallery neither desires foot traffic nor relies on in-store, local, or even domestic sales.
A contemporary art dealer since 1964, Krakow initially opened a gallery at 7 Newbury Street (the current residence of the Nespresso store) but felt stifled by the high rate of foot traffic. Most commercial galleries, including those I wrote about in my last column, covet foot traffic, hoping to promote the gallery’s name, its artists, and its exhibitions to boost recognition and revenue. Barbara Krakow Gallery, however, represents “blue-chip” artists like Chuck Close, Ellsworth Kelly, and Richard Serra, whose well-known names need no promotion and whose prices (pieces by each of these artists have sold for more than $4 million at auction) place their works beyond the budget of most casual window shoppers. As a result, while some of Krakow’s buyers hail from Massachusetts, much of her clientele are serious art collectors living in New York, California, and outside the U.S. who first interact with the artwork through the gallery’s website. According to the gallery’s associate director, Ryan Cross, Krakow was able to build up a “huge international following” because she was one of the first gallerists to use the Internet. Thus unburdened of the need to lure potential clients off the street, Krakow moved her gallery to its current location in 1983.
The Thayer Street Art Scene
The change in atmosphere as you make the left turn onto the pedestrian enclave of Thayer Street is immediately apparent. Puncturing what had been a backdrop of bleak, urban grayness, delicately laid brick paths and manicured trees lure passers-by in. Accompanying this stark change in scenery is an equally apparent transition in fashion. Whereas fellow commuters along the adjacent Harrison Avenue were clad in work attire as they headed towards the nearby Broadway T station, those pedestrians on Thayer Street are dressed to be seen. A man’s electric blue pocket square, painstakingly arranged to appear carelessly placed, peeps out of a beige seersucker suit to mingle with a woman’s elaborate black lace dress, while Johnny-Depp-like dark, thick glasses frames gaze down at suede monk straps. Seemingly insulated from the world around it, this cultural milieu is characterized by a cohesion of aesthetics and taste, marked just as much by its style as by its eager exploration of experimental new art.
I wade through the crowd, taking in both the substantial diversity in age and a seeming lack of diversity in race. Eavesdropping over the sound of shoes clapping on the pristine brick walkway, I dissect the vocational composition of the congregation: Boston’s art-collecting corporate community anxiously on their phones with their spouses, teaching artists from local universities here to support their colleagues, and fashionable young people meandering about with drinks, taking advantage of these Friday night exhibition openings as the free and classy parties that they are.