15-Jan-2000 The Brockton
It's good and cold out today. Not what I consider bitter cold. When I was in college in northwestern Mass. the temperature often got below zero. When it's below zero my nose freezes up with every breath, and I don't like that a bit. As long as that doesn't happen, I can dress for the weather.
It's not really fun to be outside when it's this cold, though, so we thought we'd go to a museum. It was between the Fuller and the De Cordova, and I opted for the Fuller because it's farther and I was up for a little driving.
On the way down 128 we passed a sign for Houghton's Pond. I've been saying “Houghton's” a lot when I mean “Bullough's” so we figured we'd check Houghton's for birds and to see if I could reinforce the difference in my mind. The pond was frozen over, and there were no birds at all in sight. Whether it makes any difference in my saying the right name remains to be seen. There's a little metro parks beach at Houghton's, and there were several cars parked near the highway exit at a little dead end road that looked like an entrance to cross-country skiable woods. There were x-c ski tracks in the snow by the pond, too. A loop around it, or along the side as far as you could go, looks like a pleasant workout.
The Fuller museum is in Brockton, a city south of Boston that was once a shoe manufacturing center. The museum is in the woods along a pond (frozen today, natch) and there are nice views of the water from walkways between gallerys. We decided it was time to become members of the museum today rather than just pay admission. We may not get there often enough to save money with a membership, but we can afford to support them; and we do often stop there on our way to Cape Cod. This will just make it easier to drop in if we're in that area.
One of the two shows that opened today was “Seaforms” by Dale Chihuly.
We hadn't heard of Chihuly until Charley was at RISD, but the guy has revitalized American glass art. I want to say singlehandedly, but that's not true; his big thing is teamwork. He runs a studio with a small army of assistants and technicians. The exhibit included a video of projects he has done in Finland, Ireland, and Italy, showing quantities of collaborators -- and showing Chihuly and his helpers throwing finished pieces, I mean beautiful completed art glass floats three feet long, into rivers and the ocean. Having them float away down the river seemed to be the main point of the project.
The pieces on exhibit were gorgeous examples of what you can do with glass. Chihuly knows how to take advantage of transparency, fluidity, and optics to do things you can't do with anything other than glass. There were forms like transparent seashells four feet long, vessels that looked like huge transparent sea urchin shells, and more and more. As you moved around each piece, the lines on one surface interacted with the lines on the surfaces below in constantly changing patterns. The clear spots were lenses, distorting the surface below in different ways with each change in viewpoint.
Hey, look, if you're in this area, go check. If not, look at Chihuly.com's own exhibition schedule and see if there's anything near you. And, say, I have to hand it to Google. I searched on "brockton fuller chihuly" and got four hits in 0.32 seconds; that was the top one.
I liked his quote, something like, “My work revolves around a simple set of circumstances: fire, molten glass, human breath, spontaneity, centrifugal force, and gravity.”
There were other shows there, too. One, “Drawing on Tradition” had nontraditional drawings: an installation of tiny embossings on tinfoil in 24x36mm slide mounts, powdered pigment on concrete blocks, and my favorite, paper cutout outlines of laundry mounted on pins flying all over a ten foot square section of wall.
The other was an exhibit by three African-American artists that will be up through Black History Month: undistinguished oil paintings of notable black people, which I found interesting for the musicians included (first woman jazz trombonist, for instance); “Amalgamated Signifiers”, a set of Photoshop photo/scan/manipulation works about the artist's interracial background and society's attitudes towards people of mixed race; and the totally most fun things in the museum, a series of doll houses filled with animated, joyous figures. It's the Luv ’n’ Life series, done by a woman who teaches in the Boston public schools (I'm sorry I didn't write down her name for you), showing her values of family, school, and social interaction. There are people hugging all over the place, parents and grandparents reading to kids, children jumping rope, kids checking armloads of books out of their school library, a beauty parlor customer snacking on doughnuts under an old-fashioned hair dryer, detail, detail, detail. It's a wonderful combination of close observation, idealism, and optimism.
What a good selection! The Fuller is admirable for having its own idea of what to show, with good standards of quality without being elitist and without making a big deal of saying it's showing outsider art. It just gives you the feeling that it's showing the most interesting stuff it can find, whether it's done by a big name or someone local whose work is worth looking at.
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