'After Hours' at the Gardner Museum
By MATT PARISH | August 5, 2008
DJ Die Young
Clusters of sharply dressed after-workers drifted wide-eyed in and out of the cavernous Tapestry Room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum like tourists at an Old World cathedral. From his post at the front of the dark hall, a T-shirted DJ Die Young flipped gurgly beats on passers-by while, around the corner, Rembrandt’s Self Portrait, Aged 23 chilled. An epileptic live video projection drew its feed from a camera aimed down through the courtyard at guests gliding around with glasses of white wine.
It was the summer installation of the Gardner’s third-Thursdays “After Hours” program, a sold-out mixer in one of the classiest Barbie houses ever built. A crowd like this one lights up the whole house — the warm bodies and conversational hum providing séance juice for the ghostly presence of the mansion’s namesake.
Some guests shuffled back through a closet door to the small special-exhibition gallery for a look at Luisa Rabbia’s new video piece, a wall-sized montage of Mrs. Gardner’s photos from China spliced with rippling water and animated plant roots growing from beige landscapes like a Windows 95 screensaver. The small klatch sipped and listened to critic Mario Diacono parse the playfully trippy work with parlor-game nonchalance.
DJ Fa Ventilato stood in the courtyard garden mixing plainchant dirges with harps and ritualistic drum loops, tossing back his long hair, the Ronnie James Dio of highbrow sound collage. A young graphic designer and her social-worker friend gazed past him to the fountain. “We should do shrooms in here and run away from the fish that would fly out of that thing,” she said. Another guest wondered aloud how soon everything would turn into Eyes Wide Shut. Ventilato ended his set and raised his bottle up like Yanni staring down the Acropolis, which was in the general direction of the coat check. No secret-society masks appeared, but the night still managed to tweak reality into a few exotic kinks.
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