Paul Chan, Adel Abdessemed, and Andrew Neumann
By GREG COOK | December 12, 2008
PRACTICE ZERO TOLERANCE (RETOURNÉE) Abdessemed's sculpture is cast from a relic of the
2005 Paris suburb riots, but it also suggests the wreckage of a car bomb. |
“Paul Chan: Three Easy Pieces” | Carpenter Center, Harvard, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge | Through January 4
“Adel Abdessemed: Situation and Practice” | MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames St, Cambridge | Through January 4
“Andrew Neumann: The Last Picture Show” | Axiom, 141 Green St, Boston | Through December 13 |
Among the most poetic and moving artwork to come out of 9/11 is Paul Chan's series of videos The 7 Lights . Most other major works addressing the attacks are documentary — Joel Meyerowitz's photos of the wreckage at Ground Zero, Paul Greengrass's 2006 film re-enactment United 93. But Chan's videos, which he began making in 2005, distill the feeling and the meaning of that day into charged symbolic elegies. And they've propelled him to art stardom — a solo survey at New York's New Museum, major profiles in the New Yorker and the New York Times."Three Easy Pieces" at Harvard's Carpenter Center offers one of his 9/11 pieces plus two other videos about war. 5th Light, a triangle of light projected onto the floor, seems like sun from a window. Shadows of leafy branches, wiggling wires, chunks of who knows what drift across the floor toward the gallery wall. Then a shock as a body plummets from the sky. Then more people fall. It brings to mind, of course, the people who threw themselves from the burning World Trade Center towers.
A coat rack, a key, a suitcase, pistols, and rifles slowly glide skyward. With 9/11 in mind, you might find that the failure of gravity suggests the Christian Rapture, the end of the world, the Apocalypse. Which in turn points to the religious fundamentalism that fueled the terrorists, as well as our American response. The floating things break into pieces and continue upward. More bodies fall. Big blurry things woosh down in the foreground. It's jarring. And heartbreaking.
The other two videos can't match its power. Chan shot Baghdad in No Particular Order (2003) while visiting Iraq with a group of anti-war activists a few months before the US invasion in March 2003. It shows footage shot from a vehicle driving through the desert countryside, men in a café, girls dancing in a living room, a sleeping monkey, men singing in a mosque, a wedding party, uniformed women with rifles chanting, "With blood and soul, we sacrifice for you, Saddam." But 51 minutes of rambling random snippets grows tedious.
Related:
Tedium and enchantment, The whiff of art, Pushing up daisies, More 
- Tedium and enchantment
Can it be a good sign when a curator writes that the artist he's featuring in her first US museum survey "has laid bare the creative act in all its tedium and enchantment for over two decades"?
- The whiff of art
The stench came from the rotting corpse — well, it appeared to be a corpse — of a woman who'd been laid out on a metal table like an exhumed murder victim awaiting a coroner's examination.
- Pushing up daisies
If the phrase "April showers bring May flowers" has any cred, it might ring true with a new installation at Boston Sculptors Gallery.
- Distance makes the heart grow fonder
Those Bostonians who've been experiencing Bill Arning withdrawals can stop fretting: the former MIT List Visual Arts Center curator, now director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, is coming home for his final opening.
- A walk on the wild side
Everyone looks so weary in Howard Yezerski Gallery's gritty documentary photos of Boston's dear departed Combat Zone from 1969 to 1978. The year's still young, but this glimpse into our past from Roswell Angier, Jerry Berndt, and John Goodman may be one of the best shows of 2010.
- Slideshow: Tavares Strachan's ''Orthostatic Tolerance'' at the MIT List Visual Arts Center
Tavares Strachan's "Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home" at the MIT List Visual Arts Center through July 11, 2010.
- Time is on my side
We tend to take the passage of time for granted, reconciling such disparate experiences as 10 minutes spent rushing through lunch and 10 minutes spent waiting for a bus.
- Cube root
"I've been told it's the largest single piece of glass in the world," Helen Molesworth, the Institute of Contemporary Art's new chief curator, said at a press preview last week.
- Fresh fruit and vegetables
The bleakest months of New England winter are ahead of us, so the prospect of leaving your toasty house to see art may not be at the top of your to-do list.
- Less
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Terrorism, More
, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Terrorism, War and Conflict, September 11 Attacks, Saddam Hussein, Visual Arts, MIT List Visual Arts Center, MIT List Visual Arts Center, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Less
