To be specific, these artists are inspired by details

January 30, 2004|Globe Correspondent

BEVERLY -- Marcel Duchamp started it when he looked at a urinal and saw beauty, plus a chance to tweak the arbiters of taste. Within the traditional parameters of art, perhaps, for him everything had grown stale. He had to look outside, to imagine something ordinary yet provocative, to envision a radical new kind of art. He called it the readymade.

Seeing beauty in the small details of life, and framing those details into art, is the aim of "Infinitely Specific," now up at the Montserrat College of Art Gallery. Janine Antoni, Nayland Blake, Mona Hatoum, Zoe Leonard, and Gabriel Orozco are all internationally known installation and performance artists; like Duchamp, they delight in pushing the conceptual envelope. Consequently, there's more going on here than simply reveling in the things we ordinarily pass by. That's just a starting point.

Martha Buskirk, an art history professor at Montserrat and the author of the recently published "The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art," curated this lean, beautiful exhibition. She tapped artists who hover outside the mainstream in some way -- they are expatriates, or gay, or overweight. Their outsider status gives them a different slant; they see things others might not catch and make art imbued with the tension of not quite belonging. As installation and performance artists, they usually traffic in art that does not last, valuing the viewer's experience over the object itself. Art becomes less tangible and more down to earth.

All the works in "Infinitely Specific" start with the quotidian: a poultry shop, a reflection in a puddle, the artist's own body. All are portrayed in photographs and videos. Documentary is often the only way to capture the context of the found object, or the best way to frame a performance. These are not simply documents of art; each photograph and video is itself a piece of art. Recording media are tools for artists who work not in paint or clay but in ideas.

Hatoum, born in Lebanon and now living in London, freights her installation and sculptural work with threat bound up in domestic imagery. Here, she offers up color photographs of markets around the world. Different approaches to displaying meat appear barbaric to anyone used to picking up a chicken breast at the supermarket. The comically titled "Which Comes Second (Santiago de Compostella)" shows the slaughtered chickens in a glass case, neither declawed nor beheaded but plucked and sprawled on their backs, with heads lolling and feet splayed. Dozens of eggs sit on the counter above.