He reconstructs dioramas to deconstruct historical myths

November 22, 2006|Ken Johnson, Globe Staff

Growing up in Cohasset in the 1960s, Sam Durant learned about our nation's first Thanksgiving at the nearby Plymouth National Wax Museum . The lifelike dioramas of Pilgrims suffering in English jails, crossing the Atlantic in their tiny wooden ship, and -- with the help of friendly Indians -- surviving and thriving in the New World left a lasting impression on his young mind.

Now an internationally recognized conceptual artist, Durant was recently invited to create an exhibition at Massachusetts College of Art, where he earned his undergraduate degree in 1986. He wanted to do something about Plymouth and the founding of our country, so he went back to the wax museum with Jeffrey Keough , MassArt's director of exhibitions and curator of Durant's show. When he learned the museum was closing for good, Durant purchased some of the wax figures and other materials that would eventually go into his politically provocative, seasonally appropriate exhibition "Scenes From the Pilgrim Story: Myths, Massacres, and Monuments."

The centerpiece of the show is a startling and bizarre spectacle: a pair of carefully reconstructed wax-museum dioramas mounted back to back on a 16-foot circular platform that slowly and silently revolves in the middle of the spacious and otherwise mostly empty Stephen D. Paine Gallery. The frozen, zombielike figures in historical costumes and the detailed stage sets they occupy create a surrealistic vividness; they seem both intensely real and ludicrously artificial.

In one scene, the famously helpful Indian Squanto shows some Pilgrims how to plant corn using fish fertilizer. In the second, a Pilgrim with a big stick stands before an Indian on all fours whom he evidently has just clubbed to the ground. This tableau, we learn from a wall label, represents Captain Miles Standish killing a troublesome Wessagusset brave named Pecksuot. The scene was removed from public view by the wax museum in the 1970s because it was deemed too violent. Durant was able to refabricate it using an old postcard.

So Durant's project is about the sanitizing of history and the casting of the Pilgrim story in a benign mythic light. You don't have to read labels to get the point. Using the waxwork tableaux serves his purpose with brilliant economy: The gallery context highlights how grotesque they are, and their grotesqueness becomes a metaphor for the grotesquely distorted history they represent. The ponderously rotating carousel is like an endlessly recurring national nightmare.