A giant seesaw dominates the main gallery at Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Its glossy red construction catches your eye, and then you notice its improbable setup: At one end, a single seat rests on the floor, holding up a network of nine seats at the other end. It's funny to see, defying the laws of physics, like a feather having more mass than a boulder. For Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, the piece, called "Leverage," is as much social commentary as sight gag, a reflection on how much weight powerful people can throw around.
A public artist uses his wits
Pedro Reyes's 'ad usum' has hope and heart
"Leverage" differs from most of the other works in Reyes's show "ad usum: To Be Used" because this teeter-totter can't really be played on. Most of the pieces in this mini-retrospective either document or propose some form of social intervention, hence their usefulness. The artist found inspiration from masters of political theater such as Antanas Mockus , the former mayor of Bogota, who hired mimes to mock traffic violators because he thought ridicule was a more effective deterrent than fines.
Reyes, who started out as an architect, makes conceptual art, architectural models, and ritualistic projects, all intended to change and refresh the public's mind-set through the element of surprise.
Some of these are wonderfully ambitious yet sensible, such as his vision (with Jorge Covarrubias ) for an abandoned, triangle-shaped high-rise in Mexico City: Turn it into a vertical green space with hundreds of hydroponic units, and put in solar panels to create enough electricity to pump the water. Others are pointed commentary: A ceramic lattice made for this show honors Le Corbusier's built-in latticework cooling system in the Carpenter Center building and critiques Harvard for running air conditioning instead of utilizing the original, more environmentally friendly system.
Reyes is a public artist, and the main problem with showing his work in an institution is that most of it represents ideas realized elsewhere. Some of the pieces here, like "Dump Shoes," modeled on snowshoes but made for tromping through heaps of trash, are merely one-note jokes skewering humanity for the damage we've done to the earth. Despite this, his vision is radical in its hope, and open-hearted in its desire to honor and empower ordinary people.
B-movie sentimentality Duane Michals has, over the decades, built his own niche in the international photography world. His work, often scrawled with text in his own hand, is as narrative as it is visual. He can be deft at exploring the crevices of longing and hurt in the human heart. Unfortunately, his new show at Robert Klein Gallery is largely just maudlin.
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