As the ICA's first big show, "Super Vision" also begs to be read as an ambitious mission statement for the 21st-century art museum. Housed in a building designed by the architectural team of Elizabeth Diller , Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro to resemble a kind of giant optical device, the museum promises to use visionary powers to scan the globe for the world's most exciting art and artists.
Under the circumstances, I was hoping that "Super Vision" would start things off with a bang. I'm rooting for the ICA to shake up the international art world. But it is, I hate to say , an unfortunately cautious opening gambit. Organized by the ICA's chief curator Nicholas Baume , it consists almost entirely of works by artists who are well-known veterans of the international festival and biennial circuit -- Ed Ruscha , Sigmar Polke , Andreas Gursky, and Mona Hatoum , to name a few.
The art and technology theme, a favorite with academic theorists since the 1960s, is also unsurprising. This is especially true in Boston, where two exhibitions with related subjects are, coincidentally, now on view at institutions of higher education: "Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology , and Contemporary Art" at MIT and "Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance in Video Art" at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. Now would be a good time to declare a moratorium on the topic.
The installation is another problem. Too many paintings and photographs are of similar size -- in the 6- to 12-foot range -- and they are monotonously distributed at regular intervals. I wish I could remove about a quarter of the show's works, to give the rest of them room to breathe and sharpen the exhibition's focus.
