Art, commerce intersect in two exhibits

December 12, 2007|Photography Review, Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

The beautiful thing about banality, if you're an artist, is how little effort is needed to assume a superior position toward it. For better and worse, nothing is more banal in this society than consumption. (For better? Imagine the alternative: not consuming.) And few opinions among people who consider themselves advanced are more banal than scorning consumption.

Two related photography exhibitions - "Ad/Agency," which runs at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University through Jan. 27; and "Cornucopia: Documenting the Land of Plenty," which runs at the Montserrat College of Art Gallery through Feb. 2 - forthrightly, if not all that memorably, profess their opposition to people buying too much. The experience of viewing them is a bit like walking down a Whole Foods aisle and hearing people with carts piled high lambaste Wal-Mart.

The title of the PRC show makes a good point. The pun isn't subtle - ad agency, get it, like Madison Avenue? - but it indicates a dismaying truth. The agent of consumerism is the consumer. Beyond the basics necessary for survival, none of us has to consume anything. Consumption is a choice. No one is forced against his or her will to go to the mall any more than one is forced to go to art school. And the two enterprises are not altogether unrelated: Underlying both is indulgence, albeit of varying sorts.

Imagine a fish complaining about the ocean being wet. Short of epic evaporation, there's not much to be done about oceanic damp, and none of the nine photographers in "Ad/Agency" seems eager to flop onto dry land. Although all their biographies include their gallery representation, none list any affiliations with an ashram, monastery, or commune. He or she who lives by the credit card is ill advised to complain about the credit card.

Diana Shearwood, for example, takes photographs of commercial images of food on trucks and other moving billboards. The aim is to make viewers aware of the great distances food can be transported to get to the supermarket. "The twenty fresh foods that typically fill your shopping basket have traveled over 100,000 miles despite that [sic] many of these items could be sourced nearby," notes Shearwood. A Montreal resident, she presumably restricts her winter produce purchases to roots and tubers.