The artists in the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park's fantastic new show "Drawn to Detail" are anything but vandals. But there are times when their work, in all its obsessive detail, suggests the same sort of horror vacui, or fear of empty space, that seems to overtake children. In infants, it often comes out as aggression. In the artists here, it can come over as an anxious attempt to keep uncertainty at bay.
The 26 artists in "Drawn to Detail," organized by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Kate Erin Dempsey and Nina Bozicnik, have spent weeks and months filling blank surfaces with obsessive mark-making. Technically, much of their work is spellbinding. Consider Astrid Bowlby, who, in the biggest of four works on display has filled a 30-by-38 1/2-inch piece of paper with tiny white flowers using nothing but blank ink (the ink, that is, defines the flowers negatively). In the process she conjures a kind of floral sublime: More complexity than the imagination can possibly hold onto without falling back on abstractions.
Even more virtuosic (if not quite as detailed) is the work of Jim Dingilian, who fills clear glass bottles with smoke and then fastidiously erases parts of the carbon residue to create mundane, misty images of cars and vans outside desolate buildings. The results have a three-dimensional, stereoscopic quality because you see through the image on the front side of the bottle to an image on the back. The effect is hallucinatory.
But what makes this show seem so of-the-moment is not so much the level of virtuosity as the level of dedication and, in many cases it would seem, obsession. Confronted by evidence of such extraordinary labors, you can't help feeling that the habit of detail might be symptomatic of something larger going on in art: a deep-seated anxiety about art's purposes, a sense of aesthetic drift, of sailing on the open sea with discipline and vim but without coordinates.
The best response, according to these artists (and they are exemplars of a much wider trend) is to immerse oneself in making marks, to find meaning in process rather than content.
