Two big gestures dominate. The first, a life-size re-creation of a hermit's two-story wooden cabin by Ethan Hayes-Chute, takes up a large part of the museum's Great Hall. Hayes-Chute, an artist in his late 20s, resides in both Berlin, Germany, and Freeport, Maine. Walking into his cabin, made with materials salvaged from dumpsters, construction sites, and recycling centers, puts you briefly on edge, like an innocent bystander unwittingly transformed into a voyeuristic intruder. But the overall impact of the installation is strangely slight.
Aesthetically, the work belongs to a phenomenon in recent art best referred to as "literalism." If the phenomenon had congealed into a movement, its manifesto might contain exhortations along the lines of: "Don't paint me a shark, give me a real one!" (Damien Hirst) or "Don't sculpt your head with clay, make it with your own frozen blood" (Marc Quinn).
The tendency has roots, of course, in Marcel Duchamp's readymades, but it has taken on spectacular new dimensions of late and has produced a lot of big impact art, sometimes with fascinating philosophical implications.
Unfortunately, although Hayes-Chute has the spectacular side of things well in hand, there is something about his reconstruction that fails to take flight. Just as the most interesting atheists have a secretly religious bent (and vice versa), the best literalists tend to harbor a secret love of metaphor, allegory, and symbol. Hayes-Chute's "Hermitage" is missing such hidden dimensions (or if they are there, they're rather too well hidden).
