LINCOLN - Its virtues are many, but perhaps the best thing about the inaugural DeCordova Biennial is that it forces a response. There’s nothing clinical or antiseptic about this show: It’s an experience. It’s brainy and cool in parts, messy and mashed-up in others. It has moments of beauty that are exquisitely austere and others that have a drenching, irresistible quality, like perfect pop. There are moments of confrontation, too - including one installation, by an artist in his 80s, that dares you not to flee.
All over the map
The art is wild and wide-ranging, but it all comes together in the DeCordova Biennial
This is exactly what was required. In previous incarnations, the DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum’s survey of contemporary New England art was a yearly event that many felt had become routine, insular, and safe.
But of course, surveys of contemporary art should be none of the above. They must allow for the exercise of conviction on the part of everyone involved, from the director of the museum on down. That means risking failure. It means welcoming advice from clever people, but ultimately putting the exhibition in the hands of one responsible person. And it means, more than anything, putting on a show - not an earnest love-in, trip-wired with good intentions.
With Dina Deitsch, the museum’s assistant curator of contemporary art, at the helm, the DeCordova has come through on all these fronts. Yes, there’s the odd work in the show that you walk by with little more than a shrug. But by activating the entire gallery, from the welcome desk (where we’re greeted by three ravishing circular wall drawings called “Portal’’ by August Ventimiglia) to a roof terrace (whose windows have been obscured by Liz Nofziger’s colored vinyl) and every nook and cranny in between, the organizers have made discovering the work in this show an adventure.
Behind Ventimiglia’s elegant wall drawings, for instance, there’s a short, sinister corridor at the end of which is a dark room. It’s screening a disturbing video by Maine-based artist William Pope.L. A bunch of chickens and goats in an old textile factory nibble at a model of the Capitol made from plaster, eggs, chicken feed, and fat. Eventually, under the pressure of their greedy attentions, the structure collapses.
Like Pope.L’s “Corbu Pops’’ show at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts last year, the piece is messy with ideas. But in this case, the jumpy footage and the hectoring noise of the birds, like the incessant blabbing of political commentary on television, gradually drowns out the possibility of thought. We walk away not so much prompted to reflection as mentally unhinged.
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