Calm without a storm

Isn’t it getting a little boring? Don’t get me wrong: I loved the Kapoor and Donovan shows, and this new Horn show, like Ortega’s before it, is by no means a flop. It is intelligent, subtle, admirably free from histrionics. Its presentation in the ICA’s beautifully lighted galleries, some of which have windows opening onto Boston Harbor, is at once stately and intimate. The weather itself rhymes with and enhances the work.

And yet, like the roiling water and changing atmospheric conditions that are among Horn’s favorite subjects, the show has no grip, no specificity, no cogency. It has some fine moments, but overall it wallows in a vaguely poetic atmosphere, failing to throw up anything that suggests real risk, real audacity, real creative compulsion.

The catalog accompanying the show, which appeared first at Tate Modern in London and then at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, contains a long primer on Horn’s world. It includes excerpts taken from the artist’s own writings, plus commentaries by critics and curators, all of them arranged alphabetically.

Horn is proudly androgynous, in both appearance and sensibility, so it’s no surprise that after the first entry, “Abba,’’ comes “androgyny.’’ In fact, it’s listed three times. Under the third listing we are told simply “see water’’ - a pointer to Horn’s own self-identification with the limitlessness and changeability of water, and also with the fluidity of nature. (“The Thames,’’ she has said, “looks like a solvent for identity, doesn’t it?’’ In front of her photographs of the roiling surface of that river, we instantly grasp what she means.)

Androgyny is also defined by Horn as “the possibility of a thing containing multiple identities. . . . You are this and this and that.’’ This notion, which sets up a tension between identity and its overflow into the world around, is at the heart of all Horn’s work. Pairs and groupings of similar but subtly different images recur again and again.