It’s also the subject of a program at the museum on March 19, when the artists will discuss the topic of exploring sites for artworks.
For “PLATFORM 5,’’ Bartow and Metzgar spent a year outside collecting information and specimens from the deCordova’s grounds. They invited specialists, such as mycologists, to join them sometimes. Their findings are on view in the Dewey Family Gallery, the museum’s venue dedicated to the permanent collection.
It’s a rich, surprising exhibit that touches on Thoreau, Darwin, and Duchamp. Like Thoreau, the artists built a hut as a home base, their “Morphology Field Station for Sensing Place,’’ which stood on the grounds for a year and is now tucked into a corner of the gallery. Strangely curved and arched like a hill, the building’s footprint mimics the deCordova’s property lines, and its rounded roof follows the land’s topography. Inside, there’s a shovel, a bucket, labeled pebbles, and dozens of plastic zipper bags stuffed with dried earth, leaves, sticks, and trash. Cozy and spare, the hut is the heart of the installation.
Bartow and Metzgar proceeded to sample, collect, and classify, à la Darwin. But the methods they contrived were more Duchampian — random systems to generate art. For instance, they drew lines between sculptures on a map of the park; wherever several lines intersected became a collection site, revisited throughout the year. A scientist would likely have drawn a grid on a map to locate sites.
Their findings, in the form of scans of items found at each collection site, are arrayed around the Dewey Gallery in yet another map of the property. The effect is sweeping and exacting, a look at time as well as space. Rocks have been spliced and swabbed, and scans of petri dishes containing microbes from the rocks’ innards are included, reaching back in geological time.
