Fair’s “Testing a World View (Again)’’ is part of the museum’s “PLATFORM’’ series, for which artists are invited to create site-specific work. Fair has set up shop on a small outdoor terrace threaded with Boston ivy just outside the top of the deCordova’s dramatic stairway. Gormley’s “Reflection II’’ greets visitors at the museum’s entrance, near the bottom of the staircase: Two iron casts of the sculptor’s body stand facing each other through a glass wall. At first, it’s easy to think one is merely the other’s reflection, but they also play with ideas of inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.
Gormley’s focus has always been the body as a fleshly sheath for consciousness and identity, and how that sheath interacts with its environment. His “Testing a World View’’ (1993) features five iron casts of Gormley’s form, each with the hips hinged at a perfect right angle between torso and legs. These he arrays around a gallery: One has its back braced against the ceiling; another stands with its torso jutting from the wall. The different postures suggest different attitudes toward the world, but the forms are also as rigidly architectural as they are figurative.
Out on the deCordova’s terrace, Fair quotes Gormley directly. She has cast her own body, in pretty pink resin powdered with aluminum leaf, in a similar perpendicular posture. One forms a V on the ground. Another perches on the terrace wall. A third projects out from the museum beneath an archway where an entry was once bricked in, legs flush against the wall. The last lolls on the grass just below the terrace, legs propped up.
Their legs cross, ladylike, at the ankle. Their shoulders are rounded - they’re not as stiff as Gormley’s men - and they appear contemplative. Rainwater has collected in the lap of the V-shaped figure, and visitors have placed pebbles there.
