Actually, most good artists do outgrow this stuff and get on with making art. The trouble is, curators - for whom art-making often remains impenetrably mysterious - still love it. Or think they should love it. And so we have biennials and triennials that overflow with self-consciousness, with worn-out conceptual japes, and with lazy gestures of political consciousness that have all the committed warmth of a dictator waving his gloved hand behind tinted windows.
The tone is set even before you enter the building by Steve Lambert’s large, old-fashioned sign combining aluminum and electric lights. “Capitalism works for me!’’ it says, and at either end “True’’ and “False.’’ As you walk past you’re invited to press a button to register your vote, and the sign keeps a tally.
It’s quite fun, I suppose, and very au courant - the 99 percent and all. DeCordova curator Dina Deitsch (who organized the show with guest curator Abigail Ross Goodman) told me she personally pressed both “True’’ and, a few moments later, “False,’’ because “it’s a complex question.’’
That sums up the matter nicely, and rather makes a mockery of a work that is already a mockery of issues it doesn’t even try to get a handle on. So let’s move swiftly along.
In the main gallery, on the third floor, Joe Zane, a Cambridge-based artist whose work is pretty much the last word in conceptual onanism, has another sign, this one in gold letters affixed to the wall. It reads: “This is not the Biennial I was hoping for.’’
Reading it, I felt momentarily outflanked, my ungenerous, rube-like thoughts revealed and writ large. But then I registered the bathos of the gesture, and its reliance on that old teenage trope of being forever smarter and more sarcastic than your audience. After which I merely felt tired.
