"Contemporary" is a Mere Convention

This Saturday I visited the Institute of Contemporary Art of Boston. Already partial to new developments in art and the trend away from tradition, I was drawn in by the unique architecture of the building from the outset. The pieces inside of the building were just as thought provoking as the facade, but I quickly saw a pattern being developed. Each piece and the building itself picked a specific, very small piece of the grand total of the "traditional view of art" and performed variations on it. Descriptions of the works always took note of exactly what the artist was trying to accomplish, whether it push the boundaries of the paint medium or to redefine a way of looking at some phenomenon. Every piece had a very specific point, whether it was aesthetic or contextual. The building itself was no more than a modernist, minimalist interpretation of classicism, balancing stark and solid geometric forms with an impending sense of dis-harmonic construction. Like new age sculpture, the ICA itself was built to tread the visual line between old solidarity and new fragility. The pieces inside were purpose driven, and often a very distinct historical aesthetic would come into play to achieve that purpose.

Matthew Ritchie, The Salt Pit
An abstract landscape opens before our eyes in The Salt Pit. Ritchie uses marker and oil paint to create an effect of great depth, and the forms he chooses at once hint at biology. The minimal palette of colors is very neutral, and the rusty copper belongs to the same family of metallic colors that the accentuating greened copper can be placed into. The viewer is directed by the abstract forms and color densities to focus the gaze slightly to the lower left of the center point of the piece.

Lisa Yuskavage, Motherfucking Rock
This work evokes such sensuality that it is almost rendered cartoonish. The exaggeration of the curves of the breasts could be considered to be the height of desirable, but the colors and the abstraction of the female face seem to say otherwise. The soft shades of the surfaces of the skin are almost realistic enough to evoke the feeling of a Renaissance portrait, but the naked form and exaggerated features are certainly more modern conventions. The figure's posture is questioning, inviting us to ask her more about herself. 

Alice Neel, Margaret Evans Pregnant
As stated by the ICA description, Alice Neel wanted to defy norms and depict a female form that had heretofore been almost wholly ignored by the art community: the woman in pregnancy. This somewhat abstracted portrait's strongest trait lies in the colors that Neel chose to depict her subject. She defines light and dark areas not with traditional blacks, browns, and whites mixed together - she takes the Van Gough approach and uses purples, blues, yellows, greens, reds, and other colors of the spectrum not traditionally used for shading. She synthesizes traditional portraiture and impressionist color choice.

Peter Chan, Untitled
This is the only piece that I reacted to overwhelmingly negatively. The only comment to be made is to take note of Peter Chan's unorthodox canvas, the cover of an eviscerated book. Unlike other paintings that were both conceptually and aesthetically enigmatic, which serves to draw the viewer into the work, this work was almost solely conceptually enigmatic. It asks the viewer to think about the relativity of the question "What is art?" with its tongue in its cheek.

Summer Wheat, Banka and Borth
Summer Wheat's methodology was to push the boundaries of painting into sculpture; to accomplish this, she used as many different ways of applying paint to the surface being painted as possible, including icing bags as well as knives and brushes. Banka and Borth is a successful blurring of painting and sculpture, as the actual form of the paint adds two layers of texture to the piece. Whereas in many paintings texture is implied, this artist seeks to both imply and explain texture with one medium.

Summer Wheat, Forever Calvin
I did not react as positively to Forever Calvin as I did to Banka and Borth. I disagreed with Wheat's heavy application of paint to the left side of the work, because it was distracting. Forever Calvin is, in my opinion, an over-application of an initially great idea. Wheat sought to blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture in her works, but here failed to succeed at producing something that can be classified as a decent attempt at either.

LaToya Ruby Frazier
Though I was initially partial to Frazier's work upon first viewing because she explored the aesthetics of a neighborhood of Pittsburgh, my hometown, as I continued to look through the exhibit I became more and more disenchanted with her photography. While some of the shots were admittedly huge accomplishments with framing and formatting, others seemed to lack this direction completely. Frazier's pictures seemed to swing between a very disciplined, technical aesthetic and a very undisciplined aesthetic of randomness. This work belongs in the former category, and is a very interesting blend of progressive, related and "collaged", unrelated images bound by superfluous similarities.

Nick Cave
Before anything can be said about Nick Cave's merit as an artist, one must first acknowledge his ingenuity as an inventor, recycler, and engineer. The chaotic work is so much to take in that upon first glance the viewer is forced to confront the reality of the amount of time that it must have taken to assemble the sculptures. This sheer magnitude of effort is reminiscent outsider art, particularly Salvation Mountain in the Southwestern United States.  Upon further inspection, one finds that Caves work is reminiscent of entangling branches or roots. The viewer is presented with an airy ecosystem of birds and flowers made strictly of metal and enamel that is not beautiful or artful in-and-of-itself, but because of the effort that must have been expended by the artist to bring the piece to fruition.