Leaps of faith
A Mass MoCA exhibition examines how offbeat beliefs affect art
NORTH ADAMS -- If I told you there were leprechauns living in my basement, would you believe me? Well, would you believe that I believe that leprechauns are living in my basement? Or would you suspect I was just trying to make myself more interesting to you?
I ask because such questions go to the heart of a muddled but thought-provoking exhibition called "The Believers" at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art .
The premise is that the 13 artists and artist teams the show presents are distinguished as much for their more or less eccentric beliefs as for the art they make. One claims he's a witch. Another says she's really two different people occupying one body. A third created wire sculptures that he believed had healing powers.
The big question is, how much of a difference does knowing the beliefs of an artist make in our experience of his or her work? The answer, going by this exhibition, is sometimes a lot, sometimes not much.
Consider the artist who goes by the name Witch Vortex . That he thinks he's a witch doesn't save his ritualistic sculpture installation from resembling a set for a high school production of "The Crucible." Around a circular stone fire pit are gathered pagan deities and a mythic horned creature roughly carved from wood and brusquely painted. There are seats made from logs and topped with animal skulls and antlers, and an altarpiece displays the phases of the moon made from hubcaps. We don't actually learn much about the artist's beliefs, but if they're as hokey as his art, that's just as well.
Emery Blagdon (1907-1986) is different. A true self-taught outsider, he began making his wire sculptures late in life while living in rural North Platte, Neb. He believed his creations could channel cancer-curing energies. He also painted boldly patterned and vividly colored abstractions on scraps of wood, some examples of which are included in the show. Reminiscent of the paintings of Alfred Jensen , they're terrific.
Blagdon's wonderfully complex sculptures resemble futuristic bird feeders, space satellites, and, in one case, an intergalactic starship. He was a truly gifted artist regardless of his cockamamie ideas about his work's medicinal properties. But I suspect that without his magical beliefs, he might not have invested such intensity in the things he made. To make art just for the sake of art surely would not have been enough.
Walter Cassidy also creates sculptures out of wire and other metallic parts as well as crystals. According to the exhibition brochure, he believes his works have occult powers. Maybe viewers would feel those powers if they could see the actual works. But in this show, they appear only in large, slick photographs, which make them look more like conventional pieces of decorative design or jewelry than transformational talismans.
Then there's the young professional CarianaCarianne , who has earned not one but two MFA degrees -- one for each of the selves she says lives in her body. Here I find myself doubting on two levels: I'm not convinced that CarianaCarianne is two dif ferent people in one body, and I'm not convinced that the artist herself really believes it. I think what she's doing is a kind of sophisticated performance art designed to challenge normative ideas about what a person is. CarianaCarianne's part of the show features a video in which she and her virtual twin vow to "take a comprehensive approach to understanding all aspects of life." The installation also includes quasi-scientific diagrams and small, invented devices that have to do with enhancing ordinary human capabilities such as hearing, vocalizing, and dreaming. It all looks like the work of just one clever, highly cerebral person, so even if CarianaCarianne is two people in one body, it's not clear what difference it makes.
The Icelandic Love Corporation, a Reykjavik-based trio said to believe in the power of love, also consists of regular professionals. Their video "Ceremony Harmony," in which a pair of young women playing accordions march through a parade of motorcyclists going in the opposite direction, looks less like a true mystical ceremony than an audition for a part in Matthew Barney's next movie.
Breyer P-Orridge is the name of a married couple who subject themselves to plastic surgery in order to more closely resemble each other. Their Surrealistic-Gothic sculptures, pseudo-religious paintings, blasphemous photographic montages (one depicts Jesus with female breasts), and much-enlarged photographs of their own facial surgeries all contribute to an impression not of transcendental belief but of narcissistic commitment to advancing their own personality cult.
While the German artist Jonathan Meese delivers a sometimes funny, sometimes tedious performance in a video recorded last year in Santa Fe, his type of wild-child antics have become all too familiar in the professional art world thanks to artists like Paul McCarthy and John Bock . Having his mild-mannered, gray-haired mother assist in his performances just seems like another interesting twist. If Meese holds extraordinary beliefs, it's hard to tell what they are from the works in this exhibition, which include, along with the video, a raucous Expressionist painting with many pasted-on photographs of the artist and of his mother and a life-size bronze sculpture of what I think is supposed to be a pirate.
Scientific beliefs enter the picture, if only marginally, in the kinetic sculpture of Theo Jansen , who has created a dinosaur-size, many-legged, insectoid construction out of plastic pipes and fittings, with wing-like sails of transparent plastic. It is impressive in person, and it is also amazing to see it scuttle across a beach, driven by the wind, in a video also on view. Can Jansen's creatures evolve to the point where they have lives of their own, as the exhibition catalog says he hopes? I doubt it, and I doubt that Jansen himself really believes in that possibility, however much he may enjoy the fancy.
Another artist-scientist, Erkki Kurenniemi , is preoccupied with the idea of achieving immortality by uploading human consciousness into computers. Exactly what this might entail is not intelligibly explained by the display of documentary videos and paper documents on display, so it's hard to say where scientific belief ends and artistic fantasy begins.
More pragmatic is Plan B , a two-person team devoted to furthering utopian schemes of architecture and communal living along the lines of Buckminster Fuller's ideas. Plan B offers a geodesic dome tent in which you can study notebooks filled with information about their projects. Meanwhile on a gallery wall, slide projectors show snapshots of admirably progressive communities around the world. With Plan B, it's less a question of visionary belief than of advancing practical technological, political, and educational possibilities.
Two other artists are represented too skimpily to add much to the show: Bas Jan Ader , the conceptual artist who famously died when he tried to sail single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean, and Panamarenko , whose sculptures represent fantastic alternative transportation vehicles.
Only one artist represents belief in an orthodox faith: the onetime Catholic nun Sister Corita (1918-1986). Her vibrant silk-screened prints combine abstract blocks of color and calligraphic texts quoting the Bible, Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Camus , John Lennon, and other moral and political heroes. Her work was a kind of liberal-Christian propaganda advocating typical goals of the '60s such as ending the Vietnam War, supporting the civil rights movement, and helping the poor.
What all the variously entertaining parts of "The Believers" add up to is not very coherent artistically or philosophically. If the show had included more artists with clearly articulated belief systems, we might come away with some more fruitful ideas about the relationship between art and belief. As it is, there is only one lesson that the show affirms for sure: In the final analysis, when it comes to art, as with leprechauns, seeing is believing.
Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com. 