Repeat after them

Jason Dean's medium is bubble wrap. He popped 570 square feet of the packing material in 15 hours and 58 minutes, and he has the video to prove it. He also has the spent wrap, hanging on rolls in the Mills Gallery of the Boston Center for the Arts. The bubble wrap is part of "OCD," a show of work by artists whose modus operandi is obsessive -- whether that's expressed through seemingly endless repetitions, a scale so minute it makes you think of the artist's hands cramping, or one so large you marvel at the artist's compulsion to keep going.

There is an increasing number of these artists. Jeffrey Keough at the Massachusetts College of Art and Nick Capasso at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln are among the local curators who keep files on art trends, and both say their files on work that seems to fit the metaphor of obsessive-compulsive disorder are getting particularly fat. They, and artists themselves, say obsessive art-making is a way to control, or at least order, some element of a chaotic world.

Several artists work in obsessive ways in the DeCordova's current show, "Self-Evidence: Identity in Contemporary Art." The overlap in the two trends -- OCD art and art about identity -- is epitomized in Karin Stack's "Hair Stories," a long horizontal sequence of photos of her hair regrowing after her treatment for breast cancer.

Stack belongs to the diaristic wing of obsessive art. These artists feel the need to record their day-to-day presence on earth, like prisoners in solitary confinement scratching makeshift calendars onto the walls of their cells. There's enough art out there by artists documenting the progression of their own cancer, for example, to make a major show on the subject.

Hair is a universal obsession, a great leveler addressed in a provocative and entertaining new show at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "Hair: Untangling a Social History" offers visual examples of humankind's absorption in what grows -- or doesn't -- out of our scalps, and our excessive dedication to, among other things, making curly hair straight and straight hair curly. Gary Metz's large grid of clinical-looking black-and-white photos of the backs of people's heads makes you focus entirely on their hair, since their faces are unseen. But it also reminds you that the grid, due to its automatic organization of material, is a staple of obsessive art.

Many artists aren't as concerned with recording their personal presence as they are with the passing of time. The "Date Paintings" of Japanese artist On Kawara are a strung-out calendar -- paintings of the day, month, and year when he made them. If he didn't finish by midnight, he'd destroy that day's work. The American artist Jonathan Borofsky has done something similar with counting, writing consecutive numbers on pieces of paper, hundreds of thousands of them over the years, and displaying them in stacks. He'd interrupt and resume the project periodically, as you'd interrupt and resume a friendship with a college roommate you knew would always be there. Borofsky's counting was comforting, an obsession he could always turn to, the kind of artistic practice that resembles meditation or religious ritual.

And like meditation it requires the artist to tune out the rest of the world and focus, whether on popping bubble wrap or on making war images out of candy, as Matthew Nash does. (Nash served as guest curator for the Mills Gallery show, which includes his work.) Food is a natural subject for an exhibition about obsession and compulsion: We're a society of overeaters on a permanent cycle of gorging and dieting.

Nash links M&Ms and Reese's Pieces with the grimness of battle in "The Children's War" series, based on World War II images from the media. Children like candy; teenagers are often sent away to kill or be killed. That link is clearer in the show's brochure than in the art itself, which is redeemed by its visual allure, its Halloween palette, its aesthetic somewhere between Legos and Roy Lichtenstein. And because Nash's medium is too crude to create a sense of individual soldiers, it conveys the sad message that war is everyone's problem.

Nancy Havlick's "Sugar Egg Rug" in the Mills is composed of hundreds of elaborately adorned eggs she makes herself out of sugar and various herbs and spices used in Armenian cooking. The desire to express that cultural heritage also determines the patterns she creates, which are based on Armenian rugs. Her eggs are an ephemeral update of the bejeweled ones that Carl Faberge created for the imperial court in St. Petersburg.

Morgan Phalen cuts paper, using knives and scalpels ordered from medical suppliers. It's the scale of his work that's obsessive: The individual pieces he assembles are so tiny that making the cuts must require the steadiness of a diamond cutter's hand. The process has left one of his fingers permanently numb. His subject, like Nash's, is violence. His imagery in the Mills show centers on weapons and tools like the ones he himself uses, all falling into heaps as if magnetized.

Jennifer Schmidt uses a No. 2 pencil to fill in answers on a standardized test form, but according to her own rules -- then she prints the results in a form that emphasizes their patterning.

More than most art trends, obsession is one we can all identify with, even if we're skeptical about its status as art. Used bubble wrap will, in many people's minds, qualify as part of The Hoax of Modern Art.

But we all have some kind of behavior that resembles what's going on in the Mills Gallery show. I really wanted to pop that bubble wrap, to feel that sudden little collapse that sounds like tap dancing or a typewriter.

And how about you? Strung together any paper clips lately?

"OCD" is at the Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, through May 9. Organized by Matthew Nash.

"Hair: Untangling a Social History" is at the Tang Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., through June 6. Organized by Penny Jolly.

"Self-Evidence: Identity in Contemporary Art" is at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln through May 30. Organized by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, George Fifield, and Francine Weiss.