She goes the distance to shed light on humanity
CHESTNUT HILL -- Her 1991 installation starring a fetal pig lying in a cell in Dublin's Kilmainham Gaol launched Dorothy Cross's career in site-specific temporary artworks. They grow ever more ambitious. The latest was last summer's multimedia presentation of Pergolesi's ''Stabat Mater" in a cave on an island off Ireland's western coast.
It's safe to say that the only person who has been present at every one of Dorothy Cross's mega-projects is Dorothy Cross.
She's staged installations from Zagreb to San Antonio, in a medieval convent in Madrid and a Byzantine church in Istanbul. Even her most intrepid fan, Boston College English professor Robin Lydenberg, hasn't seen every one of them. But in an opulent new book on the artist, Lydenberg brings together images of installations that were originally thousands of miles apart. It's the most comprehensive look at Cross's art so far.
Lydenberg is also the curator of ''Gone," a current show at BC's McMullen Museum that tracks Cross's far-flung projects through photographs, videos, and objects. Although Cross's themes range widely, they recur. Among them: humanity's relationship to the natural world, especially to animals; the politics and history of a particular place; and views about death in different cultures and eras.
Cross, born in Cork in 1956, has become one of the most significant artists in Ireland, where contemporary art is booming. She has represented Ireland at high-profile international events, including the Venice Biennale, her work is in major museum collections, and a retrospective of her career opens at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin on June 3.
Cross has been in past BC group exhibitions on contemporary Irish artists and contemporary Irish women artists, but the categories make her squirm. She once declined an offer to exhibit in the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. ''A ghetto," she calls it, while talking over coffee recently in a BC student lounge. Cross's passion for her work is evident even in casual conversation. She leans forward, looks you in the eye, and talks nonstop. The recollection ''I went diving in Antarctica to film under the icebergs" is delivered with the offhand tone of someone saying ''I went to the grocery store."
The current BC show may be documentary, but it is anything but dry. Photographs capture the installations from different angles and in different lighting and weather conditions. The images are silent and insidious, as if Cross sneaked up on her prey. Rather than feeling like incomplete indicators of something greater, they create a second, valid offshoot, like counterproofs made from blotting a wet print.
On Friday, Cross's 22-minute video ''Eyemaker" will be projected onto the exterior of BC's O'Neill Library, playing continuously from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. If the weather cooperates, ''Eyemaker" will draw crowds.
But Cross is happy creating ambitious events in places so remote that only hard-core fans get to them. ''I don't mind that not many people see my work," she insists. In fact, she goes out of her way to make her audience go out of theirs. Cross is particularly keen on jails and islands as settings. The pig piece, titled ''Caught in a State," was set in an infamous place in Irish history. Built in 1796, Kilmainham Gaol was where the British incarcerated and often executed generations of Irish rebels, including those in the Easter Uprising of 1916. It's now a museum dedicated to their memory -- and, in 1991, it was home to a series of installations including Cross's.
She wanted to create a work that was subtler than the stereotypical bad guys/good guys version of Anglo-Irish relations that the museum's permanent collection presents. And she wanted to include a pig, the animal the English press used to enjoy using as a symbol of the Irish.
''I wanted the piece to ask, 'Who is the pig? The British or the prisoners?' " she says. The title of the work suggests that the two sides are still ''caught" in what appears to be an endless cycle of violence.
''The authorities wouldn't let me have an adult pig in there for a whole month because of the smell," she says, ''so I rented a pig for a day and filmed it." The film accompanied the fetal pig, which lay on a bed of straw in a cell with an open door, a hint that freedom was a possibility, but one that the stillborn pig couldn't take advantage of. The BC show features a lyrical, black-and-white image of the jail's interior, which does indeed look haunted by the ghosts of past prisoners and their jailers.
In the course of creating her installations, Cross has become acquainted with an unlikely cast of characters, including a snake farmer in Texas who so loved his reptiles that he froze them after they died. Cross's installation ''CRY" -- short for cryogenics -- involved moving the frozen snakes to a walk-in freezer in a gallery at San Antonio's ArtPace.
'' 'CRY' was meant to contrast American and Irish attitudes toward death," she says. ''Catholicism teaches that life is a big warm-up for death, and that was the traditional Irish view. Americans are in total denial, though."
Resurrecting the reputation of snakes was also part of her plan. ''Christianity abused and demonized them," she says, adding that in some older cultures snakes were revered. ''In 'CRY' I wanted to encourage people to see how beautiful snakes really are."
Describing her most difficult installation to date, ''Ghost Ship," she says, ''I'm interested in taking risks." But bureaucracy almost doomed the project. Ireland, she says, is becoming overly cautious, obsessed with liability and insurance ''like the US."
''Ghost Ship" was an abandoned Irish lightship that Cross cleaned, covered with phosphorescent paint, and set afloat in Dublin Bay, illuminated by large ultraviolet lamps that made it glow in the dark. Automated timers controlled the lighting so that each night, the ship appeared, seemed to grow in intensity, and finally faded away, only to be ''reborn" 24 hours later.
For the site-specific ''Slippery Slopes," Cross suspended steel cutouts of sharks diving down a 200-foot gorge in Lewiston, N.Y., just down river from Niagara Falls. They were all the shark species known to attack humans without provocation, but here Cross showed them diving for their lives, headed toward 30 inner tubes in the water below.
Cross's work is never one-dimensional. Take her video, ''Midges," in which the roving camera ''discovers" a nude woman draped over the limb of a tree, an image that refers to Freud, Surrealism, art-history icons including Manet's ''Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe," the Garden of Eden, and even one of her own snake pieces, in which a dead albino python is wrapped around a pipe in a similar pose.
Not all of Cross's art is ephemeral. At the McMullen she has a pair of cast bronze urinals that are a lot more complicated than Marcel Duchamp's infamous ''Fountain," the granddaddy of the urinal-as-art. His was a sight gag -- and also a real urinal. Hers are political. The bowl of each is attached to a bronze map, one in the shape of England, the other of Ireland. Beneath the bowls are pipes in the form of penises that both aim for a single drain in the floor.
Cross is an increasingly prominent member of the international tribe of artists who wander the world to create projections for the facades of buildings. Sometimes the projections are site-specific, such as MIT sage Krzysztof Wodiczko's images of the faces of mothers who lost sons to gang violence in Charlestown, which appeared in 1998 on the Bunker Hill Monument.
Sometimes, as in the case of Cross's projections at BC, they're not. And while the scale at BC will be monumental, the action depicted is minute, and not fully revealed until a surprise, split-second ending.
''If you blink," Cross says mischievously, ''you'll miss it."
Christine Temin's Perspectives column runs on Wednesdays. 