With its new collection, ICA walks a fine line
In erecting its new home on the Fan Pier waterfront, the Institute of Contemporary Art is building a monument to art of the moment. But look out, ICA: Contemporary art can glory in tearing monuments down. For the most part, the first acquisitions in its new permanent collection suggest that the ICA is on the right track, balancing high-end beauty with more lowbrow and transgressive work.
While there's something inherently contradictory in the notion of a contemporary art museum having a permanent collection, most do -- the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mass MoCA, which operates on a comparatively lean budget, has no collection. It's a maverick institution, ambitious with its exhibitions, yet unencumbered and light on its feet, always moving on to something new.
Until last month, the ICA had no collection. But last week it announced the acquisition of four more pieces, which will be part of a permanent collection put on display this fall. The latest acquisitions are a good little group: a painting by Kai Althoff, a video installation by Christian Jankowski, and a painting and a drawing by Lucy McKenzie. This brings the new collection to 15 objects by 11 artists, including Cornelia Parker, Mona Hatoum, Nan Goldin, Laylah Ali, Marlene Dumas, Thomas Hirschhorn, Paul Chan, and Taylor Davis.
These are solid choices, mixing the big-time international names of Parker, Hirschhorn, and Hatoum with younger artists Chan and McKenzie, and locals such as Davis. They cover a decent range of media, including video and installation.
Yet building a collection, while necessary, presents a challenge. The museum should be wary of getting entrenched as a steward of culture rather than providing a vehicle for the iconoclasm of contemporary art.
Certainly, the new ICA needs a permanent collection, and Boston needs the ICA to have one. The new museum could wake up a city that hasn't thrilled to contemporary art since Monet. A permanent collection gives context to new exhibitions. More important, it's the foundation of a museum's educational programming, which plants the seeds of tomorrow's artists and collectors.
Still, the objects in the collection, worthwhile as they are, will ultimately be the most static, backward-looking part of the museum.
Art that tangles with the issues of our time, once purchased by a museum, takes on an added identity -- a degree of Importance -- that incrementally distances the piece from active engagement with this moment. Director Jill Medvedow says the ICA's collection begins with the 21st century. That's the best place to start: Now.
Already, there's a packed-in-mothballs whiff to at least one of the pieces, Nan Goldin's ''Matt and Louis in the Tub Kissing, Cambridge, 1988." Granted, it has an interesting back story -- it was on the block at the AIDS Action Committee's ARTcetera auction in 1996, but the owners of International Place, where the ARTcetera works were hung that year, censored it.
Hirschhorn is the freshest and most pugnacious of the first group. His ''Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War, One Army, One Dress" at the ICA last fall drew surprising connections between two seemingly disconnected spheres: the fashion world and the military. He builds his pieces out of materials such as duct tape and cardboard. His agenda is to disrupt: aesthetically, politically, and culturally. His ''Wood-Chain (Pisa Tower)" turns a tourist trinket into a comment on globalization.
The latest acquisitions happily co-opt some kitsch and affirm the punk element in art today. In her untitled painting, McKenzie uses an image she found on a condom machine, abstracting a pair of amorous robots in faux marble -- conflating art, kitsch, and advertising. Althoff's untitled painting addresses skateboard culture. Jankowski makes work that rings with subversive humor.
In recent years, contemporary art has often sought to question the impenetrable, ivory-tower identities museums have cultivated as arbiters of culture and history. Look at Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, whose exhibition ''America Stops Here," which just closed at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, included a handful of provocative interventions the duo deployed at MoMA almost 20 years ago. Look at Mark Dion, who has unearthed trash in museum-commissioned archeological-style digs, then installed it in a museum gallery.
With installation work, process-oriented projects, and conceptual art pieces like these, contemporary art is often less object-centered and more about creating an experience for the viewer. The glass-fronted Diller Scofidio + Renfro design of the new ICA acknowledges that museums are less cloistered today. So does the institute's ongoing Vita Brevis program, which installs temporary public art in Boston National Historic Parks. The next one, in the summer of 2007, will aptly take place across the water from the new museum, on the Boston Harbor Islands.
Medvedow reports that she's in conversation with a number of artists to commission works that will commemorate the opening of the museum in September. Japanese artist Chiho Aoshima has signed on to create a fantastical mural in the museum's lobby. Here's hoping that one of the commissioned pieces -- which will land in the collection -- will challenge the very nature of the museum. Now that would be contemporary.
