Fresh Produce: Art from Boston

Disproving the myth of Boston's cultural paucity is now only a matter of 20 minutes' distance by commuter rail. The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University has mounted a show with the catch-all title of Visual Memoirs: Selected Paintings and Drawings, featuring the work of area artists over the last 25 years and curated by Carl Belz, director emeritus of the museum. Belz had a large part in committing the Rose to its program of displaying local work, especially through the annual exhibitions of Boston's artists. Visual Memoirs surveys the more than 400 works in the Rose's collection acquired during this quarter century of Belz's directorship.

Defining Boston art as more than a stepchild of the Manhattan scene is a difficult task, made all the more so for the fact that, in the recent past, regional essentialism hasn't characterized the art in any obvious way. No one visual mode can definitively be called "the art of New England." The works at the Rose do share one quality, though: save a few pieces, Visual Memoirs is a wall-mounted show. What the artists manage to do with that two-dimensional, vertically oriented space is an amazing thing. Concurrent with the much-touted death of painting, the works at the Rose proclaim the interment postponed until artists no longer know how to play with, manipulate and transform the picture plane.

Sixty artists are represented, and their mostly large-scale works tightly cover the museum walls. Because the art is not grouped by themes, it is difficult to decide whether their arrangement is wonderfully transparent or transparently absent. Group shows force viewers to question whether those traditional distinctions of style, between figuration and abstraction, formalism and conceptualism, are useful any longer. Rather than rigidly opposed modes of creation, we have begun to think about them as mutually informative. The '90s, to a great degree, were about developing different models to help us attend to difference. At the same time, retreating behind the defense of pluralism has been blamed for a loss of critical rigor. Visual Memoirs is an example of an installation that walks, and occasionally wobbles on, the line between visual potpourri and meaningful dialogue, in which the viewer has to think about what unites the works besides how diverse they are.

One of the show's finest pieces is by Annette Lemieux, this year a visiting lecturer in Harvard's Visual and Environmental Studies department. "Decline," 1989, is a monumental, sepia-toned print of a pastoral scene. Recalling vintage travel posters, a snow-capped mountain ascends in the background, while the image of a waterfall cascades below. The oversize canvas has been set on the floor, leaning casually against the wall, so that at its lower edge the waterfall is cut off mid-drop. Lemieux wittily extends into the museum with a rectangle of blue plush carpet that begins on the ground where the canvas leaves off, its velvety nap now pulled in various directions and covered with the incidental spoor of footprints. The piece is a good-humored transgression of the viewer's space, and a clever juxtaposition of mass-produced objects.

Denise Marika's work, one of the only examples of photography in Visual Memoirs, highlights this absence from the survey. "Battle Photo Series (I-VII)," 1994-95, is composed of seven separate units arranged side-by-side, each a six-foot-tall strip of a photograph encased in steel channels. The once whole image becomes disembodied arms and legs. Because the continuity of the photo is broken up into segments, the original configuration of limbs is illegible. Are the intertwined bodies screwing or fighting? The frames of steel enclose and restrain the photograph's action, while the progression from one strip to the next increases the ambiguity of a presumably objective art form.

A beautifully rich minimalism is found in Maria Lewis's "The Dyad," 1990-92, a golden diptych. Within each square canvas a burnished circle gives a sense of geometric completion to the doubling. Though the two materials Lewis uses are of a nearly identical color, the dryly stippled acrylic of the painted whole and shiny strip of the inset circles have entirely different, and revelatory, qualities.

Academic instinct might suggest that the viewer compare each piece in the show with that of a well-known artist of the contemporary canon. A still life by Barnet Rubenstein can be likened to the work of Wayne Thiebaud, or an oil-and-wax painting by David Ortins seems like a disciplined Franz Kline. Yet this exhibit demonstrates that this is precisely not the point; the works are to be judged on their own terms, within their own visual languages. If anything, the most liberating aspect of the show is its unfamiliarity. It is the experience of thinking and seeing on our feet. It is the desire, finally, that John H. Updike '54 describes in his short story, "Museums and Women": "What we seek in museums is the opposite of what we seek in churches--the consoling sense of previous visitation. In museums, rather, we seek the untouched, the never-before-discovered; and it is their final unsearchability that leads us to hope, and return."

Visual Memoirs is on display through March 12. The Rose is in Waltham, at 415 South St. To get there, take the Fitchburg line of the MBTA commuter rail from Porter Square to Brandeis/Roberts. The Rose is open Tue. through Sun., 12 to 5 p.m. and Thu., 12 to 9 p.m. Admission is free.

CARL BELZ: THE INTERVIEW

Carl Belz served as director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University from 1974 through 1998. Now the mandarin of the greater Boston art scene, Belz spoke with Crimson Arts about a quarter century committed to the living artists of the area.

THC: [In the exhibition catalog] you somewhat skirt the issue of regionalism in your definition of Boston art. Have you ever felt that a scene comparable to, say, Chicago in the '70s has existed around here?

CB: For a while--in the 1940s and '50s--Boston was associated with expressionism. St. Louis has great expressionist holdings. That in fact was associated with the man who left [St. Louis] and became the director of the MFA. He brought that particular interest with him to the Boston area, and it coincided with interests at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. People like Max Beckmann had shows then, and Kokoschka. So at the Museum School in the late '40s and 1950s there was a strong identification of Boston with that expressionist tradition. But I think after this, as you get into the '60s and certainly the '70s, Boston is as pluralistic as any other place, nor is it as identifiable with any regional style. And I guess the show confirms the idea that Boston is eclectic.

THC: Where do you think the vitality is in the Boston scene, now?

CB: Over the years there have been from time to time artists' centers. Back in the early '70s there was a huge building across from South Station that was filled with artists, and now Fort Point, which is getting dislodged. It's the same old story: artists move into these spaces, and then there's development.

THC: How did you feel about the responsibilities of a college art museum?

CB: From my background, I guess I grew up with a traditional notion of what they called "teaching-related exhibitions." Places like Ivy League schools think of the university art museum as a laboratory for students studying the history of art. When I started at the Rose back in the mid-1970s I was kind of naturally inclined to provide some exposure for Boston-area artists, to broaden support. For years I felt guilty that I didn't do any so-called "teaching-related exhibitions." I guess my approach was that you put up some reasonably good works and that the mere encounter with them would be an educational experience.

Of course, you have to think of the overall goal, what the mission of the museum is--the Fogg, for example, is a kind of encyclopedic museum. When the Rose was opened in the 1960s, there was a hope that it would be based on the model of colleges like Harvard or Yale, and that we would collect from all different periods and places. It was at the end of the 1970s that we redefined the mission: that we would deal with modern and contemporary art.

THC: What was the particular experience of curating Visual Memoirs, and the concerns specific to group shows?

CB: I wrote the catalog up here [in Franconia, N.H., where Belz and his wife moved last year] and had to rely on memory for what the pieces looked like. I thought initially that maybe I could get in 100, sort of salon style, but then felt that wouldn't do as much justice to the individual artists as I wanted, so I had to start picking and choosing. As it became time to install the show I was anxious, wondering how they would hold up as they were all together. When I got to the Rose all the pieces were out on the floor, and I thought "These look good!" and that they were engaging and relational. I decided right away I wouldn't put the realist or minimalist or gestural pictures together. I thought that would not reflect accurately the eclectic or pluralist nature out of which those objects came. So we began to mix and match and on an intuitive level to think, these are nice in relation to one another. Or one piece would be realist and one would be gestural, but the color or handling were similar. It wasn't meant to be didactic; it was often on the basis of feeling.

THC: If you could characterize the decades that you were at the Rose, would you say that they followed those trends now so canonically recognized by art history, through the post-modernist discourse and the appropriation art of the 1980s?

CB: Those structures or those approaches that frame you when you're learning--it amazes me how deep they run. It was a while before I began to realize how formative they are. I often had to battle those biases that had shaped my own thinking with modernism as a business. I continued to cling to some of them while being responsive to other kinds of things and I guess, to some extent, clinging is evidenced by my ongoing conviction that modernism ain't necessarily dead and that I get frustrated sometimes with writers who want blithely to say, "with the discrediting of modernism."

Yes, modernism has, to some extent, been eclipsed. But good artists are still working in that tradition, so I hope that people aren't too quick to discredit it.