|
BCA’S
Magical Mystery Tour
Some 11,000 bricks
are in Laura Baring-Gould and Michael Dowling’s new
installation, “The Four Windows,” at the Mills
Gallery of the Boston Center for the Arts. This ingredient
will surprise only those who don’t already know that
Baring-Gould habitually uses odd materials and plenty of
them —11 tons of salt, or countless thousands of cloves,
say—or that Dowling has worked on a similar scale in
his “Medicine Wheel,” 36 relic-filled pedestals
and shrines he made in 1993 to mark World AIDS Day
What’s new
about “The Four Windows” is that Baring-Gould
and Dowling are collaborating. It was BCA visual arts coordinator
Carole Anne Meehan who played matchmaker, moved by the fact
that “Medicine Wheel” is shown for only a few
days each year, in the BCA’s Cyclorama, and by “Michael’s
authorship of the piece getting a little lost in the emotionally
charged issue of AIDS,” she says. Meehan also wanted
something that would “illuminate the nature of this
space,” which is fairly funky. A white-walled gallery
recently renovated, but not so as to lose its charm, it
is plunked in the middle of one of the BCA's handsome but
crumbling brick buildings. There’s plenty of precedent
for artists revealing and reveling in this sort of old architecture,
even precedent at the BCA itself, in the Cyclorama bathrooms
that architects Sheila Kennedy and Frano Violich revamped
in 1993, making poetry out of peeling paint and rusting
pipes. Baring-Gould and Dowling do something similar, slicing
through the walls of the Mills and inviting the public to
enter a usually unseen realm, an experience like passing
through the cupboard doors in “The Lion, the Witch,
and the Wardrobe,” or through the doors in the installation
Baring-Gould created for the Creiger-Dane Gallery on Newbury
Street earlier this year.
This passage
through the walls of the Mills is the culminating event
in a route that Baring-Gould and Dowling have carefully
choreographed. It begins outside the gallery, with the four
bricked-over windows from which the piece takes its name.
Various aspects of those windows suggested the four elements
to the artists: The fan embedded in one was air, a hydrant
over another was water, and so on. The notion of an installation
about earth, air, fire and water was born. The artists hollowed
out shallow bowls in the brick pavement in front of the
windows and filled the bowls with the elements. (Their fire
permit is finite, though, so you're lucky if you catch that
bowl mid-blaze.)
After this ceremonial
beginning, you enter the gallery proper, where Baring-Gould,
Dowling and dozens of volunteers who worked in their brick
brigade have erected four huts, one for each element. All
the bricks are old, which gives them rich colors and textures.
The bricks in the water hut were borrowed from a beach,
and some are coated with barnacles; many of those used in
the air hut have a trio of holes, which makes them look
like lace.
The hut form
itself is old, too, and when talking about it the artists
mention the beehive ovens at Old Sturbridge Village, and
ancient huts in Ireland and New England. The huts are all
rounded — unevenly so, which gives them an anthropomorphic
rather than geometric presence — and they stand on
square bases. The circle coupled with square represents
heaven and earth in many cultures — it’s even
the form of the new Shanghai Museum in China — and
also reflects the circular and square elements in the Mills
architecture.
The doorways
of the huts are low and/or narrow, enough so adults have
to hunch over or even wiggle sideways to enter. Changing
your shape to gain entry puts your senses on alert, making
you more conscious of what’s inside: a pool in the
water hut; dirt in the earth one; the millet that songbirds
like in the one devoted to air; candles burning against
gilded bricks in the one consecrated to fire. The earth
hut is a spiral shape that makes you feel as if you’re
entering a conch shell; the floor of the fire hut is covered
in cloves that release the scent of warm, mulled wine as
you step on them.
The spaces behind
the gallery walls are his and hers, one by Dowling, the
other by Baring-Gould, connected by a tiny peephole a la
Pyramus and Thisbe. His space, a narrow corridor with stairs
and a gilded niche filled with potatoes that represent both
the earth and Dowling’s Irish heritage, ends in a tiny
room with benches on three sides. Reminiscent of both a
chapel and a sauna, it offers refuge.
Her space has
a wax-covered floor — wax is a signature for her —
and interior windows framing oddly lovely views, including
one of an old-fashioned radiator with stylized floral decoration
that looks like a William Morris design. By judicious framing
of views and routing you around corners, Baring-Gould makes
you aware of the bones of the building, and its wiring and
pipes, all its normally hidden guts. She exposes them, yet
keeps their mystery, by covering them with copper-colored
paint.
The magic of
small, enclosed spaces, of secrets revealed, and of primal
symbols all contribute to the delight of “The Four
Windows.” Each visitor is likely to discover —
or rediscover — private meanings here. As Dowling says,
“We make our art not to tell people what they don’t
know, but to remind them what they do.” “The Four
Windows” is at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center
for the Arts, 549 Tremont St., through Jan. 26.
by Christine Temin, Boston Globe, Living Section, p1
December 4, 1996
|
 |
