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Into the void

George Kott's provocative paintings

by Leon Nigrosh

WORKS BY GEORGE KOTT, JOSEPH ARMATRUDA, AND PETULA BLOOMFIELD at the ARTSWorcester Gallery at the Jewish Healthcare Center, 629 Salisbury Street, through August 23.

George Kott has made art for more than a quarter of a century. Throughout the years, he has shown a piece or two in group shows around the area. But thanks to ARTSWorcester's community-outreach program, Kott at last has been given enough space to show a wide range of his thought-provoking work.

ARTSWorcester has just inaugurated a new satellite gallery at the Jewish Healthcare Center on Salisbury Street, and Kott's work dominates the premier show. Not only does he command attention for the sheer size of his work and for having the greatest number of objects on display (25), but each piece is filled with multiple layers, giving his work moody nuance and ominous meaning. Kott, however, denies that this is the case. "I don't believe in meaning. And you can quote me on that."

Billing himself as "Your one-stop postmodern art fabricator," Kott injects a continuous note of cryptic cynicism into discussions of his work. He claims that his main interests are to collect dust, burn things, and generally disassociate from humanity. Almost in spite of himself, he masterfully brings together these three particular aspects so they play a significant role in much of his work. His large box sculpture Look for Them in the Home Furnishings Department of Better Stores Near You is a good case in point.

First assembled in 1992, Look for Them has been presented in several different venues. Most often, however, it stood in Kott's studio gathering dust. Dissatisfied with the visual interior clutter, he recently ripped out much of the material, doused the remainder with lighter fluid, and torched the piece. In its current incarnation, Look for Them, which carries an unintended allusion to Asian architecture, presents a haunting and darkly charred visage of some indeterminate space that simultaneously attracts and repels.

A similar feeling is created in Happy Jack, a well-worn and brutalized panel with an ax attached blade outward at eye level. Kott insists that this is merely a portable version of a vignette he saw leaning against a door, yet visitors have associated the piece with Jack the Ripper.

In some cases, Kott alters his sculptures minimally, preferring to present them as "readymades" in the manner Marcel Duchamp and his friends employed in the early 1900s. These Dada artists took everyday objects and elevated their status to art by showcasing them on walls or pedestals, often attaching curious titles. Not to be outdone, Kott has mounted a complete, exposed box bedspring on the wall and anointed it The Boy Airship Pirates and the Secret of the Whistling Sphinx. He has also wall-mounted an antique portable egg safe -- a spring-loaded metal box for the transportation of eggs -- and titled it Universe in a Box. Asked if this might contain references to the early days when he worked as an assistant to sculptor Joseph Cornell, known for his shadow boxes, Kott says he doesn't want to talk about it.

But we are free to make our own suppositions, and in light of the fact that Kott did work with Cornell, who was enamored of Emily Dickinson, it is no surprise that the most recent body of Kott's work has literary overtones and contains titles that reference Dickinson's writings. These large wall works are made from torn pages of 18th-century Latin books, heavily coated with burnt-milk paint, and stretched out to create fragile and mysterious bas reliefs. The latest from this series, Studies for Emily's Making a Hell of a Racket Upstairs: Slowly Dreaming, is ominously suspended from the ceiling. Although Kott says these works are only compositional studies, you can't help but attempt to attach meaning to the ghostly Latin works that emerge randomly through the cloudy paint.

Kott's fourth grouping is made up of drawings like Rambles 'Round Old Barsoom that are so densely worked that the images appear as lightning flashes in a darkened sky. His Study for a Lost World consists of etching ink and chalk applied with such intensity that the page is virtually a black-on-black representation of entry into The Void. And to hear Kott tell it, that is the ultimate goal.

Gallery hours are from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily. Call 755-5142.