Maverick minds

The DeCordova's annual exhibition

by Christopher Millis

"THE DECORDOVA ANNUAL EXHIBITION" At the DeCordova Museum
and Sculpture Park, in Lincoln, through September 6.

Few annual exhibits enjoy the track record for eclectic quality that's been achieved by the DeCordova Museum's yearly showcase of New England artists, and this year's gathering of paintings,

installations, ceramics, and photography maintains that institution's deserved reputation. Although it's not a seamless exhibit, the care and intelligence of the show's curators combine with the maverick accomplishments of some of its artists to make the '99 Annual Exhibition a gratifying event.

The highlight of this impeccably mounted and sensitively calibrated exhibit is the wry, magical, and forlorn oversized photography of Robert ParkeHarrison. ParkeHarrison's gift lies in dramatic, gently surreal narratives that position a real man in unreal yet believable situations. In one frame, our hero has shimmied up the stem of a giant dandelion. His wide-open mouth has blown away the feathery seeds of the desiccated blossom, each the size of a doghouse. The seeds, helium-light yet elephantine, the softness of their material transformed to dagger-pointed solids, float away in an aerial ballet that occupies three-fourths of the frame. Homy and bizarre, quotidian and otherworldly, it's an image halfway between nightmare and reverie.

In another frame, the same man can be found standing at attention in the lower left quadrant of the picture on a precisely cut square of earth surrounded by a channel of water. And we witness, with the delayed surprise of the figure before us, the water's other bank to the right, a coastline of natural irregularity -- except for a square incision that corresponds to the dimensions of the man's sod raft. Somebody has set him adrift, and it's hard to know whether the work's title, Promisedland, refers to the parcel he's floating on or the continent he's been severed from, whether isolation or belonging is the fulfillment of promise.

The athletic, middle-aged man with the sideburns and receding hairline appears as the central character in each of the artist's photographs. In Restoration he's riding a primitive tractor attached by twine to a nearby row of disembodied, fantastic engine parts. In Windwriting he's seated at a desk in an open field, wearing a weathervane-capped hat and writing with a cudgel-like instrument that's attached by multiple threads to an outcropping of huge, mutant sunflowers. No matter what the occasion, our hero is always clean-shaven, formal in his posture, and suited in what resembles a 19th-century tuxedo.

He's ridiculous in the way Charlie Chaplin is ridiculous, a figure of solitary absurdity whose garb and forthrightness and can-do enterprise are at odds with his helpless confrontation with the elements. Small touches of personal control, like the top hat that remains in place as he floats away in Promisedland, underscore his pathos and quixotic appeal. ParkeHarrison's uniquely American vision (every scene takes place in what looks like a fallow field in Kansas before a twister), his dwarfed gran-diosity, suggest a talent as wide as the West.

The other highlight of this year's show is photography rich in drama and exaggeration of a different kind. Kevin Bubriski shoots Japanese women and men who at first glance look as if they'd just dropped to the ground from a bomb blast. In one image we see a woman's grimacing visage inches away from the camera's lens; she looks as if someone were stepping on her back as she resists mightily to keep her face from being pushed into a puddle of water that reflects and distorts her agonized features. In another frame a naked man in white face and body make-up occupies a similar attitude of having been struck from behind -- with the difference that he looks up and into the camera with an expression of virile hatred.

Gradually over the course of Bubriski's pictures you become aware that these are not candid shots of war victims or lunatics but staged shots of dancers or mimes (they are in fact Japanese butoh dancers), and with that realization comes a momentary letdown, an attenuated version of what the audience must have felt after Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" broadcast, when the shocking news report turns out to be a calculated drama. Yet once you understand what you're looking at, Bubriski's best images capture the expressive register of the performers he chronicles, making you want to eliminate the middleman photographer and see the performers yourself.

The weakest constituents of this year's DeCordova Annual Exhibition are the two installations, one by Gene Gort and the other by the team of C.M. Judge and Atsushi Ogata. Both suffer from a lack of visual clarity combined with overbearing sound effects. Gort's has the greater promise, offering an only slightly obscured videotape of a dead bird being devoured by maggots and flies while on an opposite wall a man you wish were wearing clothes can be seen tumbling in space. That combination of corporeality juxtaposed with disintegration could have been made compelling, but unfortunately these videotapes are only a part of the show. On the floor between the two film loops lies a pattern of square panes of glass or plastic onto which some amorphous, watery images are projected from yet another machine accompanied by deep gurgling sounds. And then there's the collage of photos of what appears to be a construction site. Ultimately it's confusion and not effect that abounds.

Confusion does not mar the Judge/Ogata installation; they know exactly what they're about, and they're prepared to throttle their audience into compliant appreciation. You enter an entirely dark space (having been warned not to touch the work of art by a sign outside the first black curtain), but before you do, the very loud, oh-so-scary sounds of a low-budget splatter film begin their assault. Once you're in the chamber, unable to move for the darkness and unable to bear for long the adolescent decibel blasts, what you get to see for your troubles are six pairs of human feet sticking up from an area of sand. In itself not bad, except that the makeshift cemetery has been made into a projection for a film loop of black shadows that move across the motionless feet. As a film still, this could be momentarily exciting; as an installation, it's puerile and pretentious.

Also included in this year's show are Eleanor Miller's polite and unobtrusive yet appealing oil paintings of vegetative debris that appears to be floating in water, as well as Jane Smaldone's naive landscapes and portraits of her young daughter. On display too are Laylah Ali's angry cartoons -- teeth-baring stick figures with black masks and round heads who do nasty yet unidentifiable things to each other -- plus Michelle Samour's decorous abstractions on handmade paper and the more metallic-seeming and industrial-feeling abstractions of Greg Parker, shiny grids in dark grays.

Bruce Barry's ceramics are, typically, pear-shaped pots with small stemmed lids, the entire surface superimposed with finely scrolled words (journal entries, it turns out). They're interesting anyway. Cameron Shaw's three pieces include a headless black mannequin standing before a full-length mirror; unfortunately, the piece competes with two other works by Shaw, a nearby skull in a glass box and a giant inflating and deflating tire, also in black. More, in this case, is not better.