Damián Ortega at the ICA: First look

The next big exhibition at ICA/Boston opens to the public Friday. The museum hopes "Damián Ortega: Do It Yourself" follows shows by Shepard Fairey, Tara Donovan and Anish Kapoor in becoming a big draw as well as a critical success. Nothing could draw as much buzz, good and bad, as the Fairey show, of course. Still, the first retrospective of this well-regarded ex-political cartoonist from Mexico City should make another step in the ICA's journey to make Boston a contemporary art hub in a way it's never been. And while the exhibit comprises only 19 works, there's plenty here to discuss.

The show-stopper is "Cosmic Thing," from 2002, a VW bug that has been very carefully exploded into its component parts, which hang from the ceiling. The Beetle is ubiquitous in Mexico, exhibit curator Jessica Morgan told the assembled media at this morning's preview, renowned for the simplicity that allows owners to do their own repairs. Ortega says he wanted to present a deconstructed system, "a three-dimensional diagram"; his motives in most of these works lean toward deconstructing systems and objects rather than the political or emotional. I don't think "Do It Yourself" will hit the funny bone in quite the same way as Donovan's bizarre topographies made of everyday objects - at a gut level, she won over even many contemporary art naysayers - but "Cosmic Thing" does make an impact that can't fully be explicated in the wall text.

Ortega's English is a little halting, but he answered questions for a while. Much of the art here, he said, comes from the idea that "you have to deconstruct an object, to open it, to see how it works." A video of him slowly cutting into a golf ball to get to the liquid center was simply a recreation of a childhood experiment. And Ortega (below) says the retrospective is a chance for him to find the links behind disparate works from different periods of his career. "The connections are something I enjoy," he said with a trace of a smile, "and I try to learn, also, about what I did."

It's not hard to read political meaning into "False Movement (Stability and Economic Growth)," the 1999 work in the foreground in that top picture. Three oil barrels are connected in such a way that when the platform under them rotates, they appear to be spinning on each other's rim like tops. From across the room, it's a potent illusion, and from a former political cartoonist, it's hard not to read as a direct commentary too.

It's easy to draw meaning from 2002's "120 Days" in which the curvaceous feminine form of the Coke bottle is distorted in a variety of ways by Italian glass blowers under his direction. A series of photos of building material outside humble Mexican and Brazilian homes offers both formal and human value. And Ortega's architecture-inspired 1998 "Tortillas' Construction Module" (below right),offers an interesting collision of city-in-the-sky modernism and Mexican culture.

But other works are conceptual experiments that don't translate to the viewer. Consider the three iterations of "Skin," in which he cut out of leather the floor plans of apartments in three iconic buildings in Mexico City, Warsaw and Berlin - and then hung them from the ceiling so that they resemble bunches of scrap. This is apparently a comment on the failure of the architects' utopian ideals, but all it got from me was a shrug.

I still can't make up my mind about his elaborate 2007 work "Nine Types of Terrain," which is housed in its own room. Nine projectors screen film loops, each one of a formation of oversized bricks toppling like dominoes. There are straight and curvy lines, spirals and whatnot. Read the text and you'll learn that the formations are based on Sun Tzu's descriptions of battle techniques, and that the barren ground where they topple is in Berlin on waste land formerly occuipied by the Wall. It's a fairly complicated conceptual project, and perhaps easily dismissed by the mass audience, but stand there for a couple minutes listening and watching as the dominoes fall, and you may come under its spell.

The show will be up through Jan. 18, and no separate admission is required.

Comments

[Thomas Garvey]

Just btw, the Shepard Fairey show was not a critical success. No national art critic gave it a positive review; the Times called it "a kind of visual easy listening for the college-educated masses."

[лечение наркомании]

cool!!!