100 Artists See God
Institute of Contemporary Arts
19 Nov 2004- 9 Jan 2005
Anthony Caro explores the darker side of life with his largest and most involved project, yet...
THE POST 9/11 view of god is a touchy one: the crumbling of two buildings and the toppling of a leader has made people of all religions stand up to face their gods, whatever they are. 100 Artists See God is a sample of this examination, wrought in all mediums and mainstays of contemporary art, and celebrated in Meg Cranston and John Baldessari’s cleverly collected exhibit.
The premise of the show is that we all live in a world that is profoundly influenced by concepts of god. Those concepts come to us in part through representation. Art pictures god and that picture is persuasive,” reads the curators’ statement, stamped on the wall opposite a huge decoupage-looking amalgamation of pieces.
Set out as a huge vertical platter and numbered like a family reunion picture (read: “No. 18: Aunt Francis, married to Bernie Davis”), the exhibit features the renowned and the unknown. Damien Hirst offers a medicinal view of God via a bathroom medicine cabinet stuffed with boxes of antibiotics and pain relievers, accompanied with an excerpt poem about god’s negligence from his Cancer Chronicles. The generally unfamiliar Jeremy Deller smacked a ‘God Less America’ bumper sticker under Jimmy Durham’s My New God, and Nicolette Pot hangs a Siamese rag doll upside down for her secret childish wishes and prayers. The content of the pieces range from crucifixions of a caricature, frog-Jesus, to James Gobel’s trailer-trash looking Jesus, a photograph of a bustling record store, and a Richard Prince’s one-exposure revelation of Woodstock.
The exhibit is best viewed for the first fifteen minutes against the back wall, staring at the overwhelming amount of work and inspiration and trying to wean a whole picture, a single thought. Then, move forward, to pour over the intricacies of individual pieces and ideas.
Around the corner and up a few flights of stairs are multi-media presentations. What looks like a television evangelist is a continuous, circular argument about god, art and life; projectors cast onto a darkened wall Andrea Bowers’ Nothing Short of the Softest Word and Christian Jankowski’s The Holy Artwork, and a little television boxes in William Wegmen’s repetitive recitations of Christian spiritual jargon.
Most impressive in the exhibit is the sheer number of individual notions of god and man and religion, construed in a strange set of expressions. It includes the religious and the not, believers, atheists and agnostics, and forwards the well-known post-9/11 religious fervency, whether it be for or against god.
- Megan M. Retka
