It's a pipe bomb, comprised of several metal tubes and a timing mechanism, partially concealed among several other objects on a table. It isn't going to explode. A nearby placard promises the reader that it lacks the necessary active ingredients. But it is in every other sense an accurate, convincing, real bomb.
This fact warps any discussion of the MFA's segment of Skyway: A Contemporary Collaboration, which includes many excellent examples of conceptually informed contemporary art. It becomes harder to talk about them. They all take place within this piece's radius.
Two work tables and a desk chair sit in the middle of the room. They are covered in a jumble of tools and junk. There are beer cans, there are food wrappers. There is a five-gallon bucket of what looks like glue. A work light cranes over the scene. It looks familiar, a slice of life from a tinkerer's garage anyplace in America. I approached it with a group of people, taking in the rich and realistic details. That was when I saw the bomb.
I was standing within three feet of it, and for a split second my amygdala was sure that it was an actual explosive device. I had the urge to get away from it, quickly.
I did move away, art-gallery niceties be damned. At last I read the placard's promises about the bomb's non-explosiveness.
There's a political rationale for the work, titled "Worktable #9, he of Righteousness." There are carefully arranged signifiers that explain to us just what kind of person the absent bomber is supposed to be. That's what the cheap beer cans and Middle-American detritus are for. Saying something about homegrown extremism seems to be artist Gregory Green's primary aim.
But it sure as hell wasn't the primary effect, at least on this viewer. That would be the queasy threat-response that the work provoked. Any thoughts of politics or society were, at best, secondary.
I'd love to talk about the other works in the show — the ones that don't traffic in implied mortal peril. Especially since so many of the works in the MFA's Skyway happen to deal with violence in ways that are far more thoughtful, artful and useful.
Anthony Record's "American Guernica" looks mythic. It shows a dark horse tumbling through space — almost as if it had been blown into the air. The animal is rendered in a strange mode that is somehow both Picasso-esque and Popeye-esque. It's striking, appealing, and troubling.
There is a similar line-toeing going on in Neil Bender's work, but the balance tips toward comic glee. An entire installation is built around a cartoon Bender drew in tribute to pro-wresting idols… when he was in elementary school. (In a long list of work dates reading 2017, the program drolly lists one from 1985.) Referencing wrestling's contortions, colors, and bodily hijinks, Bender tweaks the culture of violence that created the sport — and the sexuality it doesn't show.
Elsewhere, Wendy Babcox's photographs isolate and focus on every single bodily wound in the Louvre. Her total collection holds 7000 gore-spurting images. It's amazing how much of art history is built on blood.
The violence in Noelle Mason's "Love Letters/White Flag (Book of God)" is harder to spot at first. It's comprised of a long wall's worth of carefully embroidered handkerchiefs. Each delicate scrap of white cloth reproduces a page from the diaries of one of the Columbine killers. She's done the same thing with surveillance footage from the shooting (Editor's note: CL's visual art critic, Caitlin Albritton, reviewed Mason's work when Tempus Projects had Boys on Film in the gallery; Albritton also has art in the Skyway exhibit).
According to the catalogue, Mason's aim — which is traceable in the results and utterly fulfilled — is "taking a craft-based approach to distressing subject matter… opting for a highly physical, time-intensive engagement." In other words, it's a way of slowing down. It's a tactile method of coping with the flood of images that come with mass violence, and the vindictive emotions that follow on its heels. It breaks the cycle.
But there's an obstacle to Mason's work. It sits about twenty feet behind it, hidden among junk on a worktable. You can't look at Mason's meticulous stitchwork without feeling the bomb at your back.
Mason's work wants to help us understand and overcome violence, rejecting its methods by finding a way out. So it's tragic that at the MFA's Skyway, its approach is a casualty of another artist's more incendiary devices.
This article appears in Jul 13-20, 2017.