Lou

I went up to Boston a couple of days ago and just got back. It was quite the adventure; a cold and miserably wet adventure (90% of the time I was there) however the good company and birthday events made up for it.

We went to two museums; The ICA and the deCordova. The deCordova seems to have a pretty good sculpture park but it was too wet and cold so we didn't see it. The work we did see was indoors and was fairly good; it consisted of all Massachusetts artists (at least I think... the majority were anyhow). I wasn't very enthralled by most of the work there except for one video piece that was composed in a very compelling manner. I'm not going to go into detail but, in a nutshell, there were about six or seven flat screen monitors, each playing the same video at slightly different intervals so that one scene would lead into the other. The content was alluding to loss of land and Native American culture (I think... something to that affect).

The ICA was quite good... I haven't been disappointed yet. There is an exhibition going on called Acting Out; the premise is "social experiments in video" I really found them all to be pretty strong but the video I liked the most was by an artist named Artur Zmijewski. Zmijewski organized a studio workshop where Polish nationalists, conservative Catholics, Jewish activists, and social leftists created and desecrated each other's symbols of belief. What was initially a playful collaboration turned into a pretty intense visual battle. It was a fairly innocent activity but it was interesting to see how emotions elevated so quickly... It was almost as if I/the viewer was watching the begginings of how a huge revolutionary war develops (It felt that way to me at least)... pretty crazy.