
The
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts never ceases to impress me with their group exhibitions, both with their fearless curation and with the wonderful breadth of art they manage to pull in, and their latest
Moby-Dick show is no exception. I made it over there today on the show's last day, and I only regret I did not tell you about it earlier (I'm going to be better about that in the new year I swear). Taking Herman Melville's classic American novel as its jumping-off point, the exhibition is divided into three sections that deal with the preparation for the voyage, the ocean itself, and then the encounter with the whale, each area presided over by videos of a god-like Orson Welles dramatically presenting passages from the book. Really they had me at Welles, but then there were Richard Serra's large-scale "Ishmael" drawings, black-and-white photographs by John Gutmann of old-school sailor tattoos, and Tacita Dean's immersive
Disappearance at Sea II film, a personal favorite of mine and a still from which is pictured above. And that was just in the first gallery. In the ocean portion of the show Hiroshi Sugimoto's luminous seascape photos glow from one wall while Susan Hiller's photographic studies of different types of waves face them on the other side of the room. Marcel Dzama contributes two of his wonderfully twisted and dreamlike drawings, while a stack of Felix Gonzalez-Torres posters, in this case picturing the surface of a body of water, sits in the middle of the floor freely available for the taking by visitors. Upstairs Dzama's painting of the eye of the white whale invites you into the Moby-Dick gallery, which is literally dominated by a giant sculpture of the beast and also contains scrimshaw, harpoons, a scientific film by Jean Painlevé about diatoms, and a whole wall of the incredible Rockwell Kent drawings that were used in a 1930 edition of Melville's book. A number of the artworks on display were created specifically for the show, and they create a rich narrative through their juxtapositions with the other pieces that had been selected for how they might speak to the themes of the novel. Shows at the Wattis always activate my curiosity in a unique way, and I love the feelings of surprise and connection I experience as I move through the galleries. This exhibition is the second in a trilogy at the Wattis based on novels that encapsulate the American experience, and though I am still kicking myself for missing the first in the series, the
Wizard of Oz show, I cannot wait to see what they will do in the fall of 2010 with
Huckleberry Finn.