Mind Games at the Institute of Contemporary Art

By the time my friends and I arrived at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the line to enter the museum snaked down the block.  with a shocking wait time of 2 hours.  But with not much else planned for my Sunday afternoon, we patiently waited with approximately 8,000 others to experience the opening of the new ICA.

After 70 years in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, the ICA has expanded and reinvigorated itself with a new building located in South Boston's Fan Pier near the World Trade Center.  For its opening day, the museum welcomed visitors with a day of free admission, live music and a small but well-edited collection of contemporary art.  The new building itself is a spectacle befitting of its namesake: with walls of enormous glass windows that reflected the sunset and open waters, architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro succeeded in creating a building that is an "extension of the eyes."

Their design explores the act of seeing, allowing visitors to experience the undeveloped, sparse exterior of water, sky and asphalt both inside and outside the museum. Glancing up at the third floor windows, I saw the sky imposed upon the people inside who were looking out.  Diller Scofidio + Renfro's concept of visual exploration also seemed to have impacted the ICA's curators.

The featured exhibition, Super Vision "examines how contemporary artists have responded to and interpreted [the] changing nature of vision" with "with new technologies transforming both what can be seen and how we are able to see." While not the most novel theme for a contemporary collection, I have to admit that Super Vision was super fun.

Visitors stood mesmerized, dozens at a time, in front of "Czech Modernism Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely" by Boston artist Josiah McElheny--a neat illusion created with the employment of a one-way mirror. Another fascinating piece was James Turrell's "New Light"--an installation that appears to be a box of softly glowing red light (definitely one of my must-sees). The show included the works of several blockbuster names, such as Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter and Yoko Ono, among others. 

Also currently showing are the museum's permanent collection, Sergio Vega's full-room installation Tropicaloung, (which felt curiously like the Brazilian segment of Disney's It's-a-Small-World-Afterall ride,) and the finalists in the ICA's biennial prize for local Boston artists. By far, my favorite pieces were the works that speak to feelings of chaos, anonymity or ennui--the kinds of feelings brought on by modern communications and the affect that rapid, immediate information has on our lives. 

In the exhibition, Yoko's "Sky TV," which debuted in 1966, is translated to a flat-panel screen that showed the sky over the harbor. It was amusing to see a stream of people passing the black, "blank" screen ask a young art docent whether the TV was working, whether anything was going to show soon. Repeatedly, patiently, he replied, "Yes, it is on. Yes, it is working."

Talk about arts and culture at Entertainment.gather.com