The World as a Stage
Institute of Contemporary Art
Feb 1 - April 27

The centerpiece of the new exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art is an enormous set of crescent-shaped bleachers that curve around the gallery space like outstretched arms. They are pressed board and synthetic fiber and would resemble gym bleachers if basketball were played in the round and gyms were designed by Gene Roddenberry. Rita McBride's Arena (1997) establishes the dual theme of the exhibition: theater and life. Tightly curated by Carole Anne Meehan, this visiting exhibition from London's Tate Modern demonstrates the allure of performance to contemporary visual artists.

In an empty room, Arena might induce anxiety: all invisible eyes on you. But at the ICA the work shares space with another installation -- Jeppe Hein's Rotating Labyrinth (2007) -- which takes some of the pressure off. However, the pairing is something of a curatorial trick. While you sit in the first three rows of Arena, there is little more to do than watch yourself appear and disappear in the rotating mirrors of the Danish artist's funhouse. As Bostonist admired our own slow moving image, we realized that the Rotating Labyrinth had reflected our vanity across the room. It had become somebody else's art experience.

A warning sign in front of Rotating Labyrinth gave us pause. "Please enter with caution. The work's rotation may be disorienting." Isn't all art supposed to be disorienting?

If some of the works in the exhibition make you feel like an actor without a stage, others present a stage with no actors. In Self-Portrait as a Businessman (2002), Polish artist Pawel Althamer displays a pile of clothes, coins, luggage, and personal effects that suggest the Wicked Witch as commuter, melted away, or the leavings of Clark Kent. In fact, it was the costume that Althamer abandoned at the end of a performance piece where he played the role of Berlin businessman for a few days. When the performance was over there was no Superman. Only a naked artist in Potsdamer Platz.

Hunchback Kit (2000-2008) is a trunk filled with all the oddities you'd need for a DIY performance of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. (A warning: not even diehard Hugo fans are allowed to touch the art.) The trunk remains suspended against the wall, immobile, waiting for some monstrosity to finally be assembled. Across the room is the exhibit's most unnerving piece, Bob (2007), Markus Schinwald's automated marionette whose facial contortions and sudden foot stomps awaken that area of the psyche that still hides from Chucky.

Two remarkable works present actors in an ambiguous relationship to their audiences. Ulla von Brandenburg's Kugel (2007) is a 16mm black and white silent film shot using a mirrored ball in a garden. The ball reflects a frustrating scene: an man in a top hat performing some sort of ceremony over a man laying still in the grass. A crowd watches the spectacle. It is impossible to determine age or gender of the onlookers, and the costuming is a disorienting combination of modern and antique. With Bob standing watch over the screening, the effect is doubly unsettling.

Catherine Sullivan's video The Chittendens: The Resuscitation of Uplifting (2005) provides a note of hilarity to the exhibition. Shot in an abandoned and crumbling office building, sixteen different actors play a bizarre set of characters who interact only intermittently. They come from different worlds: the costumes range from the Elizabethan to the Georgian, through the Victorian and Edwardian to high Dillards-ian. Sean Griffin's playful, atonal score is a sort of seventeenth character. Actors on a stage, surely, but while watching the video you get the sense that there is an audience to these antics, and it is isn't you. Stick around at least long enough for the guy who is pretending to machine gun people.

No work embodies the exhibition's theme better than The Battle of Orgreave (2001) and the accompanying The Battle of Orgreave Archive (An Injury to One is an Injury to All) (2004). London artist Jeremy Deller arranged a reenactment of an epochal riot in the South Yorkshire city of Orgreave that pitted striking miners against police. It was one of the most violent episodes of labor unrest in modern British history, and it culminated in a police calvary charge through town. Rock-throwing miners were stomped and beaten.

Deller arranged for participants in the riot -- both police and miners -- to stage the reenactment under the direction of Howard Giles, an English historical reenactment expert. The resulting documentary video is a sort of artistic truth and reconciliation committee where blind human confusion leaves the causes of the violence obscure but the devastating impact of Thatcherism all too evident. The Archive includes a police shield from the combat, a worker's jacket, contemporary news clippings, and mini-documentaries on the history and practice of British historical reenactment and the riot training that Britain's police receive to this day.

The gravity of The Battle of Orgreave renders trivial the two other artworks with political pretensions. Roman Ondak's delusionally titled Resistance (2006) presents the bold and "subversive" act of wearing untied sneakers at an art opening. The work (possibly unintentionally) brought to mind the opening scenes of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, where you can determine the class and character of the two male leads after seeing nothing more than their shoes and the cut of their pants.

Also to be avoided is Andrea Fraser's impossibly snobby Little Frank and His Carp (2001). A video that starts with smarmy mugging and ends with an artist humping the Bilbao Guggenheim is the sort of thing that makes art school undergraduates and tenured professors titter -- and the rest of us groan.

Image of Rita McBride's Arena courtesy of the artist and Alexander and Bonin, New York. Image of Markus Schinwald's Bob courtesy ICA. Video still from Catherine Sullivan's The Chittendens: The Resuscitation of Uplifting courtesy of the artist and Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels. All images provided by ICA.