Fantastic Four

Douglas Blau, R. Crumb, Kate Gilmore and Odili Donald Odita at the Institute of Contemporary Art


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Published: Sep 10, 2008

R. Crumb's Underground

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The ICA has just opened the best group of individual shows I can remember in the space. The galleries were well-populated for opening weekend, but it was no surprise that the great majority of visitors homed in on the second floor to see an R. Crumb retrospective of sorts, where they were greeted by a life-size female polychrome statue in an unusual position.

This sort of fetishistic contortion is something Crumb's fans come to the show to admire, the limber young person offering surprisingly juxtaposed views of a round-cheeked face and coordinating underpants. Give yourself plenty of time to read Crumb's Zap Comix and to savor his mind-boggling, unhesitating linear facility. There's also a film about the artist who has made a virtue — and a brilliant maverick career — of neurotic idiosyncrasy. When I recall that Crumb traded six notebooks of drawings for a house in the south of France, I can't decide who got the better deal. When people look back at the 1960s, will they learn more from the clever coolness of Andy Warhol or R. Crumb's richer, riper, warmer slice of hippie life?

The ICA has been inviting artists to do site-specific works on the ramp connecting first and second floors for a while. Most of the projects have been so-so; however, Odili Odita's angular, multicolored Op-ish paintings work wonderfully with the space, which presents up-close perspectives and distant ones (including a view from outside the building), but not much in between. Odita's colors veer from chalky pastels to deep, rich tones, and the shapes are like crossing wedges of klieg lights.

Another area often allotted to less prestigious exhibitors is the little Project Space at the back of the second floor. When I read about Kate Gilmore's films of herself dressed in froufrou outfits bashing things with a sledgehammer or wriggling through a constricted crawl space, it sounded like the kind of gimmick a grad student enamored of Janine Antoni would think up. Maybe it is, but Gilmore pushes through mere cleverness with careful staging of a real physical struggle. I love when she pauses to casually adjust one stiletto that gets caught in Sheetrock: The yellow of the shoe matches parts of the now smashed-up construction, remaining in place to complement the video.

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The first-floor galleries usually house the ICA's most prestigious shows. Douglas Blau's art practice has been described as curatorial because he arranges conjunctions of old framed photographs and other print images; he's also a writer, which accounts for some of the canny connections he draws among images. Many of the relationships are visual: the same image enlarged or, as in postcards depicting a statue in Berlin, taken at different times by different photographers. In others, objects are repeated, reversed from left to right. Most notably, thematic subjects become formal repetitions: The insects in the "Dragonfly" works sometimes take on an overall winged form, or become bows carried by lady archers in old and new films and illustrations. The bows represent a visual motif of symmetry, somewhat like the insect form, but they are also a kind of cultural artifice and, simultaneously, a sense of predation and a stylized, subversive Amazonian challenge to the submissive roles of women.

This is Blau's first show in about a decade, and most of the work is new. The Conversation Piece, however, is an earlier sequence of political images, and it seems especially apt in this election season. Groups of men from ancient Rome to the modern United Nations gather to make laws. Huge audiences attend to the voice and presence of a single central figure. Powerful men touch one anothers' arms or shoulders and murmur words that change the world. The mechanics of power and our ways of envisioning them have altered so little — a sweeping theme, persuasively illustrated.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Institute of Contemporary Art | Douglas Blau, R. Crumb's Underground and Kate Gilmore, through Dec. 7; Odili Donald Odita: Third Space, through March 29, 2009 118 S. 36th St., 215-898-7108, icaphila.org