I was looking thru some old pics on my camera and came by some from when I was visiting Boston not too long ago and stopped by the lesser known DeCordova museum in Lincoln, MA (very historical, right next to Concord, looks now kinda like a mix of the deliberately quaint-colonial and wealthy suburb, I looked up the average house value or whatever and it's crazy, but I digress …) so the DeCordova museum focuses on sculpture, they have an indoor museum with various things, I was mainly there to check out the Lotti Jacobi amazing photographer active in the bohemian circles of New York, Paris, Berlin mid-century focusing on candid stuff …
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love the contrasted colors the silhouetted dog her almost Mona Lisa ambiguous three-quarters smile.
was a really cool exhibit, she was both very technically proficient and great at finding candid shots and setting them up (using a large format camera, looking down into the mirrors no less); Jacobi actually did a photograph of my grandfather who was a part of those bohemian circles (not on display of course but it was this family connection that drew me to it) but anyway amazing stuff you can find loads of it online
so that was cool; looking at their website some of their shit is hit or miss but there is definitely a lot of interesting stuff there temporarily or permanently
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But one of the really interesting things about this museum is the permanent sculpture garden outside which is full of a lot of stuff that is just bizarre and enigmatic, but is cool and resonates, I'll riff a little bit about each one.
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so smooth and polished yet so uncanny (in the Freudian sense), man and beast in a form definitively created painstakingly by man; this little form seems to capture so many little men we encounter day to day, a rat, we'd say as an insult, but perhaps ought to be said more sympathetically, trapped on a wheel; now looking at the viewer almost forlorn, as if begging, the shortened arms and legs not enough to extend a hand for help or offer one
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the natural backdrop is sublime
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more humanoid forms invoking simultaneous associations with trees, primitive tribal art and ritual, skeletal decay and yet organic overgrowth, writhing in pain, ecstasy, travail, mystical, occult transformation? the wicker man, or, in modern Internet lore, slender-man, said to have inspired killings? (long after this sculpture was done and not directly related but speaking to collective unconscious images and fantasies)
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toying with and appropriating classical forms but subverting them in medium, gesture, and overall gestalt; gesture seems to say, come, yet stay away, a common pathology in human relationships and in society in general in how we interact with one another individually and en masse
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surrealistic, inactive, impossible machines still infused with a menace of violence, rusting, left to decay, like the tanks of the Afrikakorps after Rommel was routed, dark and foreboding visions of the wars of the last century and the anxieties that followed, tanks and bombs and nuclear holocaust, yet harkening back somehow also to a more optimistic Futurism antedating the Great War … with Nature itself providing the judgment on the wisdom of this approach by its exogenous contribution to the artwork in the form of oxidation, another reference back to decay and death and inevitable (and eternal?) return
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the photos are gone but the sculpture garden is permanent and has much more stuff
if you're in Boston/Cambridge area I'd recommend it. with a little bit of a walk through a particularly quaint part of the town (after the strip mall and school) it's accessible by public transit too or from Boston like a 20 minute ride by car maybe idk
meant to post this back sometime in September but I did now and here it is
call it a sculpture trip report
