'Dangerous Curves: The Art of the Guitar'

November 2 - 9, 2000

[Art Reviews]

Guitar crazy

From high art to high camp

by Ted Drozdowski
"DANGEROUS CURVES: THE ART OF THE GUITAR." At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston November 5 through February 25.

When it comes to guitars, musicians know that if it ain't got that twang, it don't mean a thang. The sound of an instrument is foremost. But there's more to guitars than meets the ear. There's contours, surfaces, different types of wood and grains, steel and plastic and composite materials, knobs and dials and inlays and decorations and paint jobs in nearly infinite variations. And each instrument says something about its designer or its era, or the type of music it was meant to play. It says as much about its culture -- in some cases -- as a sculpture or urn or statue or photograph or poster or painting. What you'd expect from any work of art.
Hence "Dangerous Curves: The Art of the Guitar," a colorful and thoroughly entertaining exhibition that opens at the Museum of Fine Arts this Sunday. The show is a stroll through four centuries of guitar design, as represented by 129 instruments that run from high art to high camp. There are guitars that were played by pop stars: Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Kix Brooks, Les Paul, Prince, J. Geils, Joe Perry. There are guitars that date from the instrument's birth: an ivory-and-tropical-wood beauty from 1590 by the Portuguese luthier Belchior Dias that's among the oldest surviving 10-strings; an Italian 10-string (tuned in pairs, for greater harmonic clarity) from 1690 that's a tribute to painstaking craftsmanship with its breath-taking checkerboard pattern back and sides and oval neck inlays made of ebony, ivory, fruitwood, bone, and spruce. And there are oddities like Nicholas Voboam II's 1693 curio, which was made from an entire tortoise shell re-outfitted with ceramic head, feet, and tail, and a Hawaiian-model Stroh lap-steel guitar that directs its sounds through a trombone-like bell resonator.
Unlike most of the museum's ticketed exhibitions, this one includes a richly detailed audio guide with the price of admission. An MP3 player that's self-activated with a touchpad, it features narration by folk-rock performer James Taylor and verbal cameos from the likes of classical musician Sharon Isben and blues god B.B. King. There are also full-length song recordings to accompany each family of guitars on display: Baroque instruments, harp guitars, jazz arch-tops, blues hollow-bodies, antique parlor acoustics, Hendrix's Flying V, and more.
Darcy Kuronen, the MFA's curator of musical instruments, spent two years assembling the exhibition, borrowing from other museums and private collectors and soliciting the occasional donation like the ultra-contemporary Fly Artist from Ken Parker of Wilmington, Massachusetts -- a sleek wood/carbon/glass-fiber work of ergonomic and electronic precision that hangs near the end of the Gund Gallery.
Despite the guitar's current status as the most popular musical instrument, "Dangerous Curves" -- likely the first serious museum show devoted to a single type of instrument -- seems risky. Sure, guitarists and pop-music fans will come, bringing new faces through the museum's doors, but will an art crowd more conditioned to viewing touring collections of Picasso or Monet attend? After all, the electric guitar -- which accounts for a significant though not overwhelming portion of the exhibit -- is also disdained by many who fancy themselves acoustic-music purists (a distinction, it's worth mentioning, usually relevant only to non-musicians).
Kuronen and Malcolm Rogers, the MFA's Ann and Graham Gund director, are hoping for the best. Rogers explains that one intention of "Dangerous Curves" is to show how "perhaps something we take for granted is actually a beautiful piece of artwork as well as supremely functional, the result of hundreds of years of craftsmanship." To that end, the exhibit is structured, Rogers says, to "explain how fashion, times, and musical tastes have influenced the design of the guitar."
The guitars are contained in three rooms. The first, labeled "Guitars: Baroque and Classical," offers examples from the instrument's earliest days. These bear intoxicating filigrees of pearl and ivory, their soundholes often filled with wood-sculpture labyrinths that plunge three or four layers into their hollow bodies to keep tones soft, bright, clear, and ringing. It's a lovely marriage of form and function these old instruments -- including a relatively plain 1700 model that's one of two existing guitars made by famed violin builder Antonio Stradivari -- display. These guitars look charming because they were meant to be. They were used by troubadours performing for their royal sponsors, or in salons where men and women turned them into tools of courtly seduction. Taylor's narration and the musical examples that accompany this room's contents also explain the instrument's evolution from four pairs of strings to five and six and then to six single strings, and from the parlor to the concert stage.
"Guitars: By Popular Demand," the second room, captures the instrument in its most evolutionary stage. The industrial age brought steel strings and plectrums into play, and a neo-classical craze that spawned some of the most curious items in the collection: harp guitars with extra resonating strings or double bodies, lyre-shaped guitars, guitars with bell-shaped shells and elongated bottoms that rested on the floor. As well as mass production. Then the advent of popular folk, country, jazz, and Hawaiian musical styles spawned cheap kid's guitars like a Harmony with a cowboy campfire scene painted on its surface, the plastic Maccaferris, and far more impressive works like the flat-topped dreadnoughts that became a staple of country and folk, the gleaming all-steel resonator guitars favored by bluesmen, and the sensuous lines of the high-gloss arch-top -- which benefitted from some of the earliest experiments with electrical amplification.
The final room, "Guitars: Rock," houses the Post-World War II hollow, semi-hollow and solid-bodied guitars that have become the talismans of today's popular music, from Leo Fender's Telecasters and Stratocasters, which perfected mass-production and gave players the right instruments to usher in the rock-and-roll era, to Les Paul's versatile namesakes and state-of-the-art items like Ken Parker's inventions and guitar-synthesizer controllers. These are guitars whose shapes were influenced by everything from Cadillac fins to alligators, psychedelic drugs, and Star Trek. Perhaps the most revolutionary is the odd acoustic-electric Chrysalis guitar -- a lovely-looking graphite-and-fabric concoction that is partially inflatable and takes inspiration for its design and resonance principles from insect wings.
The exhibit concludes with a video reel of some of the great practitioners, from Les Paul & Mary Ford to Bonnie Raitt and Kurt Cobain, at work. Other videos depicting guitar construction, old-time string bands, and the like are placed throughout.
Curator Kuronen stresses that the way these instruments sound is an essential element of their function as art. To that end, the MFA has scheduled a host of concerts, round tables, and other events. There'll be a discussion/performance series with classical-guitarist Christopher Parkening (November 15), Latin guitarists Claudio Ragazzi and Aquiles Baez (December 6), and rock granddaddy Bo Diddley (January 10) -- all at 7:30 p.m. in the museum's Remis Auditorium. There will also be guitar-making demonstrations on November 5, December 3, January 7, and February 4, plus a round-table discussion on guitar design November 19 and one on collecting (with Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen) January 14, both at 3 p.m. in Remis. And the MFA's Chamber Music Series will offer a series of six concerts ranging from "The Soul of Flamenco" (November 12) to "From Ellington to Jobim" (February 18).
A related installation, "Music on a Long Thin Wire," by sound artist Alvin Lucier, has been set up outside the museum's Gund Gallery. Lucier's piece uses an amplified wire and magnetic fields to generate tones, much like an electric guitar. And the Museum School will participate with "Dangerous Waves: Art of Sound," a series of sound-art exhibits, lectures, and performances at the school that kicks off with a concert/reception on January 24 at 8 p.m. by Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore and electric-harpist Zeena Parkins.

Tickets for "Dangerous Curves: The Art of the Guitar" are $16 on weekdays and $18 on weekends for adults; $14 and $16 for seniors; $6 for children 6 through 17. They are available at the museum box office, via NEXT ticketing at 542-4MFA, or through the museum's Web site at www.mfa.org. More information on all events is also available via the Web site.