Lighting up Installation and illumination from Cerith Wyn Evans BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

Cerith Wyn Evans, the 54-year-old Welshman who started out as a filmmaker and is now enjoying stereo local premieres with simultaneous exhibits at the Museum of Fine Arts and the List Visual Art Center at MIT, is not your average blockbuster artist. His boldness leans to the demure; his mirth tends to be guarded. What’s more, he keeps his pyrotechnics in check, and the sexuality reflected in his art comes across with subtlety, circumspection, and infrequency. Indeed, this wry, avant-garde experimenter working in the unfortunately named genre known as installation art (show me a work of art that wasn’t installed) turns out to be an iconoclast of the first order. Cerith Wyn Evans is a formalist who both embraces and disavows form.

Seeing these quirky, sparse, self-effacing exhibits — they’re actually so self-effacing that in one instance I wasn’t sure I’d walked into the exhibit space — that succeed at making common objects weird and esoteric objects familiar, I was reminded of a stanza from an e.e. cummings poem: "spring is like a perhaps/Hand in a window/(Carefully to/and fro moving new and/Old things, while/people stare carefully/moving a perhaps fraction of a flower here placing/an inch of air there) and/without breaking anything." Wyn Evans is the consummate "perhaps Hand" in the sense that his art is all about arranging and manipulating what other people or nature itself make.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Wyn Evans has never laid a finger on any component of anything attributed to him. The centerpiece of the MFA show involves a room with seven crystal chandeliers that were commissioned and decidedly not blown by the artist. The lights within each chandelier blink out a Morse Code message — various phrases from far-flung texts that the artist finds important or inspiring. At the List Center, the remains of MIT’s first radio station, WMBR, occupy a portion of the main gallery space. Empty, outmoded, and displaced, the consoles looks like a ghost-town version of those traveling stations you see in the summer in big-windowed trailers at shopping malls or beach resorts. On the other side of the wall nearest the defunct WMBR stand three three-foot-tall 17th- and 18th-century scholar’s rocks borrowed from the MFA. Above them, a speaker in the ceiling broadcasts a found audiotape dating from 1961; "The Slide Rule Man" documents the peregrinations of a man who visited MIT "inscribing people’s names on slide rules."

Wyn Evans earns the appellation installation artist because the art he produces requires reconfiguring not just the space his art occupies but, with equal or even greater vigor, the space beyond. (MFA press person Jennifer Standley points out that at night, the flashing chandeliers create an eerie and haunting effect visible even from Park Drive.) At the same time, his deepest ambitions and accomplishments are purely conceptual. Although he occupies and defines (and fills and influences) the sites that make up his installations, his point is far more abstract.

Perhaps the most pointed evidence of his principle that art exists as a purely mental occasion triggered through whatever means by the artist is a simple neon sign placed at the base of a window that looks out over a grassy courtyard beyond the List. The luminous glass letters spell out the installation’s title: "Thoughts unsaid, now forgotten . . . " Nothing spectacular, you might say. Cute, even. But it happens that I serve as a house master at MIT, and thus I have a strong and personal sense of this achievement-driven, compulsively aware city state of a community. And it’s in this context that Wyn Evans has placed his neon sign. By degrees, you realize the poignant and almost insidious effect it’s capable of having on passers-by — would-be physicists and engineers and biologists and mathematicians who will stake their careers on articulating and not forgetting. It’s interesting to compare "Thoughts unsaid" with the neon sign at the MFA, the second work you see in that show, just to the right of the giant convex mirror at the entrance. (If you’re prone to seizures, avoid it.) After you’re through watching yourself go from upside down to right side up in the circus-worthy looking glass, a little white neon sign near the floor to the right ushers you to the next gallery. "Meanwhile . . . across town" is all it says, as if to remind you that there’s more to an art exhibit than looking at yourself in a mirror. In both instances, the artist poses a challenge to our assumptions, our intellects, and our egos.

Scholar’s rocks — a giant one perches on the lawn in front of the MFA — are for the most part naturally occurring formations that have a long and rich history in China and Japan, where they were intended as garden ornaments. The idea of the scholar’s rock lay in recognizing an object that could prompt contemplation and imagination. The twists and wrinkles and holes and concavities that deliver such graceful and unexpected complexity to wind-worn and rain-worn and time-worn limestone and tree roots (rock is metaphorical; some scholar’s rocks come in wood) have the power to captivate. In fact, an entire æsthetic built up around the scholar’s rock; its ability to resemble an animal, real or mythic, its capacity to suggest a miniature mountain (a bonsai of the inanimate, as it were), allowed certain formations to enjoy greater value than others. The human hand too could play a part in enhancing the rock’s beauty, but anonymously so. No scholar’s rock is ever signed; one simply undertook to help nature in the realization of its own process without claiming credit.

No wonder, then, that three scholar’s rocks borrowed from the MFA, all dark wood, all about the size of a breadbox, all on stands that place them at or above eye level, find themselves part of "Thoughts unsaid." Created by no one, augmented by persons unknown, physical objects meant to transcend physicality, stately and unpredictable, they resonate with Wyn Evans’s own æsthetic.

With work as strangely refined and paced and vaporous as this, placement and timing and sight lines become crucial. At the List Center, unfortunately, several important opportunities are lost. The wall that separates the scholar’s rocks from the WMBR installation prevents the machine-planed oak of the station’s consoles from confronting the rocks’ pure wood. The solitary chandelier at MIT blinking its Morse Code looks as if it were merely on a dysfunctional circuit, whereas the room of chandeliers blinking to one another at the MFA reads like a language being spoken in light. And I can’t be the only one to think that Wyn Evans had a deliberate and delicate correspondence in mind between the muscular, smooth bodies that appear in his slide-projector installation and the muscular smoothness of the scholar’s rocks; but they’re also removed from each other.

I wish Cerith Wyn Evans had been in his chandelier room at the MFA last Friday when a young father strolled in with his toddler. The baby’s response to the mute play of incandescence above him was to run from one to the other and point. That said it all.

"Cerith Wyn Evans: Thoughts unsaid, now forgotten . . . "

At MIT’s List Visual Art Center through December 31.

"Cerith Wyn Evans"

At the Museum of Fine Arts through January 30.