Gender benders? ‘Cars’ at the MFA, ‘Chairs’ at the Gardner BY JEFFREY GANTZ
	"Speed, Style, and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection" At the Museum of Fine Arts through July 3. "Chairs" At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through May 8.

You wouldn’t have to be Harvard University president Lawrence Summers to detect a gender gap between the current major shows at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. "Speed, Style, and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection" is big, overflowing the MFA’s Gund Gallery. (Ralph’s 1958 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa sits downstairs in the West Wing lobby, a teaser for this ticketed exhibition.) "Chairs," a collaboration centered on photographs by Gardner 2002 artist-in-residence Dayanita Singh, is so tiny, its main component seems lost in the museum’s intimate special-exhibition gallery. "Cars" hits you with living, breathing Technicolor: black Bugattis and Mercedes, silver Porsches and McLarens, red (do they come in any other color?) Ferraris. "Chairs" is swathed in muted, tea-tinted black-and-white. "Cars" is about isolation; "Chairs" is about community. "Cars" is all speed; "Chairs" is all stasis. "Cars" is male; "Chairs" is female. Like men and women, however, "Cars" and "Chairs" also have a lot in common. Both shows focus on objects that the art world doesn’t regularly recognize as art. Both shows are about sitting, which is how we spend much of our waking life; yet neither show makes sitting possible: the cars are off-limits, the chairs are only images. Both shows are devoid of human figures, even as they recognize it’s humans who give these objects meaning. Both shows are concise (16 cars, 25 photographs); both give you time to think. So as "Cars" and "Chairs" reach out to each other across the Fenway, perhaps the gender gap is apparent as well as real.

MFA director Malcolm Rogers has had his own gap to consider, the one between a legitimate exhibition and a commercial moneymaker that promotes the Ralph Lauren name and line. It’s bridged by the first car in the show, a 1933 Bugatti Type 59 Grand Prix. The thin spokes of Ettore Bugatti’s signature piano-wire wheels radiate in a sunburst pattern, without the usual overlapping for strength. Already art and speed are in conflict; the sleek, compact Type 59 delights the eye, but as the decade wore on, it couldn’t keep pace with the Grand Prix powerhouses from Germany and England. At 4300 pounds, the 1929 Blower Bentley makes no such compromises; yet it has its own blocky beauty. (This was the car, in "elephant’s-breath grey," that Ian Fleming initially chose for James Bond, and he remains a Bentley Boy throughout the novels.) The 1930 Mercedes Benz "Count Trossi" SSK, on the other hand, is a German version of Italian futurism: its original owner, Count Carlo Felice Trossi (who would go on to race Alfa Romeos), designed the coachwork and had it built in England. There’s a hulking feel about the SSK all the same, with its Batmobile-like tail section.

Germanic-versus-Italian is one of the show’s running themes. There are four cars from Germany (two Mercedes-Benzes, two Porsches), four from England (the Bentley, two Jaguars, and a McLaren), and eight from Italy (three Bugattis, an Alfa Romeo, and four Ferraris). The Germanic cars tend to the masculine, with hints of aviation and even rocketry: the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing Coupe with its seagull-wing airplane doors: the 1955 Jaguar XKD with its monococque fuselage and aerodynamic sharktail fin, a car that won at Le Mans in ’55, ’56, and ’57. Yet the sexy 1950 Jaguar XK120 Alloy Roadster had Hollywood calling; the first XK120 to arrive in America was claimed by Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall also owned one. The Porsche 550 Spyder, simple and speedy (it weighed just 1350 pounds), is the car James Dean was driving on September 30, 1955. For that matter, Sophia Loren and Zsa Zsa Gabor had Gullwing Coupes. Any woman exiting that car, Lauren observes on the show’s audio guide, would flash an eyeful of nylon.

The Italian cars are more sensuous; they suggest men who love women. The 1937 Bugatti 57SC Gangloff Drop Head Coupe is a town car that’s equal parts aristocrat and gangster. The 1938 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic Coupe, the poster car for this show, is a entirely different animal, one with an exoskeleton. Earlier Bugattis had been made of an alloy that was difficult to weld, so the chassis sported button-head rivets; the Atlantic’s aluminum chassis was weldable, but Jean Bugatti (Ettore’s son) liked the rivets, so he kept them. The Alfa Romeo and the Ferraris (Enzo Ferrari worked at Alfa Romeo before starting his own company) have their own quirky masculine-feminine sensibility, their own distinctive sound and curves that look different on each car yet stem from the same equation. The yellow Scuderia Ferrari shield tells you you’re looking at a creation that’s as much horse as machine.

The ultimate dialogue in "Speed, Style, and Beauty" is the one between life and death. Speed is the driver’s hope of outrunning destiny, but it’s also his — almost invariably his — date with destiny. The 550 Spyder is the car in which James Dean met his death. We’re spared the sight of the Bugatti Type 57G, the car in which Jean Bugatti, just 30, died during a test run in 1939 while trying to avoid a bicyclist (his father collapsed on the spot eight years later and died shortly thereafter), or the 156 F1 Ferrari in which Wolfgang von Trips and 14 spectators died at Monza in 1961. Those would have been even grimmer reminders of the price of art.

The catalogue for "Speed, Style, and Beauty" ($60 hardback, $37.50 paper) mostly lives up to the PR hype ("breathtaking"). There’s the now expected disconnect between exhibit and catalogue: in place of the show’s 1988 Porsche 959, the publication describes 14 other cars from the Lauren collection, including a 1973 Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona Spyder that proves Ferraris come in black as well as red. The audio guide flubs the elder Bugatti’s name (it’s ETT-ore, not E-TORR-e); the catalogue makes painful reference to the "flare of Italy." But Ralph Lauren knows cars; his commentary on the audio guide confirms him as a driver and not just a collector. Malcolm Rogers would have us believe that cars are art. He’s right.

Chairs, in their own domestic, denigrated women’s-art way, have always been art, but what’s on view at the Gardner is a little more complex. In the weeks before Dayanita Singh’s arrival at the museum in 2002, she had been photographing empty interiors in Calcutta. Inspired by the Gardner’s chairs, she went on to meet furniture scholar Fausto Calderai the following year, "conversing with chairs" in Fiesole and Florence. Comprising five parts, "Chairs" is the product of her dialogues with Calderai, designer Andrea Anastasio (with whom she traveled to the South Indian city of Coimbatore in 2003), filmmaker Michael Sheridan (part of whose video documentary can be seen just off the gift shop), and the Gardner staff.

Singh’s photographs encircle the special-exhibition gallery, 25 of them ranged in a single row at eye level, with no labels. The handout at the entrance to the gallery will tell you which ones are from India and which from Italy and which from Massachusetts (three shots of Gropius family furniture and a chair from the Gardner’s Raphael Room), but it hardly matters. Whereas "Cars" makes a fetish of identification, of objectification, of names as objects, "Chairs" strands you in real time and space. And whereas you interact with each of Ralph Lauren’s automobiles in your imagination, Singh’s photos do their own interacting — the Gardner might as well have called the show "Chairs Conversing." Not just chairs, either, but tables, doorways, windows, mirrors, portraits, wide expanses of gleaming floor, and countless books, these last often spilling out of their shelves and piling up on the tables and chairs. The chairs themselves come in all varieties: theater seats, folding chairs, armchairs, chaises longues, reclining chairs, what looks like a barber chair, even cushions on the floor. (No rocking chairs, however, and no sofas.) Singh shoots them from a middle distance that draws your attention to their surroundings: as they wait for someone to sit in them, they’re straining to hear what’s going on in the other rooms or outside. Poised in an empty space between a vase and a lamp on one side and a telephone on the other, Gropius House Chair (Lincoln) looks small and vulnerable to ambush from whatever’s outside the huge picture window behind it. Covered Chairs (Coimbatore) draws the eye to its sea of polished floor, above which the three chairs seem to levitate; it’s as if their owners had died and they’d been prepared for suttee. All the messy reality that’s been designed out of Ralph Lauren’s cars has found its way into Dayanita Singh’s photographs.

That’s the beginning of "Chairs." In an alcove outside the special-exhibition gallery, Singh and Anastasio have created "Amnesia," whereby Singh’s photographs are projected onto the back of an 18th-century Italian walnut chair in a way that invites you to contemplate the relationship between image and object, "fine" art and "decorative" art. In the Long Gallery on the third floor are displayed the tiny contact-sheet black books that Singh made as presents for Calderai and Anastasio. (A similar black book functions as the "Chairs" catalogue; it’s as minimal as the "Cars" catalogue is effusive.) In the second-floor Little Salon, Singh and Calderai have rearranged the blue 18th-century Venetian chairs and sofa; instead of looking ready to host a party, the room now appears to be in the middle of one, with chairs drawn up in groups that suggest social hierarchies, latecomers, gossip, people trying to butt in or eavesdrop or pry someone away. And in "Conversations," the excerpt from Michael Sheridan’s documentary, you can see Singh and Calderai sitting on the floor and sorting through photographs, or Calderai and the Gardner staff white-glove-moving the furniture in the Little Salon, Sheridan’s split-screen technique underlining the "dialogue" nature of the entire "Chairs" endeavor. That should return you to the special-exhibition gallery for a second look at Singh’s photos — which, like Lauren’s cars, are different each time you see them. "Still and still moving," T.S. Eliot would have said. Totally different and yet the same.