Beating the concept ‘Getting Emotional’ succeeds despite itself BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"Getting Emotional" At the Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston Street in Boston, through September 5.

A great exhibit by individual artists requires great art; a great exhibit by multiple artists requires not only great art but also a compelling idea. Just what makes one group show feel revelatory and another feel contrived is often elusive — but it’s not the Loch Ness monster, either. Sometimes nothing more complicated than artists living and working in the same place can point to a shared spirit and urgency. Other times, a curator recognizes a theme that could be apparent only to someone with an overview of the scene. When an organizer has insight into larger social forces influencing artistic expression, the guiding principle of the exhibit is itself an act of creativity. "John Currin Selects at the Museum of Fine Arts," "OCD" (obsessive compulsive disorder) at the Mills Gallery, and "The Amazing & The Immutable" exhibit of photography at Tufts are recent Boston-area group-exhibit examples.

A good idea for a show is like a good idea in general — it’s exact, it’s elegant, it reconciles contradictions, it takes risks. "Getting Emotional" at the Institute of Contemporary Art is inexact and takes few risks. There is elegance here, and a delightful willingness to confront problems. Yet I doubt any visitor who didn’t know the title of this show and hadn’t seen the catalogue would have a clue as to the concept. Put it another way: name a work of art in which emotion plays no part and I’ll show you a blank canvas at Utrecht. Nicholas Baume, who curated "Getting Emotional," acknowledges the vaporous nature of his theme. "Emotion is a vast and still mysterious subject," he writes. (Still? Will the mystery ever end?) And this acknowledgment, even when it sharpens into subcategories (he groups the various constituents into "Bodily Sensation," "Feelings Portrayed," "Emotional Intimacy," and "Emotion and Society"), can’t prevent "Getting Emotional" from making you feel you’re flopping along in shoes three sizes too large. Worse, there’s altogether too much that’s not good. (The paintings are mostly dreadful.) And yet I came away grateful to have seen and been made to think about certain images. High on my list are the traditional photographers (as opposed to the videographers or the photo-transfer crowd represented by Glen Ligon and Sam Durant), particularly Peter Hujar and Nan Goldin.

What’s remarkable about Hujar’s four-part 1969 series Untitled I–IV (Orgasm) is that the sequence of the young men’s faces in the throes of (what we’re told is) pleasure becomes a fifth element in the work. There’s a close-up of the head of the same handsome, black-haired twentysomething in three of the four frames. The second picture from the left depicts a blonde man grimacing. When taken in from left to right, the quartet suggest the four-part gesture that is the sign of the Cross. In the first frame, the head tilts backward; in the second and third, it moves left to right. In the last frame, the comely youth, the same guy from pictures one and three, drops his head, opens his eyes, and stares dreamily into the camera. In the first three frames, the body is off center, but in the last, where calm replaces tension, the subject appears symmetrical: two tips of shoulders, two hands beside his hair, two open eyes. Or almost open. The only unevenness lies in the eyes; one is open wide while the other’s half shut, and they work in concert with the mouth as it edges toward a smirk to make the last photo the least knowable visage. Which is surprising when you consider that he’s a different person in the second shot. Climax returns us to self-consciousness; the face takes on its public mask, whereas the anticipation of climax, the agony of desire, suggests holiness. For a sense of the tradition to which Hujar belongs, take a look at F. Holland Day’s 1898 series of photographs depicting the close-ups of the head of another young man (Day himself) in a re-enactment of the Crucifixion. Day studied the stages of death, Hujar orgasm. In both, paroxysm is followed by stasis, as it is in all creative acts, perhaps in all human labor — not to mention ocean waves, bird songs, and heartbeats.

Another major force here, a contemporary of Hujar but one who did not die of AIDS in the ’80s, is Nan Goldin. Each of her three large color photos depicts a couple; two of those (Nan and Brian in Bed, NYC, from 1983, and Cookie and Vittorio’s Wedding, NYC, from 1986) remain defiantly inscrutable, with the physical proximity offering no hint as to the subjects’ actual intimacy. Not so with the third couple. It isn’t just the configuration of the two male bodies in Jens Lying Across Clemens’ Lap, L’Hôtel, Paris (1999) that brings Michelangelo’s Pietà to mind. In both works, the seated figure regards the prostrate body in its lap with a look of terminal resignation. And both works are about surrender — to death in Michelangelo’s masterpiece, to physical union in Goldin’s homage.

Couples of a different but no less charged kind occupy the frames of Catherine Opie and Maria Magdalena Compos-Pons. Blood relations are their concern — we’re brought into the force field surrounding the union of a mother and child. In Opie’s 2004 Self Portrait/Nursing, we comprehend the extraordinary strength of a shirtless, big-boned, broad-shouldered, scarred, tattoo’d woman as she nurses her bruiser of an infant. Mother love has never looked so butch or so radically unsentimental. Parent and child gaze into each other’s eyes as if they were locked in place, not love so much as magnetism. Their union is indisputable, its exact nature unknowable.

A similar dispassionate intensity informs Compos-Pons’s 2001 Replenishing, in which two towering figures, the artist in one vertical column of three color photos and her mother in another, are united at the center by a seventh image. That picture simply shows a knot that links the threads each woman holds in her hands. From a lesser artist, Replenishing would spill over into nostalgia, but Compos-Pons reveals the humor required in the mother’s giving and the grown daughter’s continuing need to be connected, the sustenance she takes from her uncut umbilical cord.

Emily Jacir’s multi-panel installation combines written texts with photo illustrations. The texts explain what particular Palestinians wish for ("I always wanted to cherish the view of Palestine") with an explanation of why the wish cannot be realized ("I can’t go to Haifa, because my papers specify that I am from the West Bank . . . "); the photos show what the writer is being denied. In Andreas Gursky’s May Day II, 1998, a nighttime aerial view of a seething crowd — fists raised toward some unseen stage — conjures all the danger and none of the fecundity of a lava spill.

Non-photographic highlights of "Getting Emotional" include two videos, Darren Almond’s Traction, which is about the artist’s father’s workplace injuries (the nonchalance devastates), and Christian Jankowski’s What Remains, which captures various people’s reactions to a movie about which we know nothing.