Also on display are photos from Dijkstra’s “New Mothers” series, which documents both the intense joy and sheer exhaustion of women who have recently given birth. The series is painstakingly honest, showing the fresh beauty of newborn babies alongside the harsh physical realities of childbirth for their mothers.
The second exhibit, a collection of ink drawings by Marlene Dumas, a South African living in Amsterdam, explores the interplay between historical notions of feminine beauty, photography and art. The drawings—displayed checkerboard style in an almost dizzying array—mix traditional and contemporary figures of female beauty with androgynous faces based on photographs from a book depicting insanity. The line between the beautiful and the grotesque is blurred not only by androgyny, but also by the side-by-side placement of figures as disparate as round, curvaceous Ruben-esque women and today’s waifish models.
Another display, entitled “Rejects,” shows some of Dumas’s less interesting drawings, shredded or otherwise mangled in an effort to depict the agony and alienation of being ugly in a world obsessed with superficial beauty. One gets the clear sense from Dumas’s work that in addition to being a cultural construct, female beauty is also a very loaded and emotional concept.
The final exhibit, featuring the work of 2000 ICA Artist Prize winner, Laylah Ali, is slightly more obscure and ambiguous in its aims. Drawings of cartoonish, round-headed figures aptly called “Greenheads” depic confrontational situations that appear slightly amusing until closely inspected. The figures, which seem alien-like at first glance due to their green heads, soon come to resemble human beings in compromising positions. Morbid scenes of violence show lynchings, detached limbs, captivity and fear. Ali’s fine-grained gouache techniques allow her to emphasize disturbing minute details, like Confederate flags on the belt buckles of figures resembling Klu Klux Klansmen, and to depict race issues without using black and white.
The ICA’s current exhibitions, though perhaps only weakly related aesthetically, share the theoretical mission of exploring the connections between individuals and their surroundings. More than merely providing aesthetic satisfaction, the exhibits give one ample fodder for contemplation of the relationships between the personal, the cultural and the universal.
Rineke Dijkstra’s “Portraits,” Marlene Dumas’ “One Hundred Models and Endless Rejects” and Laylah Ali, “2000 ICA Artist Prize” will be at the Institute of Contemporary Art through July 1, 2001. For more information, please see www.icaboston.org, or call (617) 266-5152.