Education of the senses: Diller Scofidio + Renfro's splendid new home for the Boston ICA explores the relationship between culture and sight

Art in America, March, 2007 by Tom McDonough

Nowhere is this signaled more clearly than in the other major component of the fourth floor: the small "Mediatheque" suspended from the underside of the cantilever. This is a digital media center, where visitors can sit at computer stations and access information about the artworks they've been looking at in the adjacent galleries. It is also a kind of counterpoint to the large, 325-seat theater located along the western side of the building on the second and third floors. If that space is all about the collective and immediate experience of culture, the Mediatheque proposes an archetypal experience of the digital realm: atomized and thoroughly mediated. DS R subtly heightens this distinction through brilliant architectural strategies: in the theater, which is completely opened by glass walls on its western and northern frontages, one looks out over the pier and harbor with a comprehensive, level gaze (this view may be partially or completely blocked for the exigencies of performance); in the Mediatheque, whose tiers of seating incline downward at an almost alarmingly steep angle, one looks down directly into the dark water of the harbor, with neither sky nor horizon visible. It is a disorienting space, both physically and psychically, and it aptly captures the exhilarating and disturbing weightlessness of the digital ether we now inhabit.

These spaces, and the consistent attention drawn to the framing of vision throughout the museum, owe much to the best of Diller Scofidio's earlier work, notably their unrealized Slow House (1991), a beach house on Long Island conceived as a study in the architectural and technological mediation of the "view." And like Slow House, the ICA owes a distant debt to the dramatic house Curzio Malaparte built for himself on the island of Capri, overlooking the sea, in the early 1940s. Famous as the setting of Godard's 1963 film Contempt, the Casa Malaparte, too, is a grand(iose) stage for vision, carefully choreographing glimpses of the rugged cliffs lining the shore and finally providing a spectacular panorama from the vast platform of its flat roof. Sheltered under the ICA's cantilever is a grandstand adjoining Boston's Harborwalk, accessible to the public; some have compared it with the grand staircases of museums like the Metropolitan in New York, but this seems to fundamentally miss the point. This is neither a space for ostentatious display, nor is it a transitional passage where one leaves the mundane world of the street and prepares to enter the transcendent realm of Art. Rather it is, like the theater (whose tiered seating it clearly echoes and implicitly continues) and the Mediatheque, a site for the consummation of vision--an extended reflection, in part, on the legacy of Malaparte's still under-recognized contribution to contemporary architecture.

Nicholas Baume's inaugural exhibition, which occupies the west gallery of the fourth floor (the eastern wing being taken up, notably, by a display of works from the ICA's newly constituted permanent collection), is titled "Super Vision" and in some ways complements the theme of visual Bildung enacted in the architecture itself. Initially conceived by Baume while he was still contemporary curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., the show was expanded in scope to what we see on display at the ICA: 27 artists from around the world, represented by an array of paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos that are meant to explore an interrelated set of issues concerning technologies of vision, surveillance and the ability to see the infinitesimally small or the tremendously distant. And indeed much of the work does just this, from the prying technological eyes set to work in videos by Mona Hatoum (Foreign Body, 1994) and Tony Oursler (a series of "Eyes" projected onto spheres from 2005) to Chantal Ackerman's three-room video installation From the Other Side (2002), which tells the story of an anonymous Latin-American immigrant to Los Angeles from a variety of visual and narrative angles. Investigations of what has been called a "technological sublime" are pursued in Thomas Ruff's jpeg msh01 (2004), a large-scale photographic reproduction of an image of the erupting Mount Saint Helens pulled off the Internet; Julie Mehretu's explosive canvas Dispersion (2002); and even, arguably, Andreas Gursky's vast panoramas of the spaces of global capitalism (represented here by the hotel interior Shanghai, 2000, and the racetrack at Sha Tin, 1994).