visiting with art

Went to the ICA in downtown Boston, a gigantic new building with walls of glass overlooking the waterfront. The pretext was an exhibit by Nick Cave, and William Etheridge.
Nick Cave made some very amazing costumes out of thrift store finds and ingenuity. As a former dancer with Alvin Alley,

he wanted to make wearable art with a lot of motion.Two sculptural pieces were done with white buttons, sewn or twisted into wire armature. One was made of gloves with the fingers embroidered on, another of children's toys, another was made of rugs. Some were beaded. Fantastical, carnivalistic: masked with buttons, beads, fur, and even with tables and mobile carts and planters turned upside down and used as structural elements.
The other artist had made a time machine that throughout repetitious movement and animations and film took you through the event horizon. Hypnotic, repetitious, traumatic, it was both mesmerizing and yet it was hard to sit through the whole sequence.
There was also a white room of melded, molded and cast glasswork, accompanied by disturbing animation of animals and stick people and the sounds of glass tinkling and chiming. The most appropriate was the animated bull in the china shop, decomposing as he trampled the glassware. Again with the strange affect of something lovely combined with something disturbing.