Through Feb 12.
Didactic art has never particularly inspired me--unless you count being inspired to throw things--so I have to admit I never had high hopes for bodyBODY: You Can't Tell by Looking. Of course Seattle audiences would get stuck with a "multimedia exploration of the women's body-image issue" (comforting, isn't it, to know there's only one issue) while Neil LaBute's intriguing play Fat Pig is entering its fourth week in New York. But I digress.
BodyBODY consists of three segments: a photography exhibition by Amanda Koster, a digital video by Kathlyn Albright, and a play written and directed by the show's activist-impresario, Vanessa McGrady. Koster's photography isn't the most offensive contribution, but it is the most didactic and irritating. She has titled her exhibit This Is Beautiful--daring you to disagree. Obviously "this" doesn't refer to any supposed sensitivity or craft in the photographs, which look like blown-up snapshots, but instead to the subjects they depict. Rounded women's forms are beautiful, she's insisting. Seriously implausible action poses are beautiful. Bare little baby buns are beautiful. Tattoos are beautiful. But my god, flesh has never looked so dull. I'd rather see the smashed lumps and bloated colors of a painting by Jenny Saville or the gauzy surface of a Juergen Teller fashion photograph any day. As far as I'm concerned, beauty is rarely a compelling subject for visual art. Human bodies are "beautiful" in only two ways, both of them dubious: beauty that propagates the species (the vestigial remnants being sexiness and big-eyed babies) and beauty that demonstrates our animal capacity for movement. A body that is nothing but a body is nothing at all.
Albright's video, What a Body!, is equally bereft of style. The editing is minimal and stuttering; there are serious sync-sound problems; and the multicultural interview subjects are filmed in close-up so their bodies don't even factor in. But the women are vaguely interesting and sometimes they even contradict one another--I know that doesn't sound exciting, but in context, it's a gift.
Then we have McGrady's utter disaster of a play, which is performed in between video segments. The only positive thing I can say about the script for You Can't Tell by Looking is that, well, it's not didactic. For something to teach a lesson, first it has to make sense. It's a dark comedy, I guess, but by "dark" I mean hazy and convoluted and by "comedy" I mean cheap and completely unfunny. The plot: A mildly overweight girl named Bibi (Mercedes Creelman) comes home to visit her bulimic sister Vicki (Angela Di Marco) and their mean plastic surgeon daddy (G. S. Michaels). The father has a stroke in the middle of the play, is admitted into, and then escapes from, a hospital, and then, punctuating the play with fake drama, keeps falling unconscious center stage--a habit that periodically alarms everybody in the house, but never enough to take him back to the hospital.
There's also an Irish suitor (David S. Hogan) with links to the IRA and an extremely wobbly brogue and a maliciously possessive housekeeper (Teresa Hogan) with an even wobblier Southern accent. As if the IRA weren't enough, there's also an offstage Argentine mobster who has just married Bibi for his green card and her delectable blackmail potential. There are some mixed-up pregnancy tests, scattered intimations of incest, and then the auntie (Betty Campbell) who's obsessed with Janis Joplin turns out not to be an auntie at all but a… oh, never mind. Fuck it. Who cares.
There is nothing subtle or human about You Can't Tell by Looking, and only Betty Campbell does anything with the lunacy of the dialogue. Whatever message about body image that McGrady theoretically hoped to convey is buried in the crushing avalanche of the plot. The lesson to be gleaned? Even art that's not didactic can be wretched.
