Eye candy In the DeCordova’s multi-hued ‘Pretty Sweet,’ white is right; plus Lalla Essaydi in New York BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"Pretty Sweet: The Sentimental Image in Contemporary Art" At the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, through April 17. "Lalla Essaydi: Converging Territories" At Laurence Miller Gallery, 20 West 57th Street, New York, through February 26

The strength of "Pretty Sweet: The Sentimental Image in Contemporary Art," the expansive, ambitious, and uneven new show at the DeCordova Museum, lies in its both throwing the net wide and throwing the net where few dare fish. With 33 artists and tons of work — literal tons when you include Annee and David Scott’s stenciled Volkswagen — "Pretty Sweet" represents an unapologetic embrace of what most people, or at least most museum and gallery goers, painstakingly avoid in works of art: direct emotional appeal.

Over the past decades, the groundwork has been laid for this show with the willfully self-conscious three-dimensional assemblages of the brothers Chapman, the psycho-drama installations of Sandy Skogland, and the Disney-on-crystal meth confections of Jeff Koons. Sentimental, yes, but sweet those antecedents are not — their emotional reach is too expansive. And they’re certainly not sweet in the sense of that word as it’s employed in staging this exhibit. Tearful puppies, crying babies, kissing couples, forlorn stuffed animals, affectionate family photos, rouged dolls, and various cartoon figures — not to mention installations in the form of junk-filled attics and basements and living rooms and sheds — occur in such abundance that the insulin-dependent and hypoglycemic should consider themselves warned.

Nick Capasso, Pretty Sweet’s curator, cogently addresses the question of "what is sentimental" in the exhibit’s catalogue. He writes that the emotional spectrum of "sentimental" includes "love, happiness, delight, comfort, innocence, vulnerability, serenity, security, sympathy, nostalgia, bittersweet melancholy, and pleasure." But wait, there’s more. Capasso goes on to say, "The sentimental also parallels the quaint, the precious, the cute, the domestic, the beautiful, and the picturesque."

You might think from the extent of that litany that he was describing the emotional spectrum of the show, but for the most part, he’s not. It’s a hypothetical riff, not a descriptive one. Although "Pretty Sweet" enjoys an abundance of the cute, the quaint, the domestic, and the nostalgic, it runs thin on a whole lot else that Capasso speaks of, namely love, happiness, delight, and beauty. In short, any positive emotion predicated on complexity or nuance or ambiguity finds only a small presence here. On the whole, "Pretty Sweet" is pretty simple. This show is less often about the sentimental, as defined by the curator, than it is about the uncomplicated, the straightforward, the unsubtle, and the cloying.

Yet whenever the complex does sneak through, whenever the contrary undercurrent of a sentiment is allowed to find expression, the show stops being a mere confection and qualifies as a substantial course. In an exhibit as chock full of color and components and sprawl as this one, Kathleen Bitetti’s quietly unsettling Lullaby III, the first work you encounter, stands out for its ghostly austerity. Positioned at the foot of the museum’s great staircase, the installation centers on a tree stump surrounded by a picket fence on which a small cradle balances precariously. Everything but the shiny, pointed, finishing nails that fill the cradle like lethal straw has been painted white, as if the installation were an apparition of itself, a specter. White, too, are the identical plaster birds that line up along the ledge of the nearby window like mute albino buntings standing guard. The snow-covered hill just beyond the windows of the huge, open staircase made it seem as though the frozen outdoors had recast itself indoors as the ominous setting of a fairy tale. Further, with the whiteness beyond the windows forming the backdrop, it took me a while to realize that it’s not only the nearby ledge that’s occupied by the bleached birds: all the ledges of all the towering windows teem with same cloned figurines. Revealing itself by calculated degrees, Lullaby III transforms childlike imagery into intimations of mortality — the stuff of adult nightmares. Neither sentimental nor sweet, Bitetti’s installation sets a standard that a handful of the works on display prove equal to.

Outstanding among that handful is Robert Arnold’s send-up of love and desire and good looks and maybe heterosexuality to boot. His ever-changing continuous-loop video The Morphology of Desire marries irony to techno-camp as one kissing or about-to-kiss, hand-holding or parting, embracing or post-coital man and woman morph into each other in the space of a heartbeat. Harlequin Romance cover becomes breath-mint commercial becomes movie poster, and the heartbeat it takes the couples to transform is literal. An audible lub-dub of a beating heart accompanies the video loop as stereotype transforms into stereotype, as one set of perfect teeth and blond hair becomes a different set of perfect teeth and black hair, as one square-jawed stud phases into another. Everybody’s white, everybody’s manufactured — but that’s not all The Morphology of Desire has in common with Lullaby III. Bitetti’s birds stand denuded of color, a tree is rendered as if it were cement, a white picket fence surrounds what could be home only to ants and termites, and where we ought to see an infant, we get nails. In Morphology, intimacy lasts little more than a second, intensity enjoys the depth and duration of the blink of an eye, and passion becomes a joke played by time.

One of the difficulties in seeing a show as abundant and all over the place as Pretty Sweet is the visual onslaught. With so much that vies to be brighter, denser, and bigger, it’s easy to tire or dismiss or plain not see. But Neil Salley needn’t worry: his depraved and commanding Keeping Them Safe packs the wallop of a new horror flick. You enter a dark room to the surrounding sound and feel of a relentless vibration. There you find seven chest-tall pedestals, black, so you have to walk carefully among them in the darkened gallery, and each surmounted by a clear, giant jar. Hovering inside each jar is a three-dimensional video projection of the same naked boy, a miniature Icarus whose wildly beating wings account for the enveloping pulsations. Like his wings, the boy is ghostly white, and though it’s the identical kid in each jar (he looks as if he’d been lifted off a daguerreotype), what he’s up to from jar to jar changes: reading a book; upending an alarm clock; staring out at the world with his face fixed in a grimace. It’s like looking at seven captured hummingbirds with human bodies. Salley has turned the childhood bee collectors into the bees, has fused Victorian putti with the family photo, Christmas cards into a freak show. We keep our children safe, the artist appears to be saying, in the same way we keep our zoos populated; it’s all about the pleasure of our looking.

Noteworthy too are Ann Wessmann’s meticulously woven works fabricated from human hair, Lucy White’s informed primitives, which she makes out of band-aids, and Ben Freeman’s photo collages, which juxtapose antique pictures of little girls with the calendar babes some of them grew into.

NOT INCLUDED in Pretty Sweet are the recent works of a Boston artist whose show in New York takes the notion of sweet in another but complementary direction. Lalla Essaydi’s photos of Islamic women, teenagers, and girls are genteel yet often effective studies of oppression. Wrapped in white cloth and set within cloth-draped rooms, these staged tableaux are covered with Islamic calligraphy. Nothing, not an inch of the abundant material or a trace of skin on face or forehead or foot, hasn’t been written on with henna in Arabic script. The result is that the women feel doubly imprisoned, first by the cloth, then by the superimposed language.

And yet in many of the photos, the women are seen applying the calligraphy. They themselves appear to be the makers of the bars of language behind which we see their plaintive eyes. In one shot, we witness the cascading dark hair of the back of the head of a figure in a circular cape. The cape is inscribed with the same language that the woman is seen applying to a wall. In a nearby triptych, a woman almost entirely covered in an inscribed dress (but for her feet and forehead and eyes, which are also painted) moves off to the right. A tremendous train flows from her formless garment, at the end of which two bare-headed women apply more calligraphy. The two who are painting look as if they wanted to hold back or at least publicly mark the one who might be trying to walk away.

The most powerful work in the show is the most stationary, four female figures in descending height behind barriers of cloth and painted language tracing a trajectory of gradual imprisonment. The tallest woman can’t be seen at all; even her eyes have been covered by an impenetrable veil. The next tallest looks out with just her eyes; the pre-teen beside her can be seen full-faced. Only the little girl to the right enjoys an uncovered head, yet her position in the hierarchy combines with her knowing yet resigned expression to dramatize her thin, ephemeral freedom.