Wenger’s new vision of hell

Photography / David Elliott

Jane Wengers installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art (to March 22) is something different: a tunnel-of-torment, an intestinal envelope in which black walls, huge photos of grimacing faces and grunting, gasping sounds put the viewer under siege. Its ancestor is, of course, Goyas Quinta del Sordo, with its terrifying black paintings.

You dont need to place Wenger on that level, not even Francis Bacon, the modern horror master, is at that level. But her accomplishment is as serious and straight. It is not a pleasant show. it is not something anyone in their right mind could possibly “like”but the most interesting art surpasses the bounds of the likable.

Since 1972 Wenger has methodically developed this theme, of bodies seen very close, in a brutal light that turns each skin blemish and nostril hair into a grubby Gothic hook. Now, in a big room at the MCA, she has 10 of them, all of male faces, enlarged up to six by four feet and floating on black walls. With the visceral sound effects added, it is Goya’s Black Room advanced a step.

A sly eye wrinkles like a putrid turbot through the skin, two cold, tubby teeth “smile” beneath an oily fabric of flesh. Glazed eyes and foaming lips suggest an addict’s death mask. Exposed gums make another man seem gnawed by a joyless joke. It’s all about as comforting as meeting a shark at dusk. (There may be a Jaws connection, but it’s unintentional.)

What makes the shock interesting is that it avoids the easy violence of the horror-comic, the violence that amuses us because we know it’s unreal. These faces are too real, and therefore we want to shrink back from them. But the black walls isolate them, making avoidance impossible. The room is rather like a dim mirror maze where our own anxieties, physical and emotional, come floating in front of us. We avoid the morbidity of death by being unaware of it; Wenger avoids that avoidance by making death unavoidable.

And there is humor. The show is full of mordant fun at the way the faces don’t want to be what they are. The most ambiguous picture is the most delicate, of a young man looking at us with the expression to make you wince: he could be ready to grin, he could be ready to sob. But he doesn’t know. Neither do we.

One scribbler in the show’s guestbook suggests a that idea: rather more pungently than I do. The book’s other choice comments include “Wow!”….”Plop, plop, fizz, oh what a relief it is”… a full page of rhetorical tribute in French, and, my favorite: “It honestly scares the s— out of me. I guess it’s because I’m from Ohio.”

Beyond Swiftian comedy, Wenger has made light render a remarkable darkness. Her impressive technique turns all-too-human bodies into wounds that would speak, but can only suffer; their hearts seem flooded by a mud of misery, and its odor is cruelty. For sure, the museum is not playing safe with this show. Thanks go also to curator Mary Jane Jacob.