Back to Eden, at the Museum of Biblical Art (Barnaby Furnas on Fire)

Fred Tomaselli, "Study for Expulsion" (2000)

By Bryant Rousseau

The Museum of Biblical Art is one of New York's underrated art outposts, in one of the city's least-appreciated museum districts. The area around Columbus Circle, overshadowed by the performing arts at Lincoln Center, also includes two other Top 20 museums: the Museum of Arts & Design (a Top 10er) and the American Folk Art Museum.

Despite being located inside the American Bible Society's building on Broadway at 6lst Street, MOBIA, as the museum perhaps too trendily wants to be known, generally features exhibitions that emphasize earnest scholarship and avoid any sort of unwelcome evangelicalism or proselytizing. Still, I doubt we'd ever see Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" displayed here. And as a resolutely atheist New Yorker, I confess to always feeling a little awkward when entering the lobby--my god, what if someone sees me and mistakes me for a closeted Bible thumper?

The current show, "Back to Eden," on view through Sept. 28, is part of a broad trend where museums of every stripe are bending over backward to show audience-attracting contemporary art; the show's subtitle is "Contemporary Artists Wander the Garden."

I was curious about what we'd get--how much cynicism and irony would be served up, if any, and would we get A-list or G(od)-list artists, the equivalent of contemporary Christian rock?

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, "The One That Carries Fire"

By chance, the first of the 20 objects in the show that I chose to visit left me thinking, uh-oh, we might be in for a quick exit--but not because of an in-your-face religiosity. From a distance, and with my weak farsightedness, the style seemed familiar--was it a Matthew Ritchie? Up close, I saw it was work by an artist I've never heard of, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. Nothing wrong with the large-scale, mixed-media drawing's swirling pinkish-reds, clump of actual hair and plant motifs, but "The One That Carries Fire" (2011)--that "One" would be the woman of color in the bottom rung of panels, from whose head a tree sprouts--was small-gallery ordinary and its theme struck me as only distantly related to Eden: a broadly mythic tree of life, more Earth Mother than Eve.

But then my eye was drawn to a large 7'x8' painting across the room. Before I really looked at the work, I glanced at the wall text--the artist was Barnaby Furnas, one of my favorites. The prospects for the exhibition immediately improved: So if artists of this caliber are in the show, what else am I going to find? Then I really looked at the painting--and it turned out to be a showstopper in every sense of the word: I spent the next 15 minutes absorbing the deep visual pleasures of "The Fruit Eaters" (2013), one of the best works I've seen this year.

Barnaby Furnas, "The Fruit Eaters" (2013)

Since I knew right away I was going to be spending some time here, I switched on the (free) audio guide, and the exhibition revealed another surprise: It had produced a top notch tour. Each work gets an oral essay, and each has an insightful artist interview.

Furnas proves a charming raconteur. In his telling, one of the punishments endured by humans after the expulsion from the garden is gravity, and he wanted this work to depict its effects. He combed his gessoed canvas, giving it grooves his transparent colors would flow through and puddle, producing an overall sense of a downward, distorting tugging.

The painting is rich in highlights: the sun-bright fruit, the juices dribbling down Adam's body and echoing Eve's watery, golden hair; the sinuous, seductive curves of the snake and its horned face (a face that Furnas says largely formed itself during the initial pour of paint); God Himself peeking from behind a tree, the old perv; two wholly original volcanoes spewing dark blue fumes (does any other story of Eden include volcanoes?); and a garden rendered in more opaque colors: The ground, as it were, grounds the painting. Furnas says he turned to Biblical stories looking for an inspiration for something new in our oldest tales, and he clearly found a creative spark in this story of creation. 

The rest of the exhibition, inevitably, pales next to this, but there are still plenty of interesting minor notes, from some major contemporary artists. And each stop is abetted enormously by the audio guide, which should win an award (why aren't there such awards?). Since each artist is allowed to speak in-depth about the work, no overarching curatorial argument emerges, but that's just fine. The Edenic theme is obviously an, ahem, fertile one for artists, offering multiple, exploratory avenues: the loss of innocence; cerebral (Tree of Knowledge) and sexual desire; feminism; the destruction of the natural world; and, of course, the chance to riff on art history itself, which has long tackled this subject. 

Masaccio's Expulsion (detail)

That's the path chosen by Fred Tomaselli, whose "Expulsion from Eden" (see work at the top of the post) takes its inspiration from Masaccio's 1425 fresco. Tomaselli's work features all his signature collagist moves: layers of resin in which are placed photos of insects, actual pills and paint. His usual trippy, fun, easy-on-the eye stuff. (Note to curators: Because Tomaselli's work invites such close viewing, you might want to wipe the dust off the surface every other day or so.)

Alexis Rockman, "Gowanus" (2013)

Man's corruption of the natural world is the too-blatant topic of Alexis Rockman's "Gowanus" (2013), a work I first saw in a solo show at his gallery, Sperone Westwater. The 72"x90" painting was inspired by a news story of a dolphin swimming into Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal, and quickly perishing in the toxic stew. The various visual elements represent a pastiche of Rockman's "favorite moments" of the canal (graffiti, drainage spouts spilling spooky liquids), and the canvas has a lot going on. Rockman's mother worked at the Museum of Natural History, and his frequent visits there clearly seeped into his aesthetic psyche: the painting has dozens of creatures (the museum helpfully has a guide to each), including a fishy composite made up of a zoo's worth of other animals, a la Arcimboldo. The composition is dominated by an oversize cat, a "cute monster," as Rockman says, with the rapacious habits of felis catus an apt stand-in for human depredations.

Jim Dine, "The Garden of Eden" (2003)

Sculpture and its currently more prominent cousin, installation, are the exhibition's main mediums, none worthy of exclamation, none too execrable (though one is close). In the rear of the main gallery (the museum only has two), Jim Dine's "The Garden of Eden" (2003) is the size and shape of a Japanese room screen, this one made out of steel and bronze instead of paper and wood. It's crammed with two of the objects he returns to again and again in his work, across mediums: tools and a headless Venus de Milo. The bright colors were too kitschy for me, but the backstory is touching: Dine spent a lot of time as a child in his grandfather's hardware store, which for him was an early paradise.

Lynn Aldrich, "Serpentarium"

And while Home Depot is seen by Dine as a great source for artistic material (and I agree with him), Lynn Aldrich takes a more typically negative, or at least anxious, view of consumerism: In "Serpentarium" (2002), she's created a vagina dentata-like bucket entirely out of garden hoses which, she notes, often have the color and texture of snake skin. To me, it's a one-note joke, but someone else disagreed: It's owned by mega-collector Peter Norton.

By far the most disappointing work in the show is from Mark Dion, an artist I admire enormously. His work usually puts a sharp, compelling conceptual twist on how the natural world is archived in institutions. In a

Mark Dion's four-legged snake

work commissioned for "Back to Eden," he offers a too-literal (and too-Literalist) interpretation of a snake before God cut off its legs. It honestly looks like something you'd see in the Creation Museum--which is probably Dion's point, but if any work needs a healthier dollop of irony to make it go down, this one does.

As is now apparently required by law, the show includes a smattering of video. The whacky and wonderful Pipilotti Rist has a shelf-size installation of fresh cut flowers in a vase, a watering can, and a soft-edged video playing on the vase of a woman's hands arranging flowers; the wall text says there are moments of eroticism and violence; I watched the whole clip and detected nothing of the sort. The piece, "Sparking of the Domesticated Synapses" (2010), is a bit of a

Pipilotti Rist installation and video

throwaway, and, as the mouthful of a title indicates, it's at best a stretch to include this in an Eden show. But the audio was again a saving grace--interesting to hear Rist say that she views the individuality of her camera moves as being as distinctive as an artist's brushstroke.

Nearby, and also out of thematic place, was a small bronze sculpture of a tree by Rona Pondick, "Dwarfed Blue Pine" (2009-10), with miniature casts of the artist's head at the end of branches. Note to curators: Not every artwork with a tree equates to Eden.

Rona Pondick, "Dwarfed Blue Pine"

The museum's small, second gallery was given over to a single video work: a psychedelic/spiritual muddle by (the unknown to me) Sean Capone, "1000 Paths (To the Divine)" (2014).   

But let me end on a positive note about a show which I left with generally good feeling (thanks mostly to Furnas): Two ink and acrylic drawings on mylar (always a great surface) by Naomi Reis, Vertical Garden (Falling Water) and and Vertical Garden (Weeds), from 2008 and 2007. Imagine Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic Fallingwater stacked as a modernist skyscraper, and you get the idea. The pair of works stand on their visual merit alone, but again kudos

Naomi Reis, "Vertical Garden (Weeds)" (2007), detail

for extra insight to the audio: the visible undersides of some of the structures have runic, or geometric shapes, that look like cracks. According to Reis, they were glitches carried over from the architectural software program she used to help make the drawings. She kept them because she liked the way they looked, and so did I. What to leave in, what to leave out--one of the essential questions of art.

The Rousseau Rating on a 100 scale for "Back to Eden": 79 (55 without Furnas and 46 without the audio).