“Whatsoever Things are True,” Houghton Gallery and 2nd Floor Lobby

Reed Burgoyne, David Maron, Rachel Matts and Erik Winkowski offer a massive, four years of work-filled collaboration this week. The collaboration, they write at the opening of the show, started with the reinterpretation of the words, “Whatsoever Things are True,” the Cooper Union motto of 1859. It’s not clear how much this group effort is a reflection on truth, or on the institution it’s housed in, though that may be possible. Spending some time with the exhibition, I kept feeling like the message was elsewhere. It’s not about truth, but the packaging. Thoughts need form to exist in the world, and the show affirms, to be communicable, so do products, signs, and information of all kinds. How that information is handled, edited and manipulated is incredibly important and can be incredibly powerful.

David Maron’s twelve small silkscreens and one larger print in the left corner give a good example of the show at its best. These prints offer more subtle information than many of the text-based pieces in the show, and manage also to be more compelling. The forms in these prints are being conjoined, spliced and bisected. They hold you and, in rich, colorful gradients, seem to move in front of you. The “23 Dead” poster, which feels so final and frightening, doesn’t let you pass it easily. Sometimes the work, or more accurately the push for cleverness in the work, becomes cheap. The posters made in famous modern art-historical styles feels tired, and the attitude in the “shut the fuck up” cake isn’t convincing.

But there are many virtues to the show, and too many to recount all of them. Part of the appeal of the show is just how much hard work there is in it, and the work is so much and so varied that it spills out into the second floor lobby with some of the more beautiful pieces in the show. One of the best highlights of the show may be its careful and committed design, down to the way in which the artist information is conveyed. Each artist has a symbol so that even when the different artist’s work is put together, little symbols indicate the individual maker. Everything has information and all of that information here gets a package.

Henry