There’s plenty of war art. At least that’s what I thought I was looking at in “The Other Tradition” show up at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery until May 7. The pieces were, for the most part, dark and scary, even when they were funny, and they made me think of all the terrible things going on in the world right now, so in my book, they were war art. Paul Swenbeck’s shocked alien critters in “Look A Beaver!” confront a natural world that’s gone awry. Ben Woodward’s “The Cat That Ate Everything,” gobbles the sweet birds of nature, and 1993 Pew poetry fellow Linh Dihn’s “Hello Cretin” assaults as it pretends to make contact and say hello. Thank goodness for Brian McCutcheon’s weird and funny “Goat’s Tongue,” a pink projection at crotch height coming straight out from the wall, with a googly eye on top for looking where else but up. And thanks for Jeanne Jaffe’s resin and paint sculpture that bubbles with pink tipped breasts and sockets and bowling-pin shapes, a close relative to the piece pictured here.
