Increasingly, contemporary artists attempt to produce a single, unified body of work with a narrowly defined look or identity. This modular approach means that a unique image, reproduced on a post card, or featured in a display ad in an art magazine, or used to illustrate an exhibition review, may stand for the entire body of work. The artist strives to produce this kind of logo or identity. To see but one example serves to stand for the oeuvre and all of its inherent content and subtle variations.

In a media oriented world, in which we assimilate information in bites or bits of information, reduction of content influences how an artist approaches making work. It starts in art school where instructors constantly drill into students the necessity of narrowing the focus of broad experimentation and the necessity of developing a look, style, and identity before approaching galleries and curators. The pressure is constantly to reduce the portfolio. For juried exhibitions, for example, the norm is to submit just three slides. These three projected images, from perhaps hundreds of artists competing, are sufficient to cull out the strongest works for an exhibition or grant.

Looking to the great modernists, like Picasso, Matisse, or even Mondrian, who constantly changed and evolved in their work, often in a very dramatic manner, that is clearly a thing of the past. Few major contemporary artists would take those kinds of chances of switching media, style and being willing to risk falling out of favor even if only momentarily.

There are of course exceptions. Artists like Kiki Smith and Annette Lemieux come to mind. Seeing their new work is always something of a surprise. But that has become the norm for these artists who have been consistently promoted and reviewed in this manner. It is precisely what I find interesting about their work.

More often, however, as these three, one woman shows at the ICA by Laylah Ali, Rineke Dijkstra and Marlene Dumas, all too typically demonstrate, seeing a larger sample of work by contemporary artists, selected from over a period of several years, offers no particularly fresh thinking about the oeuvre. There is a mantra like, sleep walking hypnosis as we drone through three separate but similar sensations.

Of the three artists, the color photographs in small and large format by the Dutch artist, Dijkstra, have gained the greatest international exposure. During a recent visit to London, for example, we saw some of these images displayed at Tate Modern.

The artist has quite deliberately stuck to a unifying theme. The concept is to photograph adolescents in bathing suits standing on the beach set against a horizon line between sea and sky. They always seem to be approximately the same distance from the camera lens and all fit the same proportions within the picture frame. The viewer is invited to note both the similarities and then the subtle individual differences. Reading labels we learn that the images have been shot on location on beaches as geographically scattered as Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, Croatia, Poland, Ukraine, England, Belgium and the Netherlands. The photographs lock onto a kind of awkward, gauwky moment between child and adult. The kids seem not quite to know how to strike a pose. The American boys and girls seem generally more confident and self absorbed than their more diffident opposite numbers from Central Europe.

Another series, same format and composition, features nude women clutching infants, just minutes or days after giving birth. The women look so terribly young and vulnerable and one even has a thin streak of blood trailing down her leg as evidence of her recent trauma.

In the ICA theater was a continual projection of a split screen video by Dijkstra. The format is similar to the still photographs, frontal and fixed lens. Her subjects, again adolescents, are asked to respond to a dance track. They seem self conscious as they dance, smoke, stare and occasionally break into a nervous smile. The experience of the video was simple, demanding, and subliminally powerful. There was also a sense of relief to get up and leave but the memory lingers far after the experience.

The South African artist, Dumas, makes endless variations of heads or portraits using a fluid, black and white, water color on large sheets of paper She does a lot of work very quickly. The ICA showed a dense grid, floor to ceiling, of the drawings. Again, the scale, composition and technique were modular.

The first impression is that they are all generic although clearly there are gender and racial differences. After viewing an excellent ICA video with brief interviews with the three artists, however, we learned that the heads were based on images culled from books and magazines and often represented famous people. Looking again one discovered, oh yes, that is so and so. The prevailing impression of the work was monotonous.

In the ICA’s video, it was very revealing to hear Ali, an attractive, sophisticated, articulate, young African American woman talk about her anger and rage. How, because she is, "brown," she wanted to make images that reflect her race and issues. The word that most often is associated with her widely acclaimed work is, "Cartoon." It is a word that she doesn’t like as the video makes clear. Perhaps it is better to discuss the comic strip like works in terms of semiotics.

Clearly her black rage has been filtered through a lot of art history and contemporary theory. Her signifiers, what she calls, "Green Heads," are stick figure characters with snarling, M&M shaped green heads who are acting out racinated agendas. There are some variations of hair styles and other accessories. Most are bald but there are occasional Afro hairstyles and white Cone hats. The images are generally small in scale, meticulously painted, and totally flat. The sensibility is of story boards or illustrations. The works are clean and slickly painted but visually simplistic. Because of their flatness and lack of color variation, with ubiquitous blue backgrounds, they read well in reproductions.

Ali’s narratives act out her notions of race and rage from a post modern perspective. This young Boston artist has been enthusiastically embraced by the liberal art world which represents her primary audience. This recalls hearing the avant-garde jazz of late Miles Davis sitting in an audience of mostly white folks. It was an issue that Miles was very sensitive to and one wonders if Ali shares similar concerns.

And, I also have to ask myself if that is even an appropriate question to raise. Indeed, exactly what are artist’s responsibilities to their audience. Do these questions surface only as they regard the gender, sexual orientation, and race of the artist. Why only then and why not other times.

Overall, however, these three shows at the ICA conveyed few deeply moving insights or questions. It left me with no immediate desire to see more of their work. But then, that may just express the anger and rage of an average, straight, middle aged, white male. Clearly, that is not the audience that the ICA seeks to develop.