all utopias fell, 2010
Phoenix
Massachusetts Museum
of Contemporary Art
Through October 27, 2013
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| Humanity's last gasp? |
The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) is
often a challenging place. Housed in a sprawling repurposed factory complex in
North Adams that from was headquarters to Sprague Electric 1942 to 1985 and a
paycheck for some 4,100 workers, Mass MoCA presents the kind of art a lot of
people don’t “get” and provides open space for installations that are too large
for traditional art museums to touch.
One of the best ways to enjoy Mass MoCA is to follow
filmmaker Jonathan Demme’s advice: stop making sense. It’s a place in which the
visual is often its own reward. Suspend your narrative dreams. Give up the need
for the representational. Don’t ask, “What is it?” Just enjoy what it is. Go
ahead and read the artists’ statements if you must, but don’t be surprised if
you’re no more enlightened than if you hadn’t bothered. Two current exhibits
that demonstrate the fascination possible if you don’t insist on objective reality
are Michael Oatman’s all utopias fell,
2010 and Xu Bing’s Phoenix. Hit
Mass MoCA before the end of October to catch each exhibit–Oatman’s fantasy is
in the courtyard and closes for the season sometime around Halloween; Xu Bing’s
assemblage comes down after October 27.
Oatman’s project began with a fascination for the ruins of
the Sprague buildings and the pragmatic and artistic possibilities a postindustrial
canvass provides. You enter all utopias
fell, 2010 through the remnants of the Sprague boiler room. (See “Sprague
in Black and White” in the photo albums section of my Facebook site.) It’s like
walking through a geometric graveyard constructed from iron and rust, and is
the perfect welcome mat to part one of Oatman’s construction, The Shining. Oatman imagines a post
apocalyptic world in which humankind has been conquered by an unseen alien
force. He takes an old Airstream trailer and rigs it to look like a makeshift
spacecraft that force landed by the Mass MoCA boiler room. Taking his cue from
everything from the work of Giotto to Buck Rogers and Jules Verne, Oatman
leaves resolution to the eye of the beholder. Are we seeing humanity’s final
outpost, or the possible seeds of a new society?
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| What's going on in here? |
The inside of the “ship” won’t enlighten you. It’s called The Library of the Sun and it’s a cross
between living quarters, an ongoing chronicle, and an improvised laboratory. We
don’t know where its occupant might be–hidden, taken by aliens, long dead….
There are cryptic references to the sun and other symbols that defy logic.
Equally baffling is the stained glass window in the back of the trailer.
Salvaged materials? A nostalgic attempt at simulating banal domesticity?
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| A touch of home, or something else? |
And
from the trailer we also see part three, Codex
Solis, an array of solar panels that is visually interesting and quite
practical–they work and generate about 3% of Mass MoCA’s power needs. So maybe
a slice of utopia after all?
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| In the belly of the beast |
If this isn’t enough eye candy for you, check out Xu Bing’s Phoenix in about the only building that
could house such gigantisms. Xu Bing is Chinese, but lived in the United States
for two decades. He returned to Beijing in 2007 and, as anyone who has been
there knows, he returned to a city obsessed with obliterating the past and
building anew. For an artist working with found materials, it’s a trove akin to
living inside a junkyard. Xu Bing’s vision was to marry the past with the
future, which he has done by fashioning two massive dragons from materials
salvaged from demolition and construction sites. Each of his two
“dragons”–wires, machine parts, LED lights, steel rods, and broken tools–is
nearly one hundred feet long. They are, at once, familiar looking and so alien
that we might imagine them as Oatman’s bringers of the apocalypse. And like
Oatman’s assemblage, Phoenix is so
breathtaking that it’s best if you merely experience it, not try to comprehend
it.
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| Scales of the Dragon |
Mass MoCA road trip? You bet! And while you’re there, check
out what Tom Phillips and Johnny Carrera did with the written word (Life’s Work) and Mark Dion’s eccentric
musing on preservation shelters (The
Octagon Room). Rob Weir
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