In the last post I spotlighted the Clark Institute of Art.
If you're headed for Williamstown,
be sure to pop over to the adjacent town of North Adams to visit the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art,
better known as Mass MoCA. I visit the Clark to see old favorites, but I go to
Mass MoCA see things I've never seen before. #massmoca
A word on the campus and the town of North Adams: Mass MoCA
is located on the 24-acre site of what was previously Sprague Electric. At one
time, Sprague employed more than 4,100 people and its 1985 closure ripped the
guts out of a town that was already on the downward slope. In the first four
decades of the 20th century, North Adams was home to about 22,000;
today there are fewer than 14,000. Mass MoCA opened its doors in 1999, a gutsy
move in a fading blue-collar town where locals much prefer lager to LeWitt.
Naysayers predicted that Mass MoCA would be a taxpayer-subsidized flop. They
were wrong. Mass MoCA will never replace all those lost Sprague jobs—not with a
staff that's more in the order of 50, not thousands. North Adams is still
pocked by empty red brick factories and substandard housing, but Mass MoCA does
generate around $10 million each year for the local economy. Score one for art.
Here's the deal: You won't like everything you see there,
but the stuff that does grab you is
likely to be stuff you've seldom before encountered. Contemporary art differs
radically from classical art in that it's more speculative. Collectors may
spend a lot of money on pieces, but it's as big a gamble as Mass MoCA itself
whether the investment will pay off. Curators, critics, and collectors think they have
discriminating tastes, but they are often spectacularly wrong—as evidenced by
the kind of art that today hangs in conventional museums, much of which was denounced
in its day as rubbish. If you see things at Mass MoCA that strike you as landfill,
you might end up being right, but maybe not!
To show my own cards, I'm not a big fan of visual word art;
that is, pieces that are supposed to blow me away with the juxtaposition of
words—often too small to read when on the wall—with other media. I find such
works too personal to resonate broadly and, frankly, I find a lot of it nonsense
dressed in pretentious explanations. I also lose patience with most video
installations—mostly because I don't want to waste my time and energy on them.
(I also see film as a different form of mental stimulation.) My final admission
is that I can't stand the aforementioned (Sol) LeWitt. I think he' was the P.T.
Barnum of art. Others love him; thereby proving art is, in the end, subjective.
When Mass MoCA scores, it scores big. Two exhibits playing
this summer fit that bill. The first, Radical Small by Elizabeth King, borrows from Walt
Whitman the idea of the eidolon—projecting
human likenesses onto inanimate objects. The monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a form of this; ditto Pinocchio. Eidolons show up elsewhere:
carnival automatons, androids, the golem
of Jewish folktales, homunculi, shape-shifters, the folkloric fetch, wraiths,
the White Walkers of Game of Thrones….
King serves them to us visually, through uses of film, poppets, masks, small
machines, photographs, and representations of body parts like floating heads that
are stripped from the overall human physique. It's at once fascinating,
disturbing, visually stunning, and creepy.
Even more fascinating is an installation by Nick Cave, an African American artist
not to be confused with the Australian musician of the same name, though the
two share morbid fixations. His Until appears at first a riot of
pleasure: thousands of dangling glittering objects that look like a forest of
scored CDs with cut-outs. Then you walk among them and revelation dawns. Those
beautiful 'sunbursts' aren't at all what you thought; they are the flashes from
gun muzzles, which we see in the profiles of weapons and bullets that appear
when we 'see' instead of merely 'look.' Cave is also interested in
representations of race and what these mean in society. His video installation
is one of the few for which I did sit still. (Admittedly, the projected wave
pattern upon the floor is so hypnotic and vertigo inducing that I needed to
sit!) This smart, provocative
exhibit is biting social satire.
Sadly, the sculptures of Fererico Uribe are now gone, as his Here Comes the Sun was a perfect companion to Cave. Amidst
his whimsical assemblages of animals are some that stop you in your tracks: a
porcupine made of hypodermic needles, a sheep constructed of sharp scissors,
rabbits and fawns fashioned from bullet cartridges….
But that's how it is at Mass MoCA. It's a place where you
can wander in old factory corridors and then into a multi-colored tube. There are some permanent displays, such as Michael
Oatman's stunning all utopias fall, but mostly we go
there to see what's new, hip, and perhaps a classic sometime in the future. A
new building has just opened, nearly doubling the gallery space and featuring
works by a few names you might recognize: Laurie
Anderson, Louise Bourgeois, and Don
Gummer (Mr. Meryl Streep). I can't wait to return to see what's new.
Rob Weir
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