True confession: I dragged my feet getting to MassMoCA. After six years in the Berkshires and numerous trips to North Adams, we finally made it there January 1, 2011. I’d never been a fan of contemporary art, even though this was ostensibly the area of my Ph.D. But as a medievalist-turned-film-historian, I was much less interested in contemporary plastic arts than celluloid ones--film was still on celluloid back then--less interested in philosophical/theoretical meditations, than theological/humanist ones. MassMoCA, however, awoke my dormant medievalist and turned me into a believer.
It starts with the building. As much a monument to an era of faith—faith in industry, the American worker, and the rivers tumbling out of the mountains of the Northeast—as a Gothic cathedral, as huge, awe-inspiring, and archaic, the rugged old mill buildings that house MassMoCA are as present as the art they house. Built between 1860 and 1890 for the textile firm Arnold Print Works, the buildings were purchased in 1942 by the Sprague Electric Company, a major R&D firm that made electric components until overseas competition drove it out of business. Their cavernous spaces are ideal for monumental installations that mingle with rough brickwork, vaults and arches, high windows, and heavy wooden beams from a bye-gone era.
Purchased for a museum in 1986, the site didn't open until 1999 as its founders dealt with on-going funding difficulties. Since opening with 208,000 square feet of renovated space, the 13-acre campus has doubled and now includes a concert hall, artist workspace, office and retail space, as well as its 110,000 square feet of installation exhibit space. Unless an artist aspires, Christo-like, to complement nature, only his or her imagination limits what can be displayed here.
Among the most arresting works we saw were Orly Genger’s miles of intricately knotted, orange rope that burst through one wall and lay in piles in an adjoining room and Katharina Grosse’s enormous icebergs of Styrofoam and brightly colored earth.
Orly Genger, Big Boss, 2009-10
Mounded up in front of two stories of huge windows, its spray-painted primary colors straying onto several of them, Grosse’s installation, indeed, reminds one of a cathedral.
Katharina Grosse, One Floor Up More Highly, 2010
Evoking both the subject matter and aura of 17th century still lifes, particularly dark Spanish ones, Petah Coyne filled one windowless room with islands and hanging orbs of dark flowers, decorated with stuffed birds and animals, an installation that, eerie and claustrophobic, was disturbingly beautiful.
Petah Coyne, Everything that Rises Must Converge, 2010
Of the installations we saw, only Frederico Diaz’s cascades of black balls, arranged near the museum’s entrance, remains, but only until March.
Frederico Diaz, Geometric Death Frequency--141, 2010
A retrospective of conceptual artist Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings occupies one entire three-story building. From 1968 to his death in 2007, LeWitt created mathematically-based line configurations for wall drawings that were subsequently painted on real walls by a team of assistants. Conceived in 2003 in cooperation with LeWitt and his wife, work on the MassMoCA project began in 2007 with three LeWitt assistants directing a team of 62 artists, who filled walls erected in the 27,000 foot interior of “Building #7.” The exhibit moves chronologically and vertically through LeWitt’s work with the 1960’s and 70’s on the first floor, the 80’s and 90’s on the second floor, and the incredibly colorful and exuberant work of the late 1990’s to 2007 on the third floor.
Sol LeWitt, A Wall Drawing Retrospective
Mindful of his wall-painting predecessors, LeWitt once said, “I would like to produce something that I would not be ashamed to show Giotto.” My inner medievalist says that he has. The exhibit will be on display for the next 25 years, but don’t wait for the last day to see it!
For more images of the MassMoCA exhibits from 2010, click on our MassMoCA photo album in the column on the right side of this blog or use this link: http://www.millbrookhousenews.com/photos/Art/