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Published: December 29th 2011
Entrance to MassMOCA
Entrance to MassMOCA, which was once Sprauge Electronics. The large mass of black balls is an outdoor sculptureMassMoCA
Today I plan to see art, and lots of it.
I started at the museum across the river from the Porches Inn,
MassMoCA.
The museum
began life as the Arnold Print Works, which became the largest manufacturer of printed cloth in the country.
Thanks to many factors, they went bankrupt in the depression, leaving a very large empty mill complex behind.
Sprauge Electronics, which made capacitors and other components, then took over.
They ran the place for the next fifty years, becoming the cornerstone of the North Adams economy in the process.
Unfortunately, they could not cope with competition from Asia (most electronic parts are now made in China and Taiwan) and were forced to close the mill in 1986.
North Adams faced the real possibility of becoming a ghost town.
Rescue came from a much unexpected place.
The director of the Williams College Museum of Art had long wanted a place to display installation art and other pieces too large for traditional museums, and the abandoned mill seemed just the place.
After a decade of fundraising and renovation, the mill reopened as an art museum.
The
old buildings were mostly gutted to form huge galleries.
The largest is half the size of a football field!
The museum can feel a bit like a circus at times from the size, but it’s a vital stop.
There were three shows on view when I visited.
The most important was by
Katharina Grosse.
Katharina works in the intersection of painting and installation art, spray-painting directly on architectural elements to force people to look at their environment in a new way.
She turned the largest gallery into a dump (literally, with huge Styrofoam forms and piles of dirt) and then covered it all in swirling streaks of spray paint.
I’ll never look at a construction site the same way again.
The second show was called “Exchanges with
Sol LeWitt.”
The museum has a huge display of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings (they take up an entire building) and this show complements it.
Sol LeWitt exchanged work with other artists throughout his life, to expose himself to new ideas and to seed others’ creativity.
After his death, a Brooklyn gallery created a memorial by asking thousands of artists to
Berkshire Museum
Dinosaur sculpture outside the entrance to the Berkshire Museum send work they would have exchanged with him.
A selection of this work is displayed in the show.
Sol LeWitt was a founder of conceptual art, and much of the work is conceptual in nature.
Like all conceptual work, the effectiveness varies considerably.
The best work for me were pieces that showed how a particular artist had taken Sol LeWitt’s ideas or methods and made them their own, such as a piece where an artist asked family members how to create a piece for Sol LeWitt, and then followed their instructions to the letter.
The third show was a series of large scale sculptures by
Petah Coyne.
They feature exceptional craftsmanship, and unusual materials like hot wax, pig iron, and taxidermied birds.
The theme of most of the work is the struggle of life against the inevitability of death.
I enjoyed this one the least.
The detail and work involved is incredible, but I didn’t like how it expresses the theme overall.
I got one other rare treat in the museum.
They way it is arranged, the only way to get to some galleries
Midtown
New York skyscrapers at night on the way to the Armory Party is by passing through other galleries.
One of those galleries was closed for installation.
The layout meant that the installation process was on full view of the public, and there was nothing the museum could do about this.
I had never seen the process in detail before.
Part of it is highly design focused, as curators and others discuss how to arrange pieces within the space.
The rest is highly mechanical, like any other high-precision construction work.
Williams College Art Museum
After MassMoCA (and lunch) I drove to the other museum of the day
Williams College Art Museum.
It’s widely considered the best college museum in the country, and one of the most influential.
A high percentage of important curators get their degrees from
Williams, and this museum is where they learn the craft.
On past visits, it had a traditional historical layout, with side space for special exhibits (including several graduate thesis shows).
On this visit, all that had changed.
The museum was currently installing Re:View, a major overhaul of how the collection is shown.
Instead of showing things by movement, the
Armory Party at MOMA
The Armory Party in the MOMA atrium work would be arranged by topic.
Often called Post-Modern curation, this style of arrangement has been around for at least two decades.
It’s very difficult to do well (most infamously, the Museum of Modern Art show “
Modern Starts” was so bad, a critic wrote an entire book denouncing it).
Art theorists like the style, however, because it forces patrons to think about the work and draw their own conclusions rather than just accept received history.
The entire art world will notice now that Williams is trying it.
Only a portion of the show was finished while I was there.
One part showed the traditional topics of landscape, still life, and portraits, and how artists approach them over time.
For portraits in particular, the show attempted to show how the contents of the painting are determined by sociological concerns as much as artistic ones.
Another section showed art with symbolic content.
This for me was much weaker, because finding meanings in art is where current art theory most pushes the limits.
Niagara Falls was a major destination of the
Underground Railroad, but it doesn’t mean that a painting of the
Video Art
Video art projected on the walls over the Armory Party falls has any related symbolic meaning.
The final section was a room assembled by a guest curator, preferably someone who didn’t curate for a living.
This type of show usually has widely varying quality, as new ideas about art relationships are not necessarily good ones.
In this case, the museum staff chose fairly well.
The curator chose light as a topic, and arranged the paintings to show how light is depicted, and its effect on the actual subject.
As an amateur photographer, this was a topic I appreciated (and had never seen before, believe it or not).
MC Escher at Berkshire Museum
After Williams, I got a taste of the difference between a road trip and a regular vacation.
I had finished Williams sooner than expected, and needed something to do, preferably on the way to my next destination.
While flipping through an events calendar, I discovered there was an
MC Escher show in Pittsfield.
It was not strictly on the way, but was close enough.
The show itself is at the
Berkshire Museum, a combination art and natural history museum.
In the
Shadow Play
Patrons become an artwork at the Armory Party early days of the US, most museums were like this, but this one is one of a few left that still maintain the format.
Personally, I think the museum shortchanges both the art and the history, but their temporary shows are often worth seeing.
MC Escher certainly was.
MC Escher is one of those artists that everyone has heard of, and many people really don’t think of as a fine artist.
His work appeals most strongly to mathematicians and others with a scientific interest and art collectors discount him accordingly.
He was a printmaker from Holland, whose technical skills rank with the best.
Early in his career, he created traditional prints of landscapes, most inspired by the Italian countryside.
They are technically proficient, but not interesting beyond that.
His style changed radically after a visit to Alhambra in southern Spain.
The Muslim Moors had built a series of palaces there, which contained intricate geometric tile work.
Escher became obsessed with the patterns in these tiles, and worked to reproduce them in his prints.
Rather than recreate them directly however, he did so with
Kate Bush performs at the Armory Party
English singer Kate Bush played several songs of buzz guitar rock at the Armory Party pictures of fish, frogs, and birds.
This ultimately led him to the principle of
tessellation, which is the division of a plane with regular shapes.
He started making the prints that made him famous.
Later on, he started investigating visual impossibilities, such as the famous print of a waterfall falling uphill, and another were a ceiling becomes a floor in the same print.
The prints have been reproduced widely at this point, so I had seen them all before.
The part of the show I enjoyed the most was the displays of his working methods.
There were intricately carved large woodblocks, along with small woodblocks hand-printed multiple times to create a pattern.
Best of all were the preliminary sketches, which clearly show the intricate work needed to lay out each pattern.
Each starts with a basic mathematical shape, and then changes into the final animals used to create the print.
Most of these were done on graph paper.
The mathematical precision is impressive, particularly because MC Escher had no formal training in the subject.
The show was well worth the time.
Armory Show Opening
Bar at the Armory Party
The bar at the Armory Party was made of glass, lit from below by LEDs After that show, I had to get to New York City for the final event of the night, the
Armory Show opening party.
The Armory Show is one of the largest and most important art fairs in the US, which attracts contemporary art dealers from around the world.
Every year, they have an opening party at the
Museum of Modern Art.
Tickets, by art fundraiser standards, are a steal.
I had to see it.
The party was a great deal of fun.
For starters, there is the setting.
It was held in the museums atrium.
Around the central dance floor were a series of white obelisks.
These hid the speaker systems.
The room was lit from below by red and blue LEDs, giving everything a surreal glow.
Next, there was the food.
The highlight here was the desert bar, where people were given Chinese food containers to hold chocolates, popcorn, and other treats.
Finally, there was the alcohol.
Open bar, a large variety, and enough bartenders that there was never a wait at any point.
I’ve never seen that combination at a party this large
RoomMate Grace
High style hallway at RoomMate Grace. The entire hotel looks like this. before.
Most of the people I talked with were artists.
They talked about their own work, other peoples work, and recommendations for parts of the show to see the next day.
There are no parties like art parties, and the Museum of Modern Art throws a good one.
I spent the night at the
Room Mate Grace Hotel.
Room Mate is a Spanish hotel chain, and this is their first hotel in the US.
It’s very self-consciously design focused, with modernist furniture, strongly patterned wallpaper, and wild color schemes.
I felt like I was living in an art installation.
I chose the hotel because they have reasonable rates for such high style, and the hotel is a favorite of art world insiders on tight budgets.
It may ultimately cost one their sanity however.
The rooms are really tiny.
I’ve lived in small apartments, so I could handle it, but others may feel they are trapped in an ant farm.
Also, the hotel has a hopping bar scene, so it gets loud at night.
I brought ear plugs for that, and slept like a charm.
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