Mid-January Cup of MassMoCA
Our trip to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts (MassMOCA) yesterday (actually on Jan 18, 2025) was … oh, let’s call it ‘interesting.’ This huge, sprawling, 275,000 square feet of open space in a cluster of repurposed industrial mills of various kinds is best known for huge and sprawling installations on the avant-garde edge that generally are not as appealing to me as more conventional genres. I can appreciate them as a bonafide spectacle. And I like some better than others. But that spectacle quality fails to move me beyond a kind of bemusement that mostly makes me wonder who the hell funds the obviously very high cost of putting them together.
I am in no way trying to make a statement about genre, nor the installations collectively, nor the individual works that are included in the potpourri nature of each of the larger installations. Also, I have no doubt that my lack of appreciation is an expression of my own ignorance at some level. If I were to wander the museum with a good art teacher who could explain to me what I was looking at, there’s little doubt in my mind that, at minimum, I would better appreciate the technical achievement of the pieces. And maybe, just maybe, I’d arrive at some higher level of appreciation for their aesthetic value.
Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll just never develop a broad fondness for this kind of art. That actually seems likely to me, especially since aot this point in my life I don’t feel particularly inclined to study and work at it, and will just take the prima facie impression that most of them have on me, that they’re whimsical and silly, but don’t leave me with the sense of wonder and appreciation of life that more conventional art inspires in me.
This was actually our second trip to the MassMoCA, and actually it was a better museum experience. We came here about eight years ago to meet some friends who came to Vermont to ski. But it was a warn winter, with no snow. So looking for other things to do, they invited us to drive from our home, 45 miles to the west in the New York Capital District, to explore the museum and dine with them. It was great to see our friends. It always is. But as I wandered the endless halls of the massive museum this time, it occurred to me that in terms of appreciating the art it was good to be alone and not feel the inclination or obligation to chat with friends I hadn’t seen in years. Reunions with old friends are social by definition, and pondering the nature of art collections requires solitude.
So yesterday I got into it … particularly the two very large temporary exhibitions … one that is a riff on queer native Americans by Jeffrey Gibson, a New York artist of Choctaw-Cherokee descent who teaches at Bard College. His large exhibit had something of the tone of a pow-wow, with booming drums and five multiple choreographed video screens hanging over three … boxes? Altars? Dance Floors? … over which were hanging elaborate Native American dance costumes. The effect was really in-your-face, with the loud music and flashing images, and I can’t deny its spectacle appeal. We sat long enough to run through what appeared to be a full loop of the soundtrack … more than 15 minutes I think.
(NOTE: I ran across a website of Gibson’s exhibit, “the Space in Which to Place Me,” at the “Venice Biennale, where in 2024 he was the first indigenous artist to have a solo exhibition in the American Pavilion … and I AM crazy about this. Far lovelier and more engaging, in my estimation, of his installation at the MassMoCA. Would LOVE to have seen it.)
The other major installation was a riff on Scheherazade’s “1,001 Arabian Nights,” by Osman Khan, a Guggenheim Fellow and high-flying art prof from Detroit. Khan, who was born in Pakistan, focuses on Middle Eastern metaphors ranging from a pharaoh-headed quarter-driven horse, the mechanical ride’em toy kind we used to see in front of grocery stores and dime stores when I was a kid, to a huge ornate bird cage complete with feeble flying carpets, whose built-in fans could only make them shudder kind of pathetically rather than fly.
And we enjoyed these two installations a lot. It really helped that not only were we not distracted by an urge to reconnect with old friends, but that we had a leisurely pace kind of imposed on us by our 5pm reservation at an adjacent restaurant. So, we arrived at 1pm with the full knowledge that we needed to spend at least 3.5 hours there. Which is what we did. We sat and took our time to really experience … rather than just ‘look at’ these exhibits. And that’s what it takes, I think, for people whose tastes run to more conventional expressions, to learn to appreciate art like this.
I still don’t appreciate MassMoCA’s long, long hallways of painted walls … most of them with geometric designs. To be sure, they’re vibrant and eye-catching. But after a few hundred yards of them, it’s like enough already.
The highlight of the permanent long-term exhibits are a few installations by the “light artist” James Turrell, who is famous for excavating an extinct crater near Flagstaff, AZ, to create grottos and caves for his semi-high-tech art. The existence of that piece raises the question in my mind, “Where does a guy like this get the money required for this?” Some sort of patronage? Not cheap to buy and excavate dead volcanoes, to be sure.
His exhibits at MassMoCA are very simple …. Static lighting in peculiar geometric environments … one of them a dome with a sliding hatch across the middle of the roof … and others consisting of rather dark rooms with inset walls from which emit glows. I think I like the room with glowing purple diamond-shaped inset the best, but they were all nice. And again, worth a “sit down and feel this” experience.
Photography is not allowed in the Turrell exhibits, but we snuck in a few out in the dome, presumably college students?) is understaffed. Same as everywhere, you know. They just need some immigrants from shithole countries who, as we all know, are just as bright and much more willing to work for low wages than grievance-filled American workers.
Oh well. It was a lovely afternoon, a lovely museum experience that as I left I told myself I had no desire to repeat. Specifically, what I told Mary as had a nice meal at the Mexican restaurant, “Casita,” on the museum campus, I thought it would be OK if we didn’t come back to the MassMoCA again.
That quickly turned out to be another lesson in “never say never,” though, because just two days later we saw a segment on the PBS NewsHour about Vincent Valdez, a San Antonio artist whose exhibition in California recently made its debut. This art, from what I could see on the NewsHour segment, really moves me, and even before the segment had ended, Mary and I agreed that we would go out of our way to see it. And then, bing!, Jeff Brown, the interviewer, announced that the exhibit’s next stop would be in North Adams, Massachusetts, at the MassMoCA museum.
So off we’ll go on the 45-mile sojourn from Waterford, NY, to North Adams. Maybe, as we did this week, allowing time for another afternoon at the Clark Art Institute just up the road at Williamstown, to catch whatever they have there as well.