Conceptual art at MassMoCA, updated with pix

There's word on the next exhibit in the gi-normous Gallery 5 at MassMoCA in North Adams, a space in which artists succeed or fail spectacularly. Turner Prize winner Simon Starling will be exploring a little-known chapter in North Adams history in which Chinese workers were brought in to break an 1870 strike at the Sampson Shoe Factory, part of the industrial complex that is now MoCA's home. The low-paid but diligent Chinese stayed for a while, but within ten years, they were gone. Starling obtained two small albumen prints of Chinese workers in front of the factory - originally to be viewed together via a 3-D stereoscope (below). He will, um, transform them for a work called "The Nanjing Particles (After Henry Ward, View of C.T. Sampson's Shoe Manufactory, with the Chinese Shoemakers in working Costume, ca. 1875)," opening Dec. 13.

The MoCA release describes his plans: "Interested in the photographs as a receptacle for meaning as well as their physical existence as repositories for metal grains used in forming the images, the artist extracted silver particles from the prints' emulsion in order to present their three-dimensional, sculptural characteristics. Working with scientists in nearby Albany, New York, Starling created 3-D images of two particular silver particles with the aid of a one million volt electron microscope which magnified the particles 25,000 times. Starling translated scanned images of the particles into computer renderings from which three-dimensional models were produced. These models of the tiny image fragments were then replicated as immensely enlarged sculptural objects, scaled up one million times their original size. At this point the story comes full circle: economic imperatives took Starling to present-day China where the enlarged particles were fabricated into sculptures, forged in stainless steel and polished to a seductive, reflective sheen, reminiscent of works by sculptors such as Jeff Koons and Anish Kapoor.y juxtaposing historical material with contemporary modes of production and market conditions, Starling's project draws attention to economies of labor both past and present. The works will be presented in a manner that thwarts visitors' expectations of a dramatic view of the cavernous gallery."

In other words, the pic above has somehow inspired the sculptures below. (MoCA pic by John Chen.)

I guess we're going to have to check this out, although as usual I can't even guess whether we'll be cheering or giggling. I'm not sure I want my expectations of Gallery 5 "thwarted," either, but we'll give it a shot. There's also a whole other part of the exhibit, in which Starling will build a canoe and paddle it down the Hoosic River which flows by outside the museum windows.

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