Unintended interpretations at MASS MoCA

I have a great way to bump up attendance and press coverage for Petah Coyne's exhibit "Everything That Rises Must Converge," at MASS MoCA in North Adams through next February. Simply change the title to something like "What BP Hath Wrought" and tell everyone the work was created in response to the Gulf oil disaster. Because that's all I could think about as I strolled through the galleries on Saturday. Coyne's more recent works, the sculptures that make up the majority of the show, all have the same motif: taxidermy birds (and a few animals) being engulfed by black blobs.

 The blobs are made of heaps of plastic flowers and other materials coated with black wax. Most seem like islands or floating slicks, with a few breakaway dribbles. Others hang on black cords from the distant ceiling of MoCA's tallest gallery. The birds are mostly pheasants, and here and there is a squirrel. The largest and most dramatic of the works, "Untitled #1336 (Scalapino Nu Shu)" (2009-2010) features a skeletal, leafless apple tree turned black, with ten taxidermy peacocks perched in its branches.

The exhibit title comes from a Flannery O'Connor short story. There's something New Orleans-y about these pieces,  bayou gothic. A funereal dusting of dark red plastic flowers completes the mood. The BP interpretation is unavoidable, even if there are no pelicans or turtles.

The work is striking, but it also begs interpretation because, like so much of the stuff you see at MASS MoCA, it is intended to "evoke intensely personal associations," in the glass-half-full analysis of the exhibit guide, or without coherent, easily explicated  meaning beyond the initial shock, in my own glass-half-empty view. The accompanying text sounds like random art-world blather: "Coyne's works both rise and converge at MASS MoCA, making palpable the inherent tensions between vulnerability and aggression, innocence and seduction, beauty and decadence, and, ultimately, life and death." Personally, I like the BP explanation better. We'll just have to add "nature and technology" to the list of dualities.

But maybe I'm a philistine. In a gallery holding earlier work, I was consistently bored until I got to a hanging sculpture, "Untitled #720 (Eguchi's Ghost)," made of miles of filaments that turn out to be not hair or fiber but pieces of a shredded Airstream trailer. It is, as the text says, "a startling transformation from industrial to organic," but doesn't have anything to do with the 1961 Japanese short story that supposedly inspired the piece. It's unnecessary for the viewer to understand a artist's inspiration or even their intention; some of the most amazing, powerful works I've seen at MoCA were utterly baffling. But "#720" did not make me think of a Japanese short story or the transformation from industrial to organic or any of those random opposites listed above. It just made me think of Cousin It on "The Addams Family." See? Philistine.

(And by the way, could there be a more pretentious way of titling work than calling everything you do Untitled, numbering it, and then giving it a very title-y sounding term in parenthesis? Is that supposed to make us feel "the inherent tensions between named and unnamed?" Or is it just annoying bullshit?)

In general, the exhibits at MASS MoCA now are underwhelming, the great Sol LeWitt retrospective excepted. At least I found the initial gothic shock of Coyne's work compelling, even if the explanation was not. But "Material World," in which seven artists were invited to interact with the museum's brilliantly reclaimed factory environment, mostly disappoints. (How many times are we going to see a MoCA gallery heaped with random coils of rope or something similar?) The bright exception is Alyson Shotz's "The Geometry of Light," Tobias Putrih's "Re-Projection Hoosac" inspired by the Hoosac Tunnel in North Adams. A skein of fishing line is hung across a large, darkened gallery, and a single spotlight deployed to make it cast patterns that change with every step the viewer takes. It makes you think about line and refraction, and how you locate yourself in the space. "How many people clothesline themselves over the course of a day?" I asked the guard stationed there. "A lot," he said.

I always look forward to seeing what's in Gallery 5, the cavernous, football-field-sized space that has held my favorite exhibits in a decade of coming to MoCA. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's "Gravity Is A Force To Be Reckoned With" didn't do much for me, alas, in part because it is dwarfed by the space. It's a play on Mies van der Rohe's plan for a "House with four columns," a glass-walled structure that takes the Farnsworth House a step further. The artist has turned it upside down, and the result is intended to comment on modernism and transparency, freedom and consequence. I get it, but Gallery 5 won this round.#

Comments

[Katherine Myers]

The work you attribute to Alyson Shotz is actually Tobias Putrih's Re-Projection Hoosac inspired by the Hoosac Tunnel in North Adams. The Shotz piece is in another gallery and has line strung across the length of the gallery but the lines have lenses on them.

[Greg]

Enjoyed your Mass MoCA review. I've not seen the current shows, but having seen Coyne's work here and there over the years I suspect your take is pretty right on. Especially the Cousin It part. And liked the final "Gallery 5 won this round." Reading elsewhere about that installation, it just sounds like an expensive + lame inside-baseball one-liner. But until I see it, um, I'm trying to keep an open mind.

Greg

[Lauren]

I have to say that I completely disagree with this blog entry. I think in order to really understand conceptual and contemporary art, you have to have the background on the artist's thought process and the story behind each piece. TAKE A TOUR. They're free with MoCA admission and are incredibly helpful in allowing yourself to awe at the conceptualism and detail of each piece.

Petah's goal in her show is to bring us to the reality that death and beauty are always linked. She borrows the styling of the Baroque period where everything was over the top and flaunted. Her pieces reference friends that have passed away, Dante's Inferno and September 11th. As far as Eguchi's ghost goes, when the Japanese story: "House of Sleeping Beautys" was made into a performance, they asked Petah to create Eguchi's ghost. What you see in the space was the costume she created. HoSB's is about Eguchi, an old Japanese man who is struggling with traditional Japanese ritual that as a final right of passage, a man is supposed to lay in a house full of unconcious women. The ghost serves as his concious and his direction through his decision. Her pieces are dramatic, yes, but that is her style. Art can't be boxed into things that you or me, as individuals, can understand on a moments glance. The point of art is that it is thoughts, feelings, etc made tangible. Sometimes, it takes a little explaining, and that's ok.
Petah's labels her art pieces in chronological order as to when they were made. It has nothing to do with pretentious "art world blabber." It's just how she likes to label her work.
Contrary to popular belief, artists aren't constantly thinking about hidden meanings and "all up in their head." Sometimes, its just as simple as she likes to remember what order she made them in. Boom.
Moving on..
Lets talk about "Gravity is a force to be reckoned with." If you've ever read the book 1984, or WE (which is like a pre-cursor to 1984, made in the 1920's) you would have a better concept of this piece. (Which can all be explained on a TOUR)
In those books, there is the idea of a distopian future. The people are being controlled by an outside force, and there is only a few people who take notice. The idea that it is swallowed by the large space is because Ovalle really wanted you to discover things as you moved closer to it. Yes, when I first saw this piece, I was completely underwhelmed, but hearing about it on the tour really, really helped. As you move closer to the house from whatever entrace you decide to happen upon it, you start to notice things like the door is ajar, the cup is on the "floor" (ceiling) and there are scribble drawings all over the table. You start to realize that you've come upon something that isn't right. You start to think that you've come upon a house that someone has just left very quickly and you're left to put together the pieces. Meanwhile, the phone rings and video comes up of people. They say things that if you don't know anything about the piece, you wouldn't understand. But what this piece is getting at is the same thing that the books 1984 and WE are getting at. What is the world that we are controlled by? Are we so comfortable in our glass house of society that we don't know the way we're being controlled? Is technology (hence the iPhone) moving us forward or holding us back? The cup on the floor really represents the anarchist from 1984. It's the one thing in the house that makes you start thinking, "hold on, this isn't just a house flipped upside down. there's something happening here. What happened here?" The piece is incredibly mind-consuming. It forces you into a deep thought about your own life and how you've been "droning" through.

In reference to the "red ropes." It's a piece called "Big Boss" by Orley Genger. She's commenting on the historically man-dominated art form we like to call minimalism. She's this tiny little woman who knotted (By hand!) the 100 miles of rope you see in that space. You come upon a beautiful red linear wall of rope and then notice the broken side wall... walk a little farther and see an overflow that almost looks like lava on the other side. She's showing how minimalism doenst have to be like its tradition: steel, concrete, square. It can be flowing and red and made with differing materials. She's really showing you the difference between classic minimalism and "Orley" minimalism.

I think that everything in the MoCA galleries are worthy of their space. Like I said earlier, going through with a tour guide was the best decision I made. They're free with gallery admission and make ALL THE DIFFERENCE. They know what they're talking about, have a lot of knowledge on the pieces and are more than willing to talk to you about the pieces you can't quite grasp or answer any questions for you.

I encourge you to go again and give MoCA's summer shows another chance.