MASS MoCA

Bats, Books, and Mild Amusement

We paid a visit to one of my favorite places over the Labor day holiday MASS MoCA [Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art] located out west in North Adams, Ma. The building is an exhibit in itself. Housed in an old factory building, many of the original features of the factory have been preserved lending an archival authenticity and paying respect to the building, its former workers, and the art currently housed within. Of special note are the restrooms, preserved in their work-weary reality.

There were several notable exhibitions:

Gunnar A. Kaldewey: Artist Books for a Global World
Four Collaborations in Depth

A wonderful exhibition of Artist Books - one which included a 45 RPM record with a wood cover, and several others of different sizes and media.

Carsten Höller: Amusement Park

An exhibition of amusment park rides [some lit], gave the feeling of being in an abandoned amusement park, the experience was very surreal or extraterrestrial yet grounded in the heavy machinery required to provide the super sensory experience.

Artist Link

House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective

The artist was one of the leading figures of the Xiamen Dada movement In the mid-1980s.

The History of Chinese Art and the History of Modern Art - washed two minutes in a washing machine features 2 art texts washed and the resulting pulp displayed on a piece of broken glass sitting on an open tea box.

Bat Project IV features part of an airplane fuselage partially framed in bamboo and housing 300 taxidermic bats.

Artist Link

Recollection by Artist Peggy Diggs

A whimsical and sometimes startling exhibit of jars containing important artifacts of the artist's life. In one jar a pillow case from the first time she slept with a boyfriend. Most whimsical, an uncle's watch with his wife's pubic hair glued to its face. Most startling, final hospital artifacts and a post mortem picture of father.

Artist Link

As always the museum visit was intellectually challenging and inspiring. MASS MoCA is an important artistic resource and any art enthusiast should visit as often as possible !