mass moca/museum

after the clark art institute, we went to mass moca for the first time.

petah coyne: everything that rises must converge

"Unlike many contemporary artists who focus on social or media-related issues, Petah Coyne imbues her work with a magical quality to evoke intensely personal associations. Her sculptures convey an inherent tension between vulnerability and aggression, innocence and seduction, beauty and decadence, and, ultimately, life and death. Coyne's work seems Victorian in its combination of an overloaded refinement with a distinctly decadent and morbid undercurrent. Her innovative use of materials includes dead fish, mud, sticks, black sand, old car parts, wax, satin ribbons, artificial flowers and birds, birdcages, and most recently, taxidermy animals, Madonna statues, and horsehair."

material world: sculpture to environment

"Working in a range of modest, industrially produced materials -- from plastic sheeting to fishing line -- Michael Beutler, Orly Genger, Tobias Putrih, Alyson Shotz, Dan Steinhilber, and collaborators Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen engage the former factory spaces of our second and third floors, creating extraordinary environments from ordinary things."

inigo manglano-ovalle: gravity is a force to be reckoned with

"Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's project Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With is based upon Mies van der Rohe's uncompleted project, the House with Four Columns (1951), a square structure open to view on all four sides through glass walls. In Manglano-Ovalle's work, the house will be constructed at approximately half scale and inverted, the ceiling of the original becoming the sculpture's floor, the floor becoming the ceiling, and all interior elements such as Mies-designed furniture and partition walls installed upside down."

what is this all about? the historical references (Yevgeny Zamyatin, Sergei Eisenstein) are great but what is being said here?

sol lewitt: a wall drawing retrospective

"After nearly six months of intensive drafting and painting by a team of some sixty-five artists and art students, Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective is fully installed. The historic exhibition opens to the public at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), in North Adams, Massachusetts, on November 16, 2008, and will remain on view for twenty-five years. Conceived by the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, in collaboration with the artist before his death in April 2007, the project has been undertaken by the Gallery, MASS MoCA, and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts."

another show/artist/concept (conceptual) i simply do not get.

"LeWitt—who stressed the idea behind his work over its execution—is widely regarded as one of the leading exponents of Minimalism and Conceptual art, and is known primarily for his deceptively simple geometric structures and architecturally scaled wall drawings. His experiments with the latter commenced in 1968 and were considered radical, in part because this new form of drawing was purposely temporal and often executed not just by LeWitt but also by other artists and students whom he invited to assist him in the installation of his artworks."

don gummer: primary separation

"The installation consists of a massive granite boulder, 12 feet long by 6 feet tall, sawed in half. The stone halves -- separated by just a 11-inch gap -- are dramatically suspended 10 feet above ground, within a system of stainless steel supports and cables. A newly made plaza will form the base for the sculpture. Gummer's original inspiration for Separationwas a stone that he felt resembled Brancusi's Fish. In using the stone, Gummer had Duchamp's “readymades” in mind, substituting for Duchamp's manmade objects an object found in nature. "

natalie jeremijenko: tree logic

"In Tree Logic, the art of the piece is not found in its condition at any single point in time, but in the change of the trees over time. Trees are dynamic natural systems, and Tree Logic reveals this dynamism. The familiar, almost iconic shape of the tree in nature is the result of gravitropic and phototropic responses: the tree grows away from the earth and towards the sun. When inverted, the six trees in this experiment still grow away from earth and towards the sun - so the natural predisposition of trees might well produce the most unnatural shapes over time, raising questions about what the nature of the natural is. "

listening: the ruby suns; the dirty projectors; the kills; junior boys

reading: a distant mirror; of mice and men

watching: garden state; dragonball; totoro