Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse at MASS MoCA.








boards used to cover the window for jenny holzer's show were recycled as masking for this wall... they don't waste anything at this museum (for example sitting in christoph buchel's abandoned theatre seats to watch guy ben-ner's mocking video).


side by side BUILDINGs-ful of Katharina Grosse and Sol Lewitt wow.


Katharina Grosse

She gave a wonderful talk I attended in 2005 -
Katharina Grosse lecture Part 1
Katharina Grosse lecture Part 2
Katharina Grosse lecture Part 3


more pictures on my flickr


lines








KG

Material World

Alyson Shotz

Material World, curated by Susan Cross, at MASS MoCA.




Alyson Shotz






She was wearing a cool shirt covered with pearly iridescent animal and butterfly(?) shapes.. it matched her piece... but she wouldn't let me take a picture.


Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen Nguyen, with Art!


Caitlin Bermingham, Alyssa Wright, Stephen Nguyen, Tom Kotik.


gold cap and stars.


striped siren.


Jason Wilcox... artist and MASS MoCA art installer.


Orly Genger


A lot of people were talking on the other side of that wall and it created some weird muffled acoustics on this side. Fun and mysterious.


Orly Genger




Adventurer.




Tobias Putrih... stationary spotlight on monfilament... somehow a constellation of dots forms an arch... and as you move around looks like a projected flickering image shifting in space. Totally cinematic. I like the view of it from Orly's piece a couple pictures above... like you are looking into a movie theatre.




Tobias Putrih

Guy Ben-Ner

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Guy Ben-Ner at Mass MoCA. Eight films played large in eight spaces. It takes about an hour and forty-five minutes to watch them all (each is 10 to 20 minutes)... WORTH IT!

Moby Dick, 2000
Elia - A Story of an Ostrich Chick, 2003
Wild Boy, 2004
Treehouse Kit, 2005
I'd Give it to you if I could but I borrowed it, 2006-2007
Stealing Beauty, 2007 - the IKEA one.
Second Nature, 2008 - fox and crow
If Only It Was as Easy to Banish Hunger by Rubbing the Belly as It Is to Masturbate, 2009

If Only It Was as Easy to Banish Hunger by Rubbing the Belly as It Is to Masturbate is an adventure/comedy buddy movie starring Mass Moca Director Joe Thompson and artist Guy Ben-Ner as they track themselves by airplane, car, and bicycle while having a conversation mostly by reading from and referencing books like Around the World in 80 Days, King Lear, The Little Prince, Through the Looking Glass, Don Quixote, The Divine Comedy.

Thompson pilots a plane which crashes, then they get in a car - without putting on their seatbelts, Thompson driving - which crashes, then they get on a tandem bicycle with Thompson doing all the pedaling... until they arrive at a dead end sign at an empty dirt field. The borrowed literature conversation is friendly banter on issues of commitment, compromise, inevitability, purpose, mid-life crisis, and (divorce) contracts.

GET IT??- Christoph Buchel vs Mass MoCA


Guy Ben-Ner and Joe Thompson on a bicycle built for two, with Thompson doing all the pedaling.

Joe Thompson: I think we're going uphill now.
Guy Ben-Ner: No, I stopped pedaling.
JT: It's getting harder.
GBN: I said I just stopped pedaling.
JT: Start again.
GBN: Give me a reason to.

JT: Start pedaling
GBN: It's too late for that.
JT: You can say that again

Don't want to mislead anyone into thinking this piece is only an elaborately sly Buchel piss-take... it's more... I'm just sharing a layer which most people would never catch on to. When they get to the dead-end field one of them says "no circus here", and the seating is even recycled from the abandoned Buchel theater.

PLUS1: Mass MoCA has five other shows happening concurrently, including the must-see Sol Lewitt building.
PLUS2: Still waiting for the written decision on Christoph Buchel's appeal.

Walter McConnell

Walter McConnell, Itinerant Edens: Chinoiserie, moist clay, wood, plastic, polysterene, utility lamp, 2003/2007

Walter McConnell's misty Shangri-La of moist clay encased in plastic is one of my favorite pieces in MASS MoCA's Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China.

The statement -

"McConnell's moist clay sculpture reflects China's rich artistic history as well as a fantasy image of the East. Inspired in part by his tours of classic scholar's gardens, the work investigates the way images evolve as they are translated across cultures. This imaginary landscape is taken directly from an 18th-century wallpaper pattern book created by French painter and designer Jean Baptiste Pillement. The condensation produced from the 3,000 pounds of wet clay gives the work an apparitional quality, manifesting the veil through which visitors often view a foreign place. Reminiscent of a snow globe, the work takes on a kitsch quality, referencing - on a large scale - trinkets sold to tourists, and an image of China consumed by locals and foreigners alike"

MASS MoCA now allows photography, and has started a flickr pool and a youtube site. Here is the video of Walter McConnell constructing his piece; it's less than a minute and twenty seconds... worth it!

Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China

Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China, at Mass Moca.... I was excited to see this show, as a former Western Artist in Japan (8+ yrs), but it was disappointing. I think there were only one or two artists who actually live and work in China, so the show is more like Western Artists Make Brief Visits to China and Share Many of the Same Simplistic Responses... lots and lots of repetitive photos and video (the medium of the tourist) of shipping containers and apartment blocks.

Wall texts inform that the work "references China's economic and commercial development as well as the loss of cultural and social traditions in the wake of such progress", or "this poetic work subtly reminds viewers of the environmental impact of China's new development". Those are from two different pieces, but you could almost walk around with a blindfold on and attach wall texts, it wouldn't really make much of a difference. They should maybe just all read "tsk-tsk", or "KEYWORD: Three Gorges Dam"... it would have saved some time. I can imagine the roar of the collective Chinese groan. What would happen if every person in China rolled his eyes at the same time? Would the Earth spin off it's axis???

The most off-putting inclusion is Jules de Balincourt's snooze of a painting, previously seen in his most recent Zach Feuer show (scroll down). Why is this here? Thanks for your insight. Please.

It's interesting to see what artists/gallerists (Feuer, Koenig) are evidently still interested in working with Mass Moca, despite Michelle Maccarone's lobbying against it. I suspect that all of the shows currently at Mass Moca are the most cost-effective shows possible, after all of the money spent and wasted struggling through last year's Buchel/MassMoca mess. Lots and lots of easily shipped and insured video and photography, a collector's vanity show (of work by Anselm Kiefer), Jenny Holzer's projected piece (I think Jenny has covered a lot of the costs of her show, she is awesome).

GREAT NEWS is that Mass Moca no longer prohibits photography! They've even started a flickr pool.

NEXT: i liked some of the individual work in Eastern Standard, if not the show. next i'll feature some of the artists i liked... Tobias Bernstrup, Patty Chang, Walter McConnel, Catherine Yass.