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It’s 5am on a bright Saturday morning and Ron and I are outfitting our motorcycles to prepare them for a ten day trip that will take us throughout the six New England States. Not many plans are made, just a road map, a hiking guide, and a general idea about our itinerary. I love road trips and the fact that I will be doing this one on my very own motorcycle (my first one, if I may add!) makes it even harder to contain my excitement.This is a long-awaited vacation, and vacation, for me, often means staying away from anything art-related for at least a week. Being around galleries, museums and artists all year round, a real break means breaking away from all of this. |
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The Motorcycle Diaries – Ombretta Agró Andruff
It’s 5am on a bright Saturday morning and Ron and I are outfitting our motorcycles to prepare them for a ten day trip that will take us throughout the six New England States. Not many plans are made, just a road map, a hiking guide, and a general idea about our itinerary. I love road trips and the fact that I will be doing this one on my very own motorcycle (my first one, if I may add!) makes it even harder to contain my excitement.
This is a long-awaited vacation, and vacation, for me, often means staying away from anything art-related for at least a week. Being around galleries, museums and artists all year round, a real break means breaking away from all of this. But sometimes unexpected things happen such as finding yourself on the route to North Adams, Massachusetts, and realizing that MASS MoCA is only few miles away and that you’re not going to be able to resist the temptation.
Well, am I ever glad I followed my inner call and had the chance to visit the museum, which, I admit, I had never seen before. The institution is currently hosting three separate exhibitions in its main galleries. In the ground-floor space is installed an 11-artists group show entitled “Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History,” which includes Paul Chan, Jeremy Deller, Peggy Diggs, Felix Gmelin, Kerry James Marshall, Trevor Paglen, Greta Pratt, Dario Robleto, Nebojsa Seric-Shoba, Allison Smith and Yinka Shonibare. The exhibition cleverly combines the work of artists who are exploiting the material of history to give new meaning to the present. It is a powerful exhibition that spotlights the growing interest and fascination with historic reenactment and revision in contemporary art. One of my favorite works was Allison Smith’s Victory Hall a large wall installation made out of over 100 reproduced weapons from the Civil War that the artist rearranged in the shape of an ornamental wall pattern that parodies traditional displays of arms found in exposition halls. Another highlight was the ink-jet triptych Heirlooms and Accessories by Kerry James Marshall, which depicts the 1930 lynching of three African-American teenage boys by the Ku Klux Klan in Marion, Indiana.
The second exhibition is a fascinating solo show of Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping, the first ever retrospective of his work. Entitled “House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective,” it includes some 40 surprising—and sometimes jaw-dropping—works ranging from a gladiatorial arena for insects to a 20-ton sand castle to a full-size airplane fuselage.
The third show, and one of the main reasons why I am writing this piece, is a spectacular and unsettling exhibition by Belgian artist Carsten Höller—to me one of the absolute masters of installation art in the present day. Although he also works with photography and video, most of this artist’s production has taken the form of installation art or environmental art, as I would term it, which enables him to create environments (such as the popular up-side-down mushrooms room at the “Ecstasy” show at LA MoCA) that provoke sensory-altering experiences for their visitors. The show is entitled “Amusement Park.”
I feel a special and maybe even twisted attraction for abandoned and deserted amusement parks. I love to go to Coney Island in the wintertime when there are only few people around; the rides are not active and sit like huge, sleeping mechanical dinosaurs waiting for a call to new life. There is something eerie and surreal about the atmosphere in such places that is perfectly recreated in Höller’s installation here. I happened to enter the cavernous and darkened space (one of the largest and most impressive exhibition venues I have ever seen) from a side door without knowing what to expect; I was all alone for few minutes before someone else entered the space. The rides, many familiar from childhood such as the dizzying Gravitron, Bumper Bars, Twister and others, run so slowly that one can hardly tell they are moving at all. In the unnatural silence, I could hear the subtle humming of the electricity straining against the resistors and then, all of the sudden, an unexpected, loud, tumbling noise broke the stillness as one of the units on the Twister rolled down from its position. Then silence again.
As the flashing lights that usually give an amusement park its electrifying atmosphere pulsate in dramatically long intervals, I could hear the crackling of electricity while activating the light bulbs. A mirror covers the back wall of the gallery and becomes a crucial element to the work; it gives the illusion of doubling the gallery space while giving the visitors a rendering of their own body as it moves through a flickering world that unfolds in slow motion.
Behind the mirror, one could enter another installation, Turning Infrared Room, that provides three identical infrared projections, each with a slightly different delay that captures the visitors’ image once they enter the room. In the mezzanine gallery is the last installation, Revolving Doors. Composed by a series of three revolving doors entirely covered by mirrors, this work erodes the line between what’s real and what’s not.
As Joseph Thompson, MASS MoCA Director puts it; “Your body enters a space of warped time, and your mind follows with dizzying speed. Although foreboding for some, amusement parks have a dark underbelly, which this work embraces—the experience is otherworldly, pleasantly disorienting and theatrical." And, I have to say, it truly was all that, and much more.
After a couple of hours spent in the museum, we hit the road again, leisurely heading back towards Manhattan while enjoying the lush New England countryside. The next, “cultural” stop would be Ridgefield, CT, which is home to the charming Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.
As we’re taking a break from the long ride by Squantz Pond, near Danbury, CT, I realize that the Aldrich does not open until noon and that our only chance to see the long-awaited Anselm Kiefer show (and be back in Manhattan by 1pm as we had planned) is to call the institution and hope that they will be able to open the doors a bit earlier for us. “Right…” one would think, “Anything else?” Well, it certainly was worth the phone call. And, sure enough, the following day at 10:30am we pulled into the empty parking lot for a private viewing of the Kiefer pavilion thanks to the kindness of the museum’s staff who agreed to meet us earlier, allowing us to view the exhibition, how about that?
I have been a huge fan of Kiefer’s work for years, but I certainly was not ready for the kind of mystical experience that was awaiting us. As the imposing, 18-foot high doors of a huge, corrugated metal pavilion designed by the artist opened up to allow us inside, I gasped, my breathing stopped and I was truly brought to the edge of tears. As corny as it may sound, this is exactly how it happened. Inside the massive pavilion, daylight streamed through a skylight onto two long walls, each showing fifteen large paintings, three rows high and five columns wide.
The paintings, all executed with the artist’s densely material style, portray a series of dark seascapes, many of them with ships of lead attached to their surfaces.
The title of the show, “Time, Measure of the World,” is inscribed by the artist on the end wall in German, along with the words: “Fate of the People. The New Doctrine of War: Naval Battles Recur Every 317 Years or in Multiples Thereof, for Velimir Chlebnikov.” As obscure as it may seem at first glance, it all becomes clear after reading the material provided in the press-kit.
Velimir Chlebnikov (1855-1922) was the founding poet of the Russian Futurists and a writer of esoteric verse. He created poems in “Zaum,” a universal language derived from pure Slavic vocabulary that he envisioned as being the language of the future. In Zaum’s “Universal Alphabet,” each letter was connected to a certain mode and color. He also had a peculiar interest for numbers and numerology and spent endless time studying dates and working out correlations using complex mathematical formulas. This kind of research led him to formulate his findings in the pamphlet “A new Theory of War Battles 1915-1917.”
Kiefer read all of Chlebnikov’s writing between 1980 and 1997 and it was especially the laws of time, as formulated in “Tables of Destiny,” that were an inspiration to him. In Kiefer’s work, also, numbers have a great significance: they are markers of time but also assume certain attitudes and ideas that come from Kabala, suggesting systems beyond our control, but of which we remain a part. Also, the sea battles can be seen as metaphors for the endless repetitions of the same thing: the violent loss of meaning.
As the artist himself notes: “I can only make my feelings, thoughts and will in the paintings. I make them as precise as I can and then, after that…you decide what the pictures are and what I am.” (Anselm Kiefer: A Call To Memory, by Steven Henry Madoff, Art News, October 1987, p. 130).
While still in a daze, we walked out of the pavilion and had the quick chance to visit the last part of the three-phase painting project by Mary Temple entitled Extended Afternoon. In this project, the artist portrays, with a masterful trompe-l’oeil technique, an imaginary shaft of light that works its way through the museum over the course of several months. In the most recent phase, completed over the spring, Temple flooded the hardwood floor of the lower gallery with light and the shadows of tree branches projected onto the ground. The practice of painting an illusion onto a credible but impossible situation interests her because it questions basic perceptual faith, bringing into doubt our reliability in interpreting the environment.
Unfortunately, as time was running out, we didn’t have the chance to visit the other exhibitions on view here: “Full Stop,” an installation by Tom Burckhardt; a three-artist show, “Homecoming,” which brings back to Ridgefield three artists who grew-up in the area, Sarah Bostwick, Damian Loeb and Doug Wada; and the promising “Land Mine,” another three-artist exhibition curated by Jessica Hough with Laleh Khorramian, Wangechi Mutu and Michael Zansky.
Most of these shows are up until October, which provides me the perfect excuse to go back. But, for now, vacation is over and I am left with fond memories of a wonderful road trip and the amazing art we saw along the way.
