8/5/2023 0 Comments Nick cave artist mass mocaShe’s enlisted top-tier talent: Meryl Streep is brought in to read Büchel’s emails via voiceover Kirsten Johnson, an acclaimed cinematographer, lenses some memorable footage and there are interviews with high-ranking politicians and blue-chip artists sprinkled throughout. MASS MoCA is an epic space, and Trainer’s film befits it. New York Times critic Roberta Smith memorably called it a “depressing spectacle.” The partial work was put on view anyway, and a legal spat ensued between the museum and the artist. Titled Training Ground for Democracy, it featured an oil tanker, a police car, a carnival ride, and other wreckage-but, due to the skyrocketing costs associated with showing it, the work never ended up including an airliner that was intended to be shown in the galleries. There has been the occasional disaster at MASS MoCA, and wisely, a good deal of Museum Town is spent on a 2007 Christoph Büchel installation that only partly made it on view. More recently, Nick Cave, who appears throughout Museum Town, crafted a giant sculptural installation involving 16,000 wind spinners and thousands of trinkets, and Alex Da Corte loaded a massive gallery with mod furniture and neon lights. Cai Guo-Qiang exhibited a grouping of cars speared with lighting tubes, partly as a comment on 9/11. Robert Rauschenberg created a painting that stretches on for a quarter-mile. James Turrell created a giant environment that allows viewers to walk into what feel like never-ending spaces tinged green and pink by lighting effects. A survey of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings drew crowds and acclaim from critics. Since MASS MoCA’s opening in 1999, all kinds of memorable works have been mounted there. “Who would have ever guessed that a Republican governor in Massachusetts would be a Talking Heads fan?” Byrne says. When it came to obtaining additional funding for opening the museum, Bill Weld, the conservative governor of Massachusetts at the time, stopped by-and, much to everyone’s surprise, approved of what he saw, mainly on the basis that it was by a Talking Heads member who could sing “Air” on command. In 1996, David Byrne, frontman of the Talking Heads, staged a wacky installation that involved, in part, a sound element with lewd rap lyrics voiced by pleasant-sounding elderly women. Courtesy Kino LorberĪs construction came to a close in the mid-’90s, the first presentations began to be mounted in the not-yet-fully-opened space. “It’s not about the space, it’s just about space,” he says in Museum Town, which carefully plots all the adversity that he and founding director Joe Thompson faced along the way.Ī Franz West sculpture on the grounds of MASS MoCA in Museum Town. Officials had other plans in mind, including one to build a prison, but Krens persisted with his vision. What if there was an institution big enough to host them? Having visited the 1985 edition of the Art Cologne fair, where dealers trotted out monumental works and placed them inside a factory setting, Krens imagined he could do something similar. He’d been thinking of works by Minimalist and Land artists that museums had generally shied away from collecting in depth because of their size. In 1986, he was director at the nearby Williams College Museum of Art when he came up with the idea of converting a newly closed Sprague Electric factory into an art museum. The person who came up with the idea for MASS MoCA, Thomas Krens, worked tirelessly to realize the museum, however. (“People in North Adams are not ready for this,” a volunteer at MASS MoCA recalls thinking at the time.) Befuddled art critics looked on in wonderment as the people facilitating the $37 million renovation of a former mill complex. Locals viewed the museum as an art-world outpost intended to woo the elite, effectively bringing with it art no one in town would understood along with a wave of gentrification. Massachusetts politicians worried that such a project would grow too big, too costly, and too hifalutin. Fire and Ice: Marc Swanson at Mass MoCA and Thomas Cole National Historic SiteĪs Museum Town goes to show, nothing about MASS MoCA guaranteed that it would be a success when plans for it were first announced in 1986.
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