The Motorcycle Diaries

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.