We headed south around 8am. Our first real stop (after gas and the bakery) was to visit these little guys, in Harvard, MA:

One little boy will be coming home with us in August. I would write more, but it's hard to translate squeals of happiness into a coherent sentence. Let's just say we're kinda excited.

Next, we headed over to Ashburnham, MA, to visit some Nigerian Dwarf goats:

After that, we followed Route 2 all the way west, to North Adams, MA to visit the always fun Mass MoCA, where we had a little time to view the current exhibits:

Grabbed a quick dinner at the cafe, and then caught Beth Orton in concert at the museum (the real reason for our visit to North Adams).

After that, it was just a 2-hour jaunt through foggy, twisting roads, over the mountains and up Route 91 until we were safely snug in our beds, a little after midnight that same night.

The New Modernist: Edward Lifson: Sol LeWitt Drawings

Many great pictures, and a video of Aaron Andrews patting red paint in place.

Laziness 

Getting away, even it was for just an overnight was just what we needed....

Once we checked into Porches it was painful to leave, even for food...

This was my tub in the room!  I am a sucker for a claw-foot.

The whole property was pristine, with manicured gardens too.  I have got to get me a few of these massive globe onions for our gardens!

On Friday (my birthday) we went to the largest museum in the world (Yes-in little ole North Adams Massachusetts) Mass MoCA.  I love this place!  If you are into contemporary art visiting North Adams is a must!  The installations and exhibits change pretty regularly (annually?), so it is never the same place twice!

The majority of the downstairs of the museum was an exhibition entitled "Badlands".  

Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape, opening Sunday, May 25, 2008, at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) in North Adams, opens the next chapter in the landscape tradition, addressing contemporary ideas of exploration, population of the wilderness, land usage, environmental politics and the relativity of aesthetic beauty. Badlands comes at this critical time, an era when the world is more ecologically aware yet more desperately in need of solutions than ever before. The artists in this exhibition share this collective anxiety  some turn to the past to see how their predecessors negotiated the terrain of the landscape while some propose entirely new ideas. While deeply aware of the legacy of the landscape, each of these artist reinvents the genre to produce works that look beyond vast beauty to address current environmental issues.       

One artist had these awesome biospheres....

Vaughn Bell’s Personal Biospheres which give gallery visitors their own miniature landscapes to experience by popping their head into Plexiglas domes filled with small working ecosystems. Bell’s new custom biospheres forBadlands will be based on the landscape of North Adams. 

It was really cool inside the biosphere.  The air is so fresh and clean inside.  

Another part of the badlands exhibit was photographs from the Center of Land use Interpretation.  Check out their website it is really cool and interesting.  

There was also this amazing installation in the large, very large (nearly football field sized) room upstairs.  The best way to describe it is to show you.... Imagine sitting in a 12 foot in diameter bean bag chair watching this..... go here (sorry for whatever reason I was unable to embed the video, I think it might be the free blog thing)  The Jenny Holzer installation was really awesome (if you get into that sort of thing)

After the MoCA we shopped til we dropped and meandered home via Route 2, which follows a portion of the Mohawk Trail.  And at last... I did get to dip my tootsies in the Deerfield River!

Happy Birthday to me!

So we are going out to one of my favorite parts of the state.  Heading out to cool off in the Berkshire Mountains, North Adams, for two days.   Staying at the "Ultra Savvy" Porches Inn.  Hope to visit Mass MOCA, cool our tootsies off in the Deerfield River and just be in the moment.

(of course we will be taking lots of pictures too)   

See you all when we get back and I am a year older. 

No doubt people like naming things. Expecting parents stereotypically spend a good quantity of time finding a name for their child, companies spend millions to find a name that will make them millions more while the upper class enjoy naming lots of spaces and objects after themselves.

“You enter through the Arlene and Robert Kogod Lobby. From there you may choose to ascend to the orchestra level by taking either the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Grand Staircase West or the Philip L. Graham Fund Grand Staircase East. (One wonders: Do the friends of the Cafritz family feel disloyal if they enter on the east side, running late, and choose to head up Phil’s stairs?)

Should you arrive with time for a drink before the curtain, you can linger near the James and Esthy Adler Orchestra Terrace West, or the less personal-sounding American Airlines Orchestra Terrace East. And don’t forget to check your bulky outerwear at the Cassidy & Associates Coat Room, before entering the Landon and Carol Butler Theater Stage to watch the performance.

Two long lists of names of benefactors also cascade down the front of the terra-cotta-colored facade. More are etched into the glass balustrades on the upper level.

Indeed, from top to bottom the new theater is all but covered in this graffiti of the philanthropic class. Attending a performance can be like leafing through somebody else’s high school yearbook. Who are all these people? Should I know? Should I care? How much would I have to give to get my name on, say, a drinking fountain? And would a urinal be cheaper?”

Read the rest of this article on the “Graffiti of the Philanthropic Class” by Charles Isherwood at the New York Times. Also read a little about the Stephen A. Schwarzman Library (formerly known as THE New York Public Library).

[photo credit: MASS MoCA Jenny Holzer exhibit, by S. Cairns for the New York Times]

[Photo credit: Norman Rockwell Museum, by S. Cairns for the New York Times]

UPDATE: lovely article in today's Transcript about the beginning of the Lewitt project, including picture of Sylvia at work -- good job!

Aaron Andrews and Caitlin Healy and maybe more MCLA students will be joining the crew early in the summer!

Also on the MASS MoCA blog, a huge congratulations to David Lang, composer and member of Bang-on-a-Can. David just won a Pulitzer. Here in North Adams we pretty much love Lang and the entire Bang-on-a-Can crew including dear friend, the always-interesting magician-muse of contemporary violin, Todd Reynolds.

UPDATE: lovely article in today's Transcript about the beginning of the Lewitt project, including picture of Sylvia at work -- good job!

"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense." Pablo Picasso

"I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one." Flannery O'Connor

A few years after college--after following the temple route through India and a stint running a gallery in pre-cool Seattle--I turned from the visual arts back to writing. As a viewer outside the creative process, I had grown uneasy, even in galleries, even in the gallery I ran. Few people outside the art and collecting world ever stepped off of First Avenue and into our small space, and those who did enter, often seemed not deeply interested in the art at all but in being near it or being near people who liked being near it. I saw little conscious, active participation, just a drifting through.

I began to dislike museums intensely--the formality, the lack of questioning, the spectacle--in spite of my hunger for a creative world. I preferred religious art and public art because at least in Europe and Asia, you could find it on the street and in places people actually went. Art could become something new, different every time you encountered it. Of course that's not to say that we're awake to art as we pass it by or that there is no place for the museum and concert hall (as Joshua-Bell-busking-in-the-subway showed), --that's ridiculous--but are we increasingly immune to the disruptiveness of art because we are not encouraged to develop our creative selves? Indeed, I would argue that we have the creative schooled right out of us. If we, as Maxine Greene argues, release our imagination, we might be ready to have our doors blown open when we encounter art. And perhaps we'll work towards a better world.

I suppose that's what I'm doing now as I prepare to leave formal education. I'm heading out of the museum and onto the street. I'm releasing my imagination.

Of course my discomfort hasn't kept me from going to museums--you'll find me seeking them out wherever I go. But I still don't much like them. I just keep hoping I will--I like a lot of the people who work in them-- and I need art to startle me and make me question what I know. So it is with interest that I watch Leslie Madsen Brooks and her cohorts trying to transform museums into relevant, inspiring places for people--all people.

But mostly, over the years, I turned to literature, to theater, to film, to music. And I wrote. To make sense of the world, to participate fully in the world, I felt compelled to create stories, and words seemed easier to access than other materials (ha!). I turned to teaching as art--the classroom the canvas, the subject the paint, the students the collaborators, channeling experience and intelligence and imagination towards one another into creating. Classroom narratives. It was deeply satisfying.

But for the past couple of years, as classroom stories have grown pinched by curricular demands and limited by a lack of institutional imagination and the thin expectations of formal learning, I despair of this museum context. I am moving back to creative learning spaces of everyday life. I am as eager to take out my camera as I am my pen. To press the results up against one another. And okay about failing as I learn. To open a center where anyone can come to explore digital expression and connection practices--a place where creativity, imagination and connection are the focus, the raison d'etre, as people struggle to make sense of the world and "to bring better worlds into being." (Richard Miller, Writing at the End of the World, p.x)

Yesterday I spent the afternoon with my daughter and husband at what I'd almost call an unmuseum, MASS MoCA, with its mix of conventional-looking galleries and raw former-mill spaces, meandering around the exhibitions-finding ourselves offended, amused, moved in turns, arguing, discussing, animated. Then we arrived at the huge former mill building turned gallery occupied by Jenny Holzer's "Projections," a work that silences you as you enter, that you become a part of: enormous lines of poetry immersing you, a work that flows words over the floor, the walls the ceiling, bending and distorting as they encounter disruptions--including the viewer--to flat surfaces. We stayed a long time, experiencing it, thinking, talking, being quiet, taking photos--she actually welcomes people playing around with her art this way.

All day yesterday and today I can't shake the feeling of being inside the artwork, part of the experience for anyone else who was there, and they part of the experience for me. Words, light, space, shapes, people, stories. Fascinating. Jarring. I kept thinking about Nabokov's words, "Curiosity is the first step to insubordination."

I came home inspired, surprised, eager, yes, to step out of the traditional walled-off museum once and for all, where as Garrison and Anderson (p.5) contend,"There is far more rhetoric than reality in the assertion that communities of inquiry in higher education today encourage students to approach learning in a critical manner and process information in a deep and meaningful way." I'm ready to move into the un-museum creative spaces in the world where active participation is a given, imagination is encouraged and creativity at the center of the learning experience.

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams won the lawsuit against Büchel, and won the right to exhibit Büchel's incomplete work, which he had stopped progress on as the artist-gallery relationship grew more and more acrid. When the artist community balked at the thought of an unfinished work presented to the public without the artist's consent, Mass MoCa relented and dismantled "Training Ground," which had been housed in a warehouse before the lawsuit commenced.

Today, "Training Ground" has leaked out of the warehouse and now includes an exhibition of the legal correspondence between the lawyers, museum officials, and the artist himself. Fueled by rage over the destruction of his art piece, as Büchel claims Mass MoCa has done by suing and later dismantling the installation, Christoph Büchel has expanded his art and taken it in a new direction and a new metaproject based on the ideals of free speech and freedom of expression.

Lies, Accusations, and Accounting

The trouble between Büchel and Mass MoCa includes the museum's assertion that the artist was "difficult" to deal with, while Büchel maintains that MassMoCa lied about budgets.

Büchel, according to the New York Times, has investigated heavily into the accounting side of the museum, familiarizing himself with budget concerns and endowment issues to an extreme degree. It would seem that the ongoing battle between the artist and gallery has brought the artist further from his art as he gets bogged down in the bureaucracy of art exhibition, rather than concerning himself with the tenets of its creation.

Read the full New York Times article here.

Okay, okay, it's not actually my artwork. But it is artwork that I helped assemble/create: flying stuffed fake tigers pierced with arrows. To be more precise, MASS MoCA director Joe Thompson and I both labored together to put all of the arrows in all of the tigers, during a long two weeks helping create Cai Guo-Qiang's fabulous installation, Inopportune (curated by Laura Heon). It was up to the two of us to determine where to place all the arrows, based on drawings and much feedback from the artist. Many of the artworks in Inopportune are now in what looks to be a fantastic exhibit at the Guggenheim, organized by Tom Krens. I have no doubt it's a dynamite exhibit: Cai Guo-Qiang's quite inventive, theatric, plus friendly and professional to work with. Here's the review from the New Yorker and a piece at Newsweek. This photo of an arrow-ridden tiger is from Roberta Smith's New York Times review [photo credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times]:

And a link to the slideshow:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/02/22/arts/22cai-slideshow_4.html

Here's a photo I took at MASS MoCA during 2004 the fabrication:

Just exactly why Ms. Smith doesn't mention the immense contributions made by MASS MoCA and its staff and curatorial team in relationship to these artworks is sort of mysterious. The cars, exploding/fireworks videos, etc., were all part of Inopportune and were largely fabricated at MASS MoCA. [Correction: according to their website the cars installed at the Guggenheim are an 'exhibition copy' of Inopportune: Stage One, where the MASS MoCA fabricated set of cars, the original exhibit, is at the Seattle Art Museum. It's a fascinating idea that you could make a compelling copy of an installation that is this large and intense!]

Here is my friend Tom hanging on for dear life on a suspended car while wielding a huge drill (and yes I mean an actual drill), and another picture of the artist and my wife Laura Christensen lodged inside a car putting together the circuitry that powers the lights:

For some great blog articles on the Guggenheim exhibit, see Culturegrrl online, where the intrepid Lee Rosenbaum has placed many interesting behind-the-scenes photos and insightful discussions. She has also ridden the flume.

Click here for Cai Guo-Qiang's well-designed website Click through to find photos and records from 2004 of Inopportune Stage One and Stage Two at MASS MoCA

MASS MoCA, Saturday, January 19, 8:00 pm, Club B-10, $14 advance, $18 day of show

Former EV1 owner, alternative fuel activist, and featured personality of the film Chelsea Sexton will participate in a Q&A after the screening. She knows everything there is to know about alternative fuel; you owe it to yourself to meet her!

Also tune your radio to WAMC on Wednesday, January 16, at 11AM to hear an interview with Chelsea.

It was among the fastest, most efficient production cars ever built. It ran on electricity, produced no emissions and catapulted American technology to the forefront of the automotive industry. So why did GM crush its fleet of EV1 electric vehicles in the Arizona desert? This chronicle of the life and mysterious death of the GM EV1 deftly examines the car’s cultural and economic ripple effects and how they reverberated through the halls of government and big business.

Thursday, January 17, 7:30 pm, Club B-10, $7. Tickets can be purchased online HERE.

Tara Donovan's pins are hard to miss. There are thousands of them upstairs at the new Institute of Contemporary Art. They're smushed together almost as if dropped into a trash compactor, except instead of being bent, they form a 3½-foot-tall block of sinewy, shiny metal. This is art, and it sits in the center of a gallery at the ICA, one of the signature pieces of the museum's collection.

Stare at "Untitled (Pins)," and you're likely to have questions. How does this cube stick together? Is it solid or a kind of pin shell? And what of the artist? Did Donovan get pricked as she manipulated the piece? Was she wearing protective gloves? What kind of care and persistence did it require for her to turn these thousands of glittering pins into such a perfect square?

One thing you might not expect: Donovan didn't put "Untitled (Pins)" together at all. The New York City artist figured out how to shape a mass of pins and sent instructions to the museum; the work was assembled in July, and again in August, entirely by the hands of ICA employees.

Surprised? Don't be. Like any museum of contemporary art, the ICA is full of works built by somebody other than the artist, from Kelly Sherman's Foster Prize-winning "Wish Lists," a collection of personal wish lists gathered from the Internet, to "Cell (Hand and Mirror)," a mysterious Louise Bourgeois piece featuring a pair of carved marble hands in the center of miniature room.
In Cambridge, Harvard's Carpenter Center was recently home to an installation piece of cellophane-wrapped candies laid in a golden carpet across the ground floor of the center. The work is credited to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, but was actually built by curator Helen Molesworth. (Gonzalez-Torres died in 1996.) At the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, several pieces in the Spencer Finch exhibit - including a majestic stained-glass wall - were simply assembled according to the artist's specs. And last September, when the Boston Center for the Arts hosted "Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off" by Scottish artist Martin Creed, in which the gallery's 67 track lights illuminated the white walls and then flicked off every five seconds, not only did Creed not set up the exhibition, he didn't even fly to Boston while it was up.

As contemporary art becomes more mainstream, and successful artists become "brands" that draw huge sale prices and big museum crowds, legions of art viewers are now finding themselves confronting "original" works created by someone other than the person listed on the wall label.

What qualifies such artwork as original, and whether it should matter whether the artist physically created the work, is a debate that has occupied academic corners of the art world for years. But if museumgoers believe - reasonably - that the point of seeing original art is to connect intimately with the artist who crafted the piece before them, they are opening themselves up to a rude surprise. In a contemporary art museum, it's now fair to expect that chunks of a collection were never touched by the artist at all.

Geoff Edgers
Boston Globe

Tomorrow: Part 2 from Edgers' excellent article.

• Mr. Goodbody's House of Potions featuring mad scientist art-making, with paint, goo, slime and other magical creations with which you'll be able to make art and play with at home.

Wednesday, Dec. 26, 10 to 11:30 am, ages 3-12

• Magical Memory Pop-Up Books Make a pop-up book filled with your memories. Bring photos to create collages or tell a story in your book.

Thursday, Dec. 27, 10 to 11:30 am, ages 7-17

• Magical Memory Pop-Up Books for Adults Don't let the kids have all the fun! Come learn how to make a variety of pop-up books to house your photos or tell a story. A great workshop for teachers, parents or anyone looking to let their artistic side out for the night.

Thursday, Dec. 27, 6 to 8 p.m.

• Fantastical Face Your Fears New Year's Hats Come to our annual New Year's Eve hat making class. Afraid of spiders? The dentist? Heights? Create a magical hat to help you combat your fears as you ring in the New Year.

Monday, Dec. 31, 10 to 11:30 a.m.; ages 3-12

There is a $5 per person materials fee for each art class. Space is limited so register early. Call Kidspace at 413-664-4481, Ext. 8131 or email kidspace@massmoca.org

Thursday, December 6, 2007, 7:30 pm
Courtyard Café or Club B-10
$7

MASS MoCA’s winter Cinema Lounge series features green-themed documentaries taking a wide-ranging, inclusive look at environmental issues. The Endless Summer opens Green Docs on a lighthearted note. Shot in the mid-1960s, it chronicles the intercontinental travels of two surfers in search of the perfect wave. The exploits of the surfers are cheerful and humorous — whether they’re catching waves, teaching locals to surf or being chased by zebras — but the real majesty of the film is in the breathtaking scenery. Pristine beaches and glittering surf form a constant backdrop, visuals The New York Times describes as full of “hypnotic beauty and almost continuous excitement”. The majesty of the sea combined with the adventurous attitude of the surfers is infectious, gently inspiring in viewers a greater appreciation of the coastal landscape and ecosystems.

Text taken from the MoCA website

Here's one thing I know as someone who's been kicking around the art world for a little bit:

As an artist, you expect that museums will play fair and be nice. You take in stride that you might get jerked around by critics, commercial galleries, collectors, other artists, and so on. But somehow you expect more from museums. And then something like this happens.

I'm really curious to see how Jenny Holzer reacts to all this. She is certainly a big enough art name that she could pull out of her upcoming show with no damage to her career, but will she? She must have been working on this exhibit for months if not years; as miserable a situation as all this has turned out to be, there is a tiny corner of myself that can understand if she doesn't cancel. Artists make all sorts of sacrifices in order to show their work... right? This is just another one of the indignities that artists face in the long road that is exhibiting... ... right? In a situation like this, you just take a deep breath and go through the show like a trooper - the professional artist that you are...

...
...
... right?

Ugh, dear god. This whole situation makes me want to vomit. I am really keeping my fingers crossed that Holzer either cancels her show or is rushing off to the neon fabricator right now to have new huge text pieces that read THIS IS THE WORST MUSEUM EVER or DEMAND YOUR ADMISSION MONEY BACK so she can install them for the show.

Be thankful, at least, that it is Holzer coming up next. Someone with the kind of art world collateral that she has does have the actual option of cancelling or putting together a protest show. What would be even more heartbreaking is if there was a younger, less established artist scheduled in the next slot. Stuck between a gallery screaming at you to go ahead with the show, the museum screaming at you to be done already and whatever your own feelings are on the Büchel case... well, that's a horrible situation to be in. Ugh. Good lord.

[later]
Quick update... thanks to Anaba for this link...
In one of the grossest/strangest distortions of Web 2.0 that I've seen in a while, MassMOCA now has a blog about the court case. Don't let the format fool you; it may look like a blog and the great new day of the internet dawning in which readers collaborate (collaborate!!) with the creator of the site in order to create content... but it's not. Instead, it's an authoritarian FAQ about the court case (ok, understandable to a certain extent) followed by a very creepy comment section (ok, totally NOT understandable!! alarms blaring!!) to "discuss" the case. Suspiciously, there are only three comments and all are pro-MassMOCA.

The easy thing to do in this situation is to post a pro-Büchel comment and see if MassMOCA pulls it. I'm wondering if it would just be way more fun to do something like have 50 of us all hit the site and put really intense, well-thought-out arguments up there all at once and make an archive of what those comments are and... do something with them. I don't know. I'm open for suggestions.

A list of confirmed participants:
Abe Lincoln Jr. (NYC), Aerosolarts (La Jolla, CA), ANT (Vienna, Austria), APE7 (Sydney), Jason Archer & Paul Beck (Austin, TX), Arrrgh! (Hannover, Germany), Bask (Detroit), Brandon Bauer (Milwaukee), BOB215 (NJ), Bongout (France), Buffmonster (LA), Alex Costa (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Dr. Blade (Atlanta), Dub Syndicate (Houston), Shepard Fairey (LA), Jerome G (Paris), Give Em Hell (NJ), Lord Hao (Paris), HECZ (Chicago), Height Lab (LA), Hubert One (Brooklyn), INK 76 (NYC), Jet-Pac (York, UK), JS04 (Chicago), Kempt (Boston), Klutch (Portland, OR), Nicolas Lampert (Milwaukee), Charlene Lau (Toronto), MAD One (Tempe, AZ), Magic Propaganda Mill (NYC), MAKE (LA), Markron103 (Phillipines), Minigraff (Sydney, Australia), Claude Moller (SF), Roger Peet (Tucson, AZ), POCH (France), Leon Rainbow (NJ), RB827 (Brooklyn), REVISE CMW (Chicago), Erik Ruin (Detroit), Schhh (Barcelona), Scout (Albany, NY), Sevenist (Chicago), Shiro (LA), Skumskullz (Germany), Olever Stak (Paris), Sunkist (Netherlands), Super-Mega (Japan), Swoon (Brooklyn), Beth Tub (IL), TXMX (Hamburg), Nick Walker (UK), W/REMOTE (Minneapolis)

A catalog of the show is available through MIT press.