Museum Town

From factory town to museum town.

(2019) Documentary (Zeitgeist)  Meryl Streep (narration), David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Nick Cave, Joseph Thompson, Thomas Krens, Megan Tamas, Ruth Yarter, John Barrett, Francis Esposito, Simeon Bruner, Denise Markonish, Bob Faust, James Turrell, Jane Swift, Jack Wadsworth, Richard Criddle, Missy Parisien. Directed by Jennifer Trainer

 

No less a wrenching change in the American landscape than the Industrial Revolution was America’s loss of factory jobs that began in the late 1970s and has continued through now. Towns that had once been prosperous suddenly saw their economies obliterated overnight. Suddenly, everyone is unemployed. Despair and crime move in and the feeling of hometown pride moves out.

North Adams, Massachusetts – located in the picturesque Berkshires of the Western part of the state – is such a town. A bustling, productive town that relied on the Sprague Electric Company as the economic engine that powered the town. When the company abandoned the town and moved its facilities elsewhere, the town was devastated. The massive factory complex which had once supplied parts for war planes during the Second World War and employed most of the town’s women in that Greatest of Generations, stood empty, a symbol of changing times and of corporate loyalty (or lack thereof).

But there were people who had a vision. Thomas Krens, for one; a former director at New York’s Guggenheim (where he was a figure of considerable controversy, something not touched upon in the film) and director at nearby Williams College where he’d taught for 17 years (and graduated from in 1969). Inspired by German factories that had been repurposed as art museums, he came up with the idea of doing the same in North Adams.

It was a bit of a hard sell. The blue collar citizens and officials of North Adams were about as far from an art colony as it’s possible to get; ayor John Barrett once quipped that he wouldn’t cross the street to see some of the art instillations at the museum built in his town. And while Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis had been enthusiastic about the project and willing to contribute the funds needed to get the project off the ground, his Republican successor William Weld was less enthusiastic and the project nearly died almost before it began, saved only by the fact that Weld was – surprisingly – a Talking Heads fan, an anecdote that is explained further in the film.

If the movie seems like it’s gushing a bit from tie to time, it’s understandable; Trainer was for many years the director of development at the museum that eventually became known as the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MassMoCA. This familiarity with the subject does give the film some insights that it might otherwise not have been possible to get, but there is also the other side of the coin – the filmmakers don’t always look with clear eyes at the museum, although an early dispute with a Swiss artist who objected to having his work displayed unfinished after refusing to finish the work when the museum objected to expensive overruns. Trainer does attempt to show both sides, but it’s telling that the only interviews on the incident come from the MassMoCA staff whereas representatives of the artist or the New York Times art critic who reported extensively on the subject were not.

Much of the film follows the installation of Until, an extensive work by Chicago artist Nick Cave (not the one you’re thinking of) made up of found items, ten miles of crystals, and some creative fabrications (the installation ran from October 2016 until September 2017. It is a look at how such installations are created and fabricated and will be of interest to art buffs.

This is clearly a labor of love, and as such there are some things that are endearing about it. Residents of the town – notably Ruth Yarter, a feisty senior citizen who worked at Sprague during the war years and then again at Mass MoCA as a ticket taker – are interviewed and many of them were skeptical and somewhat bemused, but when the dust cleared, the museum indeed revitalized the town. Art therapy, indeed.

REASONS TO SEE: A fascinating story of ambition and vision. Streep’s narration is unobtrusive.
REASONS TO AVOID: A bit on the gushing side.
FAMILY VALUES: Suitable for family audiences.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Mass MoCA is currently the largest museum of contemporary art in the world.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Virtual Cinema
CRITICAL MASS: As of 1/15/21: Rotten Tomatoes: 85% positive reviews; Metacritic: 57/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: The Art of the  Steal
FINAL RATING: 7/10
NEXT: The Midnight Sky

A Space Program

A tea service on Mars.

(2015) Comedy (Zeitgeist) Tom Sachs, Hailey Gates (voice), Pat Manocchia (narrator), Mary Eannarino, Sam Ratanarat, Chris Beeston, Evan Ross Murphy, Patrick McCarthy, Nick Doyle, Van Neistat, Kevin Hand, Jeff Lurie, Jared Vandeusen, Gordon Milsaps, Sarah Hoover, Bill Powers, Sarah Vasil, Greg Vane, Sarah Sachs, Arthur Sachs, Max Ellenbogen, Aunt Irma, Lila Ellenbogen. Directed by Van Neistat

 

There is art and then there is Art. The difference between the two is that art is reflective, stimulating, inspiring and Art is pretentious and arrogant. Art talks down to people; art brings them into the conversation. Art is made for the artist; art is made for the people.

Tom Sachs follows the dictates of bricolage, in which the artist uses mainly found materials and a fairly strict list of other materials to create. In this case, at a large space (normally used for things like basketball games) in New York City, he decided to do something about the space program and NASA. Using mainly plywood, steel and other mediums, he and his team crafted an environment of Mission Control, a lunar landing and a faux Mars to merge performance art and bricolage into a kind of art environment. Not being the sort of person who pays much attention to art (other than the cinematic kind), I’m not certain if this is innovative or not but something tells me it’s been done.

Probably not in this manner and on this scale, to be fair. The storyline posits a manned mission to Mars in which two female astronauts (Eannarino, Ratanarat) are sent on a mission to the Red Planet to research whether life exists there. While they are there they perform a traditional Japanese tea service and plant poppy seeds (off of a hamburger bun) in order to grow poppies so that heroin can be distilled, helping NASA defray the costs of sending an expedition to Mars. You have to give them points for out-of-the-box thinking.

There are certainly elements of whimsy here and some of the constructions are quite clever. I’m never quite certain whether the artist is poking fun at man’s pretensions of space conquest, or honoring human ingenuity through ingenuity of his own. As with all art – or even Art – it is open to the interpretation of the viewer and there is no wrong interpretation.

One of the problems I have with the film is that it almost has an obsessive-compulsive disorder in certain ways, endlessly discussing the materials used by the bricoliers in constructing the installation (do we really need to know why plywood was an ideal medium?) which does little to enhance our appreciation of the artwork and quite frankly feels like it’s being used to pad out the film, which clocks in at a short 72 minute running time, but feels much longer – also thanks to assigning each character a code name using military call signs based on their first and last names (Evan Murphy becomes Echo Mike, Tom Sachs becomes Tango Sierra and so on). They also flash to a faux ID badge for each cast member. It gets monotonous.

I will admit freely I’m not the intended audience for this; I am neither a hipster nor an art geek. People who are into art, are into trends or are into more intellectual pursuits might well find this fascinating. There is certainly some reflection on the process, although it is mainly in the execution rather than of the conception; the film doesn’t go into at all why Sachs chose this subject, or how he got the idea of creating Mission Control and Mars in a performance space. I would have liked to have seen a little bit more from that angle.

So not my cup of tea really, but as a document of an important work of modern art, it can be said that this is vital work. From the aspect of the layman however, there is an air of self-important smirking that didn’t really go down well with me. Maybe because I’m a bit of a space buff, I found it a little more irreverent than I was comfortable with. Then again, good art does make you reconsider your position while skewering the icons of culture. In that sense, this is a successful film.

REASONS TO GO: A record of an important piece of modern art.
REASONS TO STAY: The obsessive discussion of the materials used is pretentious. Not sure if this is hipster art snobbery or an attempt at sacred cow tipping. Despite a 72 minute running time still overstays its welcome.
FAMILY VALUES: There is some profanity and a few disturbing images.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The film is a recording of Sachs’ 2012 installation at the Park Avenue Armory.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 4/8/16: Rotten Tomatoes: 89% positive reviews. Metacritic: 71/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: The Forbidden Zone
FINAL RATING: 4.5/10
NEXT: High Strung

Levitated Mass

L.A. rocks!

(2013) Documentary (Electric City) Michael Heizer, Michael Govan, Jarl Mohn, Terry Semel, Zev Yaroslavsky, Bruce Pollack, Stephen Vander Hart, Mary Heizer, Terry Emmert, Tim Cunningham, Chris Gutierrez, Larry Klayman, Greg Otto, Elaine Wynn, Kathleen Anderson, Wes Molino, Chaz Ermini, Raul Duran, Gregg Lowry, Ron Elad, Laura Roughton, Chrissie Isles. Directed by Doug Pray

Art is an entirely subjective thing. What is art to one person may not necessarily be  to another. Some people can look at a beautiful sunset at call it art; others say that art only exists as a human creation; art cannot be discovered, only created. There is no right answer, incidentally; art is what you think it is.

Michael Heizer is a sculptor who has been pushing the boundaries of art since the ’60s. He created the concept of “negative sculpture” – solid objects with the “art” carved out of them. Heizer also tends to prefer working with massive sizes and shapes. He has mostly been on his Nevada ranch the past couple of decades, working on a unique and perhaps unfinishable sculpture.

That doesn’t mean he hasn’t made time for other things however. One concept he has been working on for more than forty years has been the work of art entitled “Levitated Mass” in which a massive boulder is suspended above a trench so people can walk beneath the boulder and alongside it. He would eventually have a supporter in Michael Govan, executive director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or as it is locally known, LACMA.

When Heizer found the perfect rock in a Riverside quarry, he was ready to create his artwork but first he had to get the rock from Riverside to Los Angeles. That’s a 60 mile journey if you make it directly, but a boulder this size – 340 tons, 21 and a half feet tall – isn’t just something you can pick up and put in the back of a pickup truck. A specialized transport had to be constructed just to move it and the route had to go in such a way that the vehicle was able to make it under bridges (and over bridges that were structurally able to support the weight) as well as on roads which didn’t have tight turns that the truck couldn’t make. Eventually a route was plotted that turned the 60 mile trip into 106 miles.

The process to move the boulder was a harrowing one, involving 22 city governments, three county governments and the State of California with the museum having to secure permits from each one of these bureaucracies. Just one refusal would have shut the whole thing down, and there were some legitimate reasons to say no – wear and tear on roads, the involvement of city services, the disruption to traffic (although the rock only traveled late at night).

The museum raised the ten million dollars needed from private donors and eventually, on the night of February 28, 2012 the boulder went underway from the quarry. The museum had to arrange to notify the residents of what was happening, tow cars parked along the route, temporarily move traffic signals and signs, and insure that the rock wasn’t damaged en route. In order to facilitate it, the boulder was wrapped in sheets of Egyptian cotton and essentially hidden from sight.

A curious thing happened on the way to the museum. People turned up to watch the spectacle night after night, sometimes in pajamas in the wee hours of the mornings. Tens of thousands of residents turned up, over a thousand of them gathering at LACMA on March 10 alone to see the boulder arrive at its new home. Spontaneous block parties broke out; people proposed marriage and everywhere the rock went it ignited a debate as to whether the expense was worth it and if this rock was actually art or ego. One thing is for certain; Angelinos love a good spectacle.

Pray wisely doesn’t take sides and allows the viewer to decide these questions for themselves. It’s understandable why some people, particularly in some of the poorest neighborhoods of L.A. would be grousing about spending ten million dollars to move a rock when there were so many urgent needs desperate for funding in those neighborhoods. However, it is also understandable that art has an important place not only in a city’s culture but in its own self-definition. What would New York City be without the Guggenheim, or Chicago without the Cloud Gate sculpture? Sure, they’d still be there but they wouldn’t be the same.

The movie serves as a tribute to human ingenuity as well as human will, the will to make the unlikely happen. One has to admire the tenacity of the team of transportation experts and museum staff as well as Heizer himself. The installation shows skills not only in art but in engineering and architecture as well. It is open to the public at the present and doesn’t require museum admission to see it.

While some of the street interviews tended to raise some of the same points over and over again, it is nonetheless inspiring to watch the transportation, the reaction of the people of Southern California to it and the final installation of the boulder in its new home. Is it art? That’s really your call to make dear reader but as far as I’m concerned, it’s art. Very much so.

REASONS TO GO: Invites debate as to the nature of art. Inspiring and creative.

REASONS TO STAY: Some of the talking heads are a bit superfluous.

FAMILY VALUES:  Suitable for the entire family.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Heizer’s father was a geologist who did a great deal of research into the movement of heavy objects by ancient civilizations.

CRITICAL MASS: As of 5/10/14: Rotten Tomatoes: no score yet. Metacritic: no score yet.

COMPARISON SHOPPING: Tim’s Vermeer

FINAL RATING: 7.5/10

NEXT: Brick Mansions