Museum, bodies, alternative electricity

David Altmedj MCA Denver

New Building for Museum of Contemporary Art Opens with New Stuff Inside

Sunday, Oct. 28, 2007

DENVER  — The Museum of Contemporary Art opened its new building and new show to the public Sunday. The show is called Star Power: Museum as Body Electric.The stars are seven artists from somewhere far away from Denver that have the talent to play major league art, just as the Colorado baseball team was creating its own drama in the World Series in Denver on the same weekend the MCA was opening.

Like the drama of a baseball game, contemporary art is not a settled matter. The sport of looking at contemporary art is that you do not have to argue with 200 years of art history to hold an opinion, just as any sports fan can have an opinion about whether or not the manager should pull the pitcher. You probably know as much about art, which is simply a physical expression of what it means to be alive today, as most fans know about baseball. The game will have a definitive ending based on the score, and deliver some emotion dependent on the feeling of winning or losing, although you may never know if your pitcher decision would have made a difference. Likewise, if you take the time to look at contemporary art, you may never know if you have the right opinion, but you will have an emotional or intellectual reaction, possibly more complex, maybe less strong, or one that might recur in ordinary life, just as you might with baseball.  If you’Äôre not getting contemporary art, maybe you need to have a little more commentary like you get at baseball games. Follow this link and read my story about the Museum of Contemporary Art Conversations with the Artists held on Saturday. I also like to listen to what other people who enjoy the sport of Contemporary Art have to say.

For example, I went to the public opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver with a painter, a sculptor, kids, professors, people who make things and a token real estate agent.Museum of Contemporary Art Denver

The photography gallery on the main floor was lined with: standard big photographs, photo collages, a photo stuck on rag paper and hung in the bottom of a big empty frame, photos marked by handwriting and arrows and two Natural History museum style cases protecting a messy collection of scrapbooks, magazines, notes, nostalgic war memorabilia and workbooks, most of which were in German, assembled by New York artist Collier Schorr. The collages were beautiful compositions, said the painter, and the whole room with its images of a naked woman and a partially clothed young man reminded her of the careless feeling of young adulthood ’Äì carefree living in a messy room, holding at bay responsibility that would certainly be ended by joining the military or having children. I thought the room was dominated by an emotionless attitude toward the male subject and self-absorbed decisions about what to cut and where to paste it that had more to do with the artist than the subjects. ’ÄúThis artist will never have an independent thought,’Äù one man said trumping my disinterest.

Next, I tried to look at a video installation of black and white animation choreographed to classical music suggested by two turntables placed in the center of the room. Inside the room, the sound was isolated and enveloping and anyone who entered became a part of the visual scene. The artist, Carlos Amorales, is from Mexico City and the monochromatism must be a great contrast to his world outside. Outside this room, for me, I was distracted by Bob Marley songs wafting loudly from the basement through all three floors as if a huge choir of singers was practicing downstairs. We had to see what was going on.

Dave Altmedj

South African artist Candice Breitz compiled the choir by stacking 30 TVs  — five-high, six-wide and playing on each one an individual singing along with Bob Marley songs being piped into their heads via headphone. These individuals, 30 Jamaicans, were filmed individually as they sang alone in the recording studio. Each gives an individual performance emanating from one of the TVs. While there are several moments where one of the singers makes a mistake, comes in at the wrong time, hums instead of enunciating, the piece is flawless ’Äì upbeat, individualistic, elegant. I could hear some of the artists in the audience thinking it was too accessible.

MCA Denver David Altmedj

On the second floor, the largest gallery is walled with mirrors and filled with mirror-covered sculpture by Canadian artist David Altmejd. Eerie and exciting like a carnival hall of mirrors, only the odd rubber mask or white table stands out in the room, and it takes a monent to realize the mirrored objects are six giants. They are inanimate, staring into the silvery ether of their own biology, each has many broken mirror pieces, one skin has a puncture so large you can see into its plywood interior, one Halloween rubber head and body in transition to mirror-mandom. These flaws are mostly subtle, the shapes as typical horror film ’Äì six iterations from Godzilla-like to the Borg-Box with eyes. ’ÄúViolent, angry,’Äù said the painter; ’ÄúDominating, ghost-like icons,’Äù I said. ’ÄúIf they are supposed to be gods,’Äù said the sculptor, ’ÄúI wouldn’Äôt waste my time making them.’Äù True, what does simulated power have to do with our lives.

Rangi Kipa Museum of Contemporary Art Denver Another set of deities were being evoked in a much smaller gallery by New Zealand artist Rangi Kipi. He ornately carved a wooden house, roof open to the sky, exterior walls covered with detailed black paintings of tools, carvings and images of a life close to nature and work. Inside were colorful phrases in a highly ceremonial Maori language. The artist and the artist’Äôs wife were present ’Äì Artist in Residence, technically -- and explained the Maori mythology, as they would be doing all week with school kids invited to the museum for educational programs.  The artist had a wealth of his native imagery to use, each with a meaning understood and accepted by a community of people, but I kept feeling he was also trapped by this mythology and could not make meaningless giants in a house of mirrors.

MCA Denver Wengeche MutuWengechi Mutu constructed Will Honey-Flavor Milk Curb the Pig-feed Rage in a narrow gallery space that includes a window to outside to which she taped clear tubing and clear-heeled platform shoes. The opposite wall was gently bathed in natural light from the window and the glass wall covered by diffusion panels. On this wall, Mutu built a landscape with layers of packaging tape that I can associate with dry arroyos in a New Mexico hillside. Medicinal bottles filled with milk are hung from the ceiling and drip to the floor at random intervals, marking the entire territory, animalistically, for this artist. I invaded the space to meditate on the clear tape, shoes and hose framing a crystal clear Denver day when I was splatted with milk.MCA Denver Wengeche Mutu

The wall is stenciled with a repeated image of a hog carcass. The cut out of the carcass includes the forearm of a man holding it, and all are close to the same fleshy color. Small red dots splatter the repeated image, and honey-colored hoses and summer-coats from small mammals are laid in the arroyos. The form is pretty, including the puddles of white milk that have developed on the black gallery floor.

The artist may be more pleased by the other reactions I heard about the piece, ’Äúhard to get in to", "disturbing.’Äù One woman said it reminded her of a film she saw about harvesting bile from live animals in China. ’ÄúThe Chinese can be so mean to animals; I guess we ask a lot of them ’Äì animals.’Äù The real estate agent thought the pinky flesh-colored stencil and red dots were splatters of real blood until she got close enough to see the image. The real reek of nature will begin, for me, once that rancid milk starts smelling.

The Building Contains Art

The MCA building is complex in texture, rich in materials, and elegantly simple in design. The base of the exterior walls are concrete cast into a wooden mold reminiscent MCA Denverof board and batten, a quick construction style common in Colorado mining towns, which makes obvious the hand of man in the building that will hopefully remain cast in concrete for a long time. The ceiling of the entry is glossy black steel almost as reflective as the translucent black glass that makes up the largest part of the walls. Inside, the intense Colorado light is diffused by floor to ceiling panels of fabric that are at the same time technical and organic. Two floors of gallery space sit atop a basement level gallery, and are crowned by a rooftop cafˆ©, garden and kids space. This jeweled crown is luscious: deep brown deck rails, black metal and glass, sculpture as gardens, sparkling views: linearly along 15th to downtown, and an undulating westerly 15th Street that curls up into the Highlands neighborhood.

From the roof your can look through glass floor panels, slivers of openings that pierce the entire box. Inside more obvious slivers open the layers to one another: the stairway and a central atrium. The stairway is a dark sheath of steel -- walls, ceiling and treads -- as intense as a transporter device. The atrium is open between the first and second floors, delineated by a solid white steel balustrade. Unpredictably, clear glass windows appear, allowing in horizontal light, crossing the vertical grid of light beams into the building. The slit of the entryway is not yet finished, but was functioning Sunday so visitors could experience the museum without a door.

The building gives off a steely sense of formidability, balanced by slices of vulnerability, and an emphasis on box-like functionality, without being devoid of rich textural diversity. The architect, London-based David Adjaye, embodied these characteristics when he spoke about how proud he was of this building. He was thankful for the opportunity to build it, while people were falling over each other to thank him and show their pride in having unanimously selected such a now-hot architect. Although he knows his resume is filled with recently completed large commercial commissions in Britain, Norway and China, Adjaye showed he cared about this project. He called it his first museum as if that was as important as a first kiss.

Terry Talty is an art tourist, this week, in a hometown hosting the opening of a new art museum and the baseball World Series, who realizes more tourist dollars are spent on culture than sports.