May 24, 2003 - Apr 2004
Galleries

Yankee Remix began with a simple premise: that artists would use the collection of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) to make new works of art for MASS MoCA. SPNEA's collection encompasses domestic artifacts (such as furniture, paintings, and kitchenware), archival material (photographs, letters, architects' drawings), and houses (including the modernist Gropius House, the 17th-century Coffin House, and Beauport, a Victorian fantasy).

The locality of the collection is what binds these elements together: New Englandness provides the "Yankee" in Yankee Remix. The "remixing" was engineered by nine artists Rina Banerjee, Huang Yong Ping, Manfred Pernice, Annette Messager, Ann Hamilton, Zoe Leonard, Martin Kersels, Lorna Simpson,and Frano Violich - whose bodies of work, though they differ greatly from each other, often allude to historic topics or incorporate pre-existing, or "readymade," objects. The artists, from five different countries and working in as many different media, made works that range from poignant to humorous for the exhibition. Some tackled specific historic people and events, such as Crispus Attucks and the Battle of Bunker Hill; others worked more generally, referring obliquely to the China trade, the enduring uncanniness of the home, and the idiosyncratic business of historic preservation itself.

Although MASS MoCA commissioned new works of art before, this was the first time that an entire exhibition had been created from newly commissioned work. Despite the variety in these nine works, several factors unify them all: the origin in SPNEA's rich, geographically targeted collection, the production during the same twelve-month period (a tumultuous one in U.S. politics), and the consideration of MASS MoCA's particular spaces.

Rina Banerjee

The story Banerjee told in this sprawling installation began with its most unassuming part: a group of three optical sculptures, resting low on the floor, dwarfed by the translucent pink Taj Mahal and chock-a-block altar that share the gallery. In these delicate optical sculptures, Banerjee includes excerpts from letters that were sent from Calcutta by a young Boston Brahmin named Ogden Codman to his fiance back in Boston during the late 1850s. The letters are paired with photographs from an album of 'Calcutta types' that Codman bought during his long tourist sojourn there. Banerjee relished the opportunity to gain insight into Codman's way of thinking about Calcutta, which she found hilarious, threatening, and bizarre by turns. The rose-colored glasses that Codman seemed to wear sent her on a riff about the Western romanticization of India during Victorian times, when there were fads for paisley shawls, Indian furniture, and decorative items. This romance was the alternate face of colonialism.

The glistening pink Taj Mahal, whose title Take Me, Take Me, Take Me . . . To the Palace of Love is taken from a kitschy Hindi movie of the mid-fifties, addresses both the absurdity and charm of the western infatuation with this cultural landmark as a romantic fantasy. In the center of her plastic palace, Banerjee placed a large, intricately carved Indian chair, already well past the height of fashion in India when it was made in the 1850s, but absolutely a la mode in Boston at that time. The chair is surmounted by a rather silly chandelier of Styrofoam, plastic butterflies, glitter, and other bits of sparkly color. The altar, equal to the Taj Mahal in size, anchors a long view in the museum. A large group of tea tables and side tables crowds the lotus-shaped pediment. Tea sets (some for dolls, some for dollhouses, and some for grown-ups) rest on top of each table, and the whole thing is swathed in drippy pink Reynolds Wrap. Tea became the fad in England, and then in America, as a result of colonization. Banerjee hints at the strange and pervasive fact that exoticized elements of a colonized culture often become fashionable in the culture of the colonizer.

By mixing the toy tea sets with the adult versions, Banerjee hints that to drink tea in the West (at least 150 years ago) was to play at India. The pink material is a kind of haze of romance, the pink eye of the title, the rose-colored glasses. But pink eye is not benign; it is a virus. Above these objects, Banerjee constructed a hierarch from the bottom up: first a dollhouse, then a bird cage, a pair of plastic lotus lights, a group of portraits, a pair of baby buggies surmounted by pink onion domes. The whole is capped off by a copy of the classic Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington.

It is difficult to take in the totality of Banerjee's installation; it is delightful, but also critical. A text (more poetic than prescriptive) that Banerjee wrote and placed on the foremost part of the lotus pedestal draws a connection between toy tea sets and colonial subjugation.

Ann Hamilton

There was only one object in the gallery assigned to Ann Hamilton: a sturdy metal stand supporting a stack of three rotating video projectors. It resembled a lighthouse both in form and action, projecting beams of light in slow revolutions onto the surrounding four walls. The video beams struck the wall at chest-height, bisecting the gallery to create a horizon line -- moving images above, blank wall below.

The three projectors spun slowly at different speeds and in opposite directions. The projected images changed size and focus as they traveled further from their source, crossing and intersecting each other in a non-repeating pattern. Hamilton created these images from photographs and papers in SPNEA's Boston archives. The most recognizable of the videos is a succession of eerily volumetric close-ups of people's faces. Made using a thumbnail-sized camera at very close range, this video traces details of photographic portraits on calling cards from the mid-19th century, so that an eye, or chin, or ear comes slowly into focus as the projection circles the room. The miniature size of the camera, its extreme proximity to the photograph portrait, and the way Hamilton directs it with her hand, rather than her eyes, have the effect of transforming this video into a caress, of transferring the faculty of sight to touch. Here vision proceeds at the pace and with the rhythm of the hand.

Hamilton used the same technique to trace a photograph of a late 19th-century schooner taken by Nathaniel Stebbins, part of a large collection of maritime photographs in the archives. This ship, arrested in the original photograph, seems to bob on the water, an effect intensified by its movement over the video horizon on the walls.

In the third video, a line of writing unfolded along the wall, skipping over the horizon like swells. The texts derive from children's copybooks made about the same time as the photographs of ships and people were taken. Children learned by writing one line of text, usually a short moral lesson, repeatedly. This text circled around the room hundreds of times every day, echoing the rote writing of children 150 years ago.

The horizon, the lighthouse, the faces, the schooners and the script: Taken as a whole, these hypnotic images surround and bisect your body. You might first think of history; the spinning lights, rocking ships, and unfurling ribbon of writing evoke voyages and distant correspondences. But with each slow lap of the images around the walls, the distance between past and present collapses, and the plenitude of embodied presence begins to vacuum of absent bodies.

Huang Yong Ping

Huang Yong Ping was born in Fujian Province, China, and lived there until 1989 when his work was included in a groundbreaking exhibition in Paris that presented Chinese contemporary artists to a large Western audience for the first time. Coincidentally, 1989 was the year of the massive protests at Tiananmen Square. Huang, a political dissident, went to Paris for the exhibition and chose to remain there.

Since that time, he has often situated his art in the great divide between East and West, and his work for Yankee Remix was no exception. One small object among the 100,000 items of New England origin in SPNEA's main storage facility caught Huang's eye: a little vessel in the form of a Chinese or Japanese dragon that might have been an incense burner or a sushi dish. The feisty little dragon was as foreign among the Tobey mugs as Huang himself was, and perhaps that is why it called out to him. At MASS MoCA, Huang transformed this foot-long dragon in a radical way, building a giant wood and paper replica over 50'in length. The dragon became a dragon boat to navigate the imaginary space between East and West.

The boat's contents gave us some idea of its passengers. Huang borrowed 22 Victorian traveling trunks from SPNEA, lining them up inside the boat. Patrician Bostonians of the Victorian era were inveterate travelers, inspired by the booming China trade, and exercised their newly realized financial and cultural clout by journeying to far-flung places. But Huang's construction suggested that even though the boat was glorious and the trunks were sturdy, undertaking the journey might remain impossible.

Huang attached old straw brooms, walking canes, dress swords, and even wooden stocking stretchers to the sides of the boat in place of oars. These everyday New England items, as useful as they may have been for their original purposes, will never propel the curious Bostonians to China. For them, China will likely remain an imaginary place, a fantasy framed by limited experience. Their idea of China, like the little dragon, will for the most part be hemmed in by Tobey mugs

Martin Kersels

What you would have seen before you in this sky-blue gallery was a giant boot, which was also a house, in an advanced state of fairy tale-like decay and rebirth. A fake cherry tree grew from a pile of ravaged furniture in its greenhouse toe, and a small crop of hemp plants crowded around a chandelier above the heel. Ivy and rose vines crept over the shingled surfaces. The boot house pays homage to one of the more unusual buildings under SPNEA's stewardship: Beauport, a highly idiosyncratic house that was designed and decorated by H.D. Sleeper, a lifelong bachelor who shared the house with his mother, from 1907 until 1934. Unlike most people whose homes enter SPNEA's collection, Sleeper tended to wink away concerns for historical accuracy in his design. He did nothing to correct the farfetched stories that neighbors whispered about the house; in fact, he encouraged them.

During his week-long visit to Boston, Kersels visited Beauport with one of SPNEA's conservators. He was intrigued with the Sisyphean tasks required to keep entropy at bay. Wallpaper that curled off the walls was uncurled and put right back on. Wood-boring beetles were combated with the latest techniques. The havoc wreaked by an invading squirrel was calmly and deliberately countered. But even as a dedicated staff of professionals worked against entropy in the physical structure of the house, Kersels found that they allowed, even embraced, entropy of the house's mythology, which Sleeper had deliberately cultivated by means of benign neglect. Historians at SPNEA endeavor to separate fact from fiction. But for Kersels, the fictions are just as revealing as the facts, and a good deal more interesting.

For that reason, Kersels incorporateed some of Beauport's and America's myths into his boot, even the form of the boot itself. SPNEA is deservedly proud of its collection of bunker boots, which were placed in the foundations and walls of houses for good fortune. But a house with a bunker boot must be demolished in order for the boot to come to light, hardly good fortune! Kersels' boot house was based on these contradictory talismans. Second, the cherry tree and hemp. Mr. Sleeper was a George Washington aficionado. The cherry tree reaching for the light through the wreckage of the boot nods to the youthful pranks of the father of our country (who could not tell a lie, but could chop down a perfectly good cherry tree). The hemp growing under the chandelier denotes not only Washington's enthusiasm for the plant, which he thought could be a great boon to the country, but also the plant's psychedelic properties.

Zoe Leonard

Zoe Leonard created one of the sparest-looking installations in Yankee Remix, for which she selected and photographed a group of objects in SPNEA's collection and had 32 images printed on postcards. She staged and shot the photographs in the most straightforward way, centering one object at a time on a plain background and working with natural light. The final products (the postcards) were displayed in an equally straightforward way: on a rack in the gallery, where they were for sale. Even the text on the back was plainspoken: (Wedding Gown, c. 1990) for example.

Leonard was drawn to the wallflowers of SPNEA's collection, to things without association to famous people or events and objects that were run-of-the-mill in their day. She gravitated to simple materials, such as plastic and pottery, and avoided high-style craftsmanship. The humble poetry of these everyday objects, normally shadowed by the more obvious charms of the rest of SPNEA's collection, came through in Leonard's postcards, a format particularly well suited to them. As a group, they began to form a personal iconography of American things; a baseball, some rifles, a microwave oven.

Leonard's reason for seeking out these particular objects was not only to give them a chance to shine their meager light away from the glare of the rest of the collection. She also regretted the codification of meaning that is the fate of any object that enters a museum collection. An object, such as a painting, might be preserved in perpetuity by a museum, but its meaning will be assigned to it by the institution. This calcification of meaning seemed a particularly troubling fate for the everyday objects that Leonard chose, which might otherwise signify many practical and sentimental things to different people throughout the course of a single day. By making and selling postcards of these objects, Leonard smuggles them out of the confines of the collection and into the world at large, reintroducing them into the chaos of real life, and opening them up once again to meaning's plenitude.

Annette Messager

Many of the artists in Yankee Remix dealt with specific historic events: the Boston Massacre, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the China Trade. Others concern themselves with more amorphous topics: the idea of America, the notion of a linguistic mind. Messager is one of the latter. Once Upon a Time proposes the idea that household objects have memories and keep secrets, which Messager sought to reveal and animate.

The four groups of objects that Messager borrowed from SPNEA (cradles, dressmakers' dummies, bed, and farm tools) were all given companions (in most cases animals) that slowly patrol the perimeter of each group. Messager's creatures, dragged along the floor by motorized pulleys, served contradictory purposes: they prevented us from gaining access to the intimate secrets the objects keep, but they hinted at what those secrets might be. They liveed their lives on the fringes of the domestic, close to its fraying outer edges.

The bed, for example, had a pair of glittering high-heeled shoes, joined by a strange soft sculpture resembling a spinal column. A woman's bare feet in the bedroom, particularly the bridal chamber, have long symbolized that the room is sacred and that the woman is pious; think of Jan van Eyck's famous Arnolfini Wedding Portrait of 1434. But in this case there is no barefooted woman, only her sparkly pink shoes. We do not know why she has abandoned them.

A group of large mice was pulled creakingly around a trio of dressmakers' dummies, circling them like sharks around lonely swimmers. The faceless gray rodents menace the dummies, which were fantasy doubles of three women; the gulf between the women's dark reality and their dreams for themselves is great.

The empty cradles had one small sleeping cat, much smaller than the rats, as their chimera. A cat is often the object of affection of the childless, and old wives'tales abound with warnings about cats in cradles stealing babies' breath. Is the sleeping cat, seemingly so innocent, a threat or protector for the absent infants?

A wounded wolf prowled the perimeter of a group of farm implements: thrashers, a hetchel, pitchforks, and guns. The border between domestic and undomesticated worlds is contested with these items. Normally, the wolf stands on just the other side of the border, and perhaps he was shot for crossing it, to attack sheep, for example. Messager stressed that he is only wounded, not dead. He may have lost one battle with the domestic world, but the war continues.

Manfred Pernice

Where Huang and Banerjee tell stories in their installations, Manfred Pernice set a tone. And where Huang and Banerjee delved into historic travels between East and West, Pernice presented his own experience as a German in Boston in the Fall of 2002. He did not intend for every object in his installation to have a scripted meaning; rather, the objects and video portrayed his personal impressions of this historic place and SPNEA's collection. Our experience of the work replicates Pernice's experience in Boston, the unordered flow of thoughts, the formation of a general feeling from a series of impressions.

The installation was a raised platform made of wood and particle board with strange furniture on top. Walking up the stairs to reach the platform can induce conflicting feelings. On the one hand, you are exposed; other gallery visitors can easily watch you as though you were a boxer in a ring. On the other hand, you are protected, surrounded by unusual display cases for documents, a cabinet with two video monitors, some benches, and a large stained-glass window. In such uncertain surroundings, you might be drawn to the things that are easiest to understand, in particular a group of illustrations for a monument to the Battle of Bunker Hill inside the display cases.

The Battle of Bunker Hill took place on June 17, 1775, just outside of Boston. A band of colonists, who had been given the order not to shoot 'till you see the whites of their eyes,' twice repelled attempts by the British to take Breed's Hill, where they had entrenched themselves. (Why the battle was named for nearby Bunker Hill is an open question.) On the third attempt, the better equipped and trained British took the hill, but with heavy casualties and a new respect for the colonists' determination.

Pernice examined these plans for the unfinished monument in Boston during a contentious period in international politics over American intentions to engage in another battle, this time for Baghdad. Pernice alludes to the feeling of unease about the war that pervaded Boston and Berlin, and ponders the trajectory of American militarism through his inclusion of proposals for the Bunker Hill Monument. These 160-year-old proposals offer insight into a mind not yet made up about how to represent the battle. This ambivalence, removed from the final Bunker Hill Monument, remains in Pernice's installation, which he titled Wonderland after a Boston subway station.

Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson made a pair of films, shown side by side, for Yankee Remix. Both were shot in interiors of houses in SPNEA's collection (on the left is the 17th-century Coffin House; on the right is the 20th-century Gropius House) and both have only one character, played by Wangeshi Mutu. Mutuâ's character, a young and beautiful black woman, carries out everyday tasks appropriate to the periods that the two interiors represent. Similarly, she wore period-appropriate clothing. The only sound for the two films, since the woman never speaks, is music. When we see her in the Gropius House, we hear jazz; when we see her in the Coffin House, we hear songs by the black piano prodigy Blind Tom, written in the mid 19th century. She seems to pass effortlessly between the two synched films, collapsing the century or so between them, her time travel paralleled by the shifting music.

Simpson's paired films unfolded at a precise, circumspect pace. In fact, these two qualities 'precision and circumspection' pervade all aspects of the film: the lighting, the details of the interior, the inscrutable face of the woman. They are strangely hermetic. They seem not so much suspenseful (Simpson has cited film noir as an inspiration for earlier films) as suspended in time. In this they share more with the 17th-century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, who frequently painted women alone engaged in solitary domestic pursuits, than with Alfred Hitchcock. Like Vermeer, Simpson offers us a portrait of a woman who is psychologically removed from us; she is distant and unavailable, even though every detail of her physical person and environment is rendered with Vermeer's Dutch clarity.

In 2002, curator Thelma Golden asked Simpson how she felt about making work in which the presence of the black body is consistently placed in the foreground. Simpson replied: "Given the generation that I was brought up in, and given the way in which that affects how I see things now, I cannot take that presence for granted. The moment I take that presence for granted, the dominant image will quickly return to a kind of monolithic, non-ethnic depiction." Even though none of the things the character in Simpson's Yankee Remix project does were specific to her race (what might such things be, anyway?) the fact of her race is as integral to the work as her sex, her era, her unknowable but certain psychological complexity, her humanity.

Frano Violich

A humble pewter teapot with an illustrious provenance was the focus of Frano Violich's installation. The teapot was thought to have belonged to Crispus Attucks (also known as Michael Johnson), the first person killed during the Boston Massacre. On the night of March 5, 1770, during one of the key events leading to the American Revolution, British soldiers garrisoned in Boston's port fired on an angry mob, killing five.

Very little is known about Attucks beyond the fact of his death, and that piqued Violich's interest. Violich used this installation of five small plaster sculptures, the documentation of Attucks' autopsy, and video to construct a relationship between Attucks as a person and an ordinary object that anyone could own.

In newspaper reports, in the documentation of Attucks' autopsy, and in an advertisement placed by his master when he escaped from slavery, Attucks is described as a half-African, half-Natick Indian man of above average height 6' 2'. John Adams, in the belief that in a free land all men were entitled to a fair trial, defended the British soldier who shot Attucks at his trial. He argued that the massacre was not the fault of the soldier, but of the British policy that allowed troops to be stationed against the will of the people. He also stated that Attucks probably led a 'rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jacktars.' But Attucks was soon recreated by the colonial press as a great patriot, a man of integrity who died for liberty. Since this patriot (or saucy boy) was present at the port, it is conjectured that he was working as a sailor, perhaps on whaling ships or in the China trade, which leads us back to tea.

Tea leaves spin in Violich's ominous, beautiful video, interspersed with meditative images of pewter, trees, a man's face, and the water of Boston harbor. Tea leaves cover the shelf on which the five plaster sculptures rest. Tea is a powerful symbol: of the Boston Tea Party (another key event leading to revolution), of the age-old practice of reading fortunes in tea leaves (or in Attucks' case, misfortune), of the China trade, and finally of the fact of Attucks. Violich, an architect working in Boston, used state-of-the-art computer technology to document Attucks' teapot in a 3-D scanner. This equipment, currently used in reconstructive plastic surgery, was also used to scan the eye, ear, nose, lips, and fingers of a model who resembles Attucks in a general way. These scans 'stand-ins for the five senses' were grafted onto five copies of the teapot, and output in plaster by a 3-D printer. Attucks, Violich suggests, was both more and less than a cog in history's great wheel: He was a man of his time, a tall sailor who owned a teapot, whom we remember today as a hero because he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.