Mar 2003 - Apr 2004
Galleries

In the fantastic, things could go either way. Poised between the possible and impossible, the fantastic is a destabilizing pause in the plausible, a moment for our utopian dreams and dystopian fears to acquire form.

Fantastic featured two major bodies of work by Gregory Crewdson, Twilight and Hover, and new works by Miguel Calderón, Nils Norman,Alicia Framis, and Temporary Services and Angelo. This imagery, populated by alien lights, levitating hippies, and utopian schemes, teeter in the fantastic moment, beguiling us to linger there with them on the precipitous cusp of possibility. Philosopher Walter Benjamin believed that meaningful social transformation required these disorienting moments just beyond the real: In his view, the fantastic is a powerful tool for preconceiving – and reordering – our world.

Since the early 19th century, MASS MoCA’s region – from Maine to New York – has sheltered utopian experiments with fantastic overtones. Fantastic thus began with the Threshold of Wonder, a small cabinet of curiosities culled from this local history that offers a preamble to the exhibition itself. Whether escaping from reality or creating a new one, the enterprising visionaries, utopians, and philosophers at the heart of this region’s utopian experiments – from Brook Farm to the Shakers – prove Benjamin’s point: the fantastic, in art and life, is the springboard to utopia.

Miguel Calderón

Six sleeping bags float magically in a makeshift mid-air campsite. Ponytails and dreadlocks dangle from the bags: there are hippies in those floating cocoons! The floating hippies are attached like so many balloons by a winding black tube from what seem to be tanks full of helium (or perhaps nitrous oxide.) Levitating above the ground, these snoozing figures embody the timeless desire to escape Earth’s gravity.

In Quantum Physics (2003), commissioned by MASS MoCA for Fantastic, Mexican artist Miguel Calderón reread a chapter of utopian history. Hovering in front of a large freezer full of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream – as if ratty-haired children in Willy Wonka’s playhouse – the drowsing hippies might be dreaming of an endless supply of a very special ice cream – an ice cream dedicated to their recently deceased hippy hero Jerry Garcia. Yet a twisted commercial irony casts a spell over this haze of happiness, as blissful hippie revery is reduced to an ice cream flavor. As the irony takes hold, the hovering mystery of the sleeping bags once again captivates our imagination. Quantum Physics conveys a sense of levity and boyish humor even as it sticks its finger in the ribs of a consumer culture powerful enough to subsume communal ideals.

In the adjacent gallery, Calderón’s video Inverted Star (1999) [image left, bottom] moved from the cloud-filled skies of utopia to the fire and brimstone of hell itself. In 1999, Calderón placed a classified ad in a Mexico City newspaper seeking people who believed they were possessed by the devil. “Are you possessed?� the ad read. It did not take long for Calderón to find the “stars� of his project. He went to their homes and documented the strange behavior of the self-professed possessed. The title Inverted Star refers to the upside-down pentagram often associated with Satanism, but as in all of Calderón’s work, there is a more complex narrative beneath the prankish humor. In Calderón’s irreverent oeuvre, fact is always stranger than fiction. It is not the possession that is so striking about Inverted Star, but possibly the lengths to which people will go to become “stars� or to make a dollar. Beneath the sensationalism of the video is clear-eyed commentary on society’s rampant commercialism and sensationalist media.

Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson’s elaborately staged photographs capture the transitional moment between domestic order and natural disorder, the real and the surreal, the attractive and the repulsive. Through meticulous articulation of a wealth of mundane details, Crewdson imparts a mysterious pregnancy to his images of prosaic New England neighborhoods.

In the Hover series – shot in Lee, Massachusetts, between 1996 and 1997 – Crewdson experimented with black and white photographs shot outdoors from a high vantage point, giving them a strangely voyeuristic quality. (These photographs are installed between the Threshold of Wonder and the Tall Gallery.) In one photograph, a bear has wandered into the suburban landscape and overturned a garbage can. The authorities are on the scene, uncertain how to apprehend the bear, while neighbors marvel at the intrusion from the comfortable distance of their manicured lawns. Like the awestruck onlookers, we puzzle at this unresolved narrative.

In the Twilight series, begun in 1998, Crewdson shifts to moody color and eerie, beautiful lighting effects recalling Hollywood sci-fi films. As the title implies, these images vibrate in an evocative space between photographic precision and narrative obscurity. Ophelia [image left, top], for example, was created at MASS MoCA over a period of several days in the summer of 2001. The interior of an otherwise normal living room has become flooded with water. The protagonist of the picture, Ophelia, lies partially submerged, floating on her back and gazing outward, her attention (and body) adrift. This is no accident scene: her shoes remain on the stairs, a sign of strange premeditation. In Untitled (Pregnant woman/pool) (1999) [image left, bottom], a pregnant woman stands on her lawn in a kiddie pool while a beam of otherworldly light shines down on her from outside the frame. Alien intrusion pierces the scene of suburban alienation, a reference to the fantastic in an otherwise normal moment. Situated in humble settings filled with beat-up station wagons, overweight men, and children’s toys, Crewdson’s Twilight photographs evoke longing and wonder, with more than a little despair.

Crewdson’s intricate compositions require up to four weeks of planning on the part of the artist and many hours of set design and lighting with the help of more than 35 stagehands, electricians, gaffers, and actors. These elaborate techniques, coupled with powerfully suggestive scenes, have garnered Crewdson recognition as one of the major forces in narrative photography.

Nils Norman

What if the abandoned Kmart in North Adams were redesigned as a self-sustainable public info park to facilitate the exchange of new ideas? What if a motor coach, powered by vegetable oil and solar energy, featured a greenhouse and a library to promote discussions about alternative energy and experimental city design?

British-born artist Nils Norman asks such questions through his work, encouraging us to think about public spaces in new ways. Through computer-generated graphics and models often made of recycled materials, Norman expresses his far-reaching vision for more earth-friendly and community-oriented urban environments. During a visit to MASS MoCA, Norman saw the now-abandoned shell of Kmart as a perfect site to rethink urban design and economies. In his Kmart Model (2003) and Kmart Mural (2003), Norman replaced the roof with photovoltaic cells that transform solar power into hydrogen, which in turn meets the energy needs of the building and garden.

Inside the old Kmart shell, a town archive and community information center are now available to research and discuss local and global issues. Instead of Kmart’s vast asphalt parking lot, Norman envisions an edible permaculture park replete with community gardens, composting stations, and natural water filtration units. The plan both criticizes an economic model that promotes wasteful growth, and presents an alternative vision that advocates community interaction and the productive use of sustainable resources. Here is a contemporary urban restatement of many of the ideas inherent in the intentional communities of the 19th century.

The Geocruiser Mother Coach (2001) [image left, top] is a proposal for a mobile greenhouse with a library of utopian literature and a solar-powered Xerox machine that runs on biodiesel. The large bus would drive to different community gardens, art spaces and town meetings providing resources for communities to reshape their world. Emphasizing mobility, radical literature, sustainable energy, and civil liberties, Norman presents imaginative tools for the public to use.

Alicia Framis

Spanish-born artist Alicia Framis works the creative zones between isolation and connection, public display and private interaction, the extraordinary and the commonplace. Her Remix Buildings series (1999–2000) presented utopian alternatives to normal urban living patterns that encourage the viewer to consider new modes of social interaction. In Cemetery in Metro Station, Paris, Framis asks commuters to stop and reflect on the names of the dead in a stylishly lit wall full of funerary urns, fashionable shoes and advertisements. Cinema with a Hospital, Los Angeles (1999) combines a movie theater with a medical clinic, mixing popular entertainment with public health. The juxtaposition of human activities which are generally unrelated questions fundamental conventions of urban living while presenting somewhat startling alternatives.

Framis is acutely attuned to the experience of modern living. As a dark-skinned woman living in Berlin, she was warned not to walk alone in neighborhoods where right-wing skinheads and their fierce dogs patrol the streets. In response, she produced Anti Dog (2000) [image left], a line of dresses made of dog-proof, bulletproof, and fireproof material. The fashionable armor provides women with freedom and protection while spotlighting the basic desire to feel confident and secure against a background of public danger.

Temporary Services and Angelo

Temporary Services collaborates with diverse artists and employs multiple formats to present projects that combine public participation with innovative social messages. Temporary Services is a dynamic organization that ignores standard art world notions – such as selling art! – in favor of social interaction and process.

The collective has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with Angelo, an artist and inmate in a California prison who initially contacted one of the collective’s members in response to an article circulated in an underground publication. An active correspondence ensued over ten years, unhampered by the history of Angelo’s criminal record, which remains unknown to Temporary Services.

Prisoners’ Inventions (2003) is a collaborative project illustrating the innovative ways inmates make their lives more comfortable and convenient. From the confines of a small cell such as the one on display, Angelo’s detailed drawings and descriptions of inventions (some of which were specially fabricated) bear witness to human creativity under adverse conditions and the will to create a better existence, despite extremely restrictive circumstances. Here, the realm of the fantastic unfolds in tiny nooks and crannies. An immersion heater made from toothbrushes, an oven made from toilet paper rolls, and salt and pepper shakers made from disposable lighters are examples of inventions that transform the dreary prison experience into a more humane existence.

Fantastic is supported in part by grants from: the Artists’ Resource Trust, a fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation; Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, and the Netherlands Culture Fund of the Dutch Ministries for Foreign Affairs and Education, Culture and Science; Holly Angell Hardman; and the British Council.

Miguel Calderon, Quantum Physics, (2003) Photo by Doug Bartow