Joe and I spent the weekend in the Berkshires, and despite the fact that I tried numerous times for the umpteenth millionth year (okay, maybe only 9) to get Joe and/or his family to go with me to see a Shakespeare & Co. play, it didn't happen. I was really hopeful this time, but alas, I think that I am just plain alone in my desperation to see Shakespeare. It was Romeo & Juliet, which I've not yet seen on the stage, sigh.
At any rate, at least I can get Joe to go up to North Adams to
MASS MoCA. For some bizarre reason the girls at front gave us the runaround and said there was no teacher discounts (despite the fact that every other time we've gone Joe gets in free+1 because he works at an art school). So that was rather annoying. Especially since the prices have gone up and half of the museum was video art (Guy Ben-Ner) and neither Joe or I get very excited about v
ideo art.
Fortunately there were other exhibits. One of the artists I liked is Sean Landers:
Joe hates art that has words in it but being a writer I'm very drawn to visual representations of words. As a critical & creative thinker, Landers is interesting to me also because he used mind-mapping in the painting above and he did it in a really interesting way where the thoughts intersect and entwine. Joe just rolled his eyes but for me I really loved the visual workings of the mind (even if they were somewhat deliberate). The thing is, as evidenced by the title, Landers is fully aware of the ego that is present in this piece, which is Joe's primary beef with art that includes words; he finds them full of ego. At any rate I really liked his part of the exhibit.
The other artist that I liked and that Joe actually did too was
Robert Taplin, who I think we saw at the
Decordova a few years ago. He had an interesting set of dioramas all based upon scenes from Dante's
Inferno.
But the highlight of Mass MoCA these days is the new wing that only houses
Sol LeWitt. It's pretty amazing, three floors of drawings. You really need to see it to appreciate it. The first floor was really the most mind-boggling. The time and precision that went into the drawings is incredible. These paintings were produced from plans that he left behind after his death. Most of his later art was the execution of these sorts of art plans. It's an interesting concept.
That photo is a very very small piece of a large wall, all done in pencil.
Again, just a tiny piece of the wall. This one was all done in chalk.
To get a sense of the scale:
Fortunately for you the Sol LeWitt exhibit will be up for the next 25 years, so you'll have lots of time to get thee to Mass MoCA.
