Entering a another world by Theresa Rauh

When we entered this museum I knew from the very beginning that this museum was totally different than all the other museums we had visited before. The Mass MoCA museum in Western Massachusetts is a huge, old storehouse and factory building full of 100000 sq. feet of incredible contemporary art. Some of these things could never be displayed in the traditional museum/gallery setting. 27000 sq. feet of Mass Moca are occupied with wall drawings of Sol LeWitt from 1968-2007. All these wall drawings are painted differently. The drawings are painted directly on the wall. The exhibit is also special because Sol LeWitt didn’t do the paintings himself but gave directions to his assistance on how to paint them. It is very impressive to see that all the paintings have the exact same style within the exhibitions, although they were executed by different assistance. The first paintings were executed graphite, which are painted very fine.  Later Sol LeWitt executed them in colored pencil and finally in chromatically rich washes of India ink, bright acrylic paint, and other materials. With these materials Sol LeWitt painted large area shapes and patterns. It was interesting to see the enormous differences between his earlier and later works and how is style of painting changed over time.

But the wall paintings are not the only incredible thing about Mass MoCA. We also visited an exhibition by Lee Boroson, called Plastic Fantastic. This exhibition consists of four components: Moisture Content, Depp Current, Uplift, and Subterranean Set. Moisture Content consists of sheer fabric draperies and transparent and translucent crystalline forms arranged to create passageways. It is like moving through shifting fog. First you stumble through the occasional clear view through the haze, but then you lose your view completely when entering the veil, which is set up creating passageways and you feel like you are lost between all these layers. After entering Moisture current we arrived at Deep Current. It is a wooden decking, with a big hole containing white little balls. The entire deck is surrounded, by a railing above the deck. There is a visible machine, which makes the balls fall down sporadically. Deep current is supposed to be a referential ode to Niagra Falls. I think this connection was a little too abstract though. Just past deep current we entered uplift, which is a dark room with blown up plastic bags tied together. Overall it looks like a dark forest, with trees made out of plastic bags. It reminded me in a way of the forest in Snow White when she is escaping the bad queen in the Disney movie. From this dark room, we came in the Subterranean Set, which is a field of hand blown glass shapes containing colored lava like fluids, that move around within the glass lamps. They are located on green, carpeted floor that looks like grass. Both Uplift and Subterranean Set present earth and fire components to the exhibition. This whole piece of art is something I had never seen before and I really liked the reference to nature and that the message it carried about a controlled version of it. Everybody can interpret the message in his own ways. This museum is not like other museums in any way. It is more like entering another world. It is like traveling to an unknown planet, you would have never dreamt of and I would totally recommend going there and making this experience yourself.