In a Boston Globe piece on "Training Ground for Democracy", an imminent Christoph Büchel exhibit, Geoff Edgers quotes Mass MoCA director Joseph C. Thompson:
"Did we get the 727 fuselage, blown up, burned, and suspended in the gallery as he had asked?" he said. "Well, that one we couldn't come up with. But we looked into it."In a followup on the Exhibitionist blog, Edgers quotes one bullet from a seven-page ultimatum, penned by Büchel to outline his frustrations and demands for satisfaction:
There is NO negotiation about the scope of the project. It will be realized as proposed.Yikes. Based on the article, the directors at MASS MoCA are handling this cavlierly, saying things like "the show must go on" but not explaining how they plan to cater to the artist—or, more importantly, whether they feel that they are obligated to. Installation is 9/10 of the show, right? Büchel could raise a holy stink about the show, but could he force MASS MoCA to not show the work they've installed to date? You'd think that a contract for such a materially ambitious show would offer some guidance . . . but then you'd expect the same contract to include an agreed-upon, itemized costing for such elements as disassembling a two-story house and reassembling it within the show.
How about that MASS MoCA space? When I was in Miami in December, I saw John Bock's Zero Hero at the 7,500-square-foot Moore Loft space. I couldn't think of a place in the District that could host that show, but since then I've heard loose talk about creating a contemporary art center in the District. Now, you'd have to go well beyond the city far from the suburbs past the exurbs to find 13 acres for a campus like MASS MoCA—perhaps farther than North Adams is from Boston. But a more modest space is within the Red Line's reach. Having plans that brought me to the area anyway, I took a walking tour of the vast, gentrifying warehouse district near the NewYoFlo Metro station—an ideal setting for a contemporary art space of this magnitude. (This trip led to a hilarious exchange with police, who took me for a very lost tourist. "Excuse me, mister, are you from Europe?")
I'd like to see what that contract looks like. It's a normal feature of exhibition contracts that they specific that all works included in the exhibition must be displayed (setting aside those cases where the parties work out some other arrangement.) But from the Globe article it seems unclear which objects were specified, and what responsibilities each party bore in terms of the development of the installation. I'm very suspicious of the artist's claim, for instance, that he could have gotten a house in there for less than the museum spent; perhaps so, but the museum has to consider issues that the artist might not in terms of installing something of that magnitude (and why the heck wasn't someone so controlling taking a more active role in the decision of which house to use, anyway?).
Moral of the story: it's a bad idea to get into a contract with someone completely intransigent and think that it's going to be a "fluid, collaborative" experience.
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Posted by: James Lasie at June 11, 2011 1:54 AM