#Moca museum of computer art series

This new work involves several forms of video projection, glass sculptures and a talking light bulb. The museum's intention to commission works of art is well represented by ''Tree Logic,'' a Magritte-like installation piece by a young Australian artist named Natalie Jeremijenko that consists of six good-size saplings suspended upside down in the newly sodded and cobblestoned courtyard.Īnother commission, Tony Oursler's installation ''Optics,'' feels a bit like a work in progress, but it shows this artist, known for animating objects and dummies with little video images, moving successfully away from his signature formula. Generally things are more interesting when the displays edge into new territory with younger or unknown artists. The work belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which cannot exhibit it until it raises the roof of one of its galleries and was happy to lend it while it does so. Rauschenberg's involvement with found materials (especially fabrics), his appetite for photographic imagery and the myriad transfer techniques, often of his own invention, by which he incorporates these images into his art.įurther evidence of the big-is-better approach is the display of Joseph Beuys's ''Lightning With Stag in Its Glare,'' a handsome, funereal sculptural installation centering on a 16-foot-high slab of heavily worked bronze suspended by a noose from the ceiling. It is in fact a retrospective in its own right, a spectacular summation of Mr. Rauschenberg's two-museum retrospective at the Guggenheim. The good news is that, overall, there are several instances where the center's stated mission is shown to be both worthy and attainable - that is, to show large works of art that other museums would have difficulty displaying and to commission and otherwise foster works that mix disciplines and media in new ways.īegun in 1981 and still in progress, this work has some ups and downs of its own, but it looks quite a bit better here than it did last year at the Ace Gallery in SoHo during Mr.

Still, the inaugural weekend was electric with a sense of relief, delight and possibility. In some cases this may reflect first-time-out inexperience: several sculptures seem shoved into spaces too small for them, most egregiously in the case of Dan Flavin's fluorescent light works, forced to compete with muscular ventilation ducts that obtrude from an uncharacteristically low ceiling. In galleries featuring works by Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, John Chamberlain and James Rosenquist, the art often feels much like furniture in a model home, a stand-in for something real. The largest exhibition, ''Test Site,'' is freighted with less-than-inspiring works by big-name artists, most of them borrowed from other institutions, especially the Guggenheim, at the last minute. It is perhaps to be excused that after these challenges, the center's opening slate of exhibitions and performance events is a mixed bag in terms of quality. Last fall the Dia Center for the Arts, which had been on the brink of agreeing to lend large chunks of its collection, found its own building, in Beacon, N.Y. Thompson sometimes working without salary and with only one other staff member. It has subsequently overcome many obstacles, with Mr. Krens left for the directorship of the Solomon R. The brainchild of Thomas Krens while he was director of the Williams College Museum of Art, the center, known as Mass MOCA, was made a reality by Joseph Thompson, who took over when Mr. This incarnation was touch and go for most of a decade. Bruner's overall plan, these contrasting walls express an exemplary balance of old and new, paying homage to the building's history while enhancing its new incarnation.

#Moca museum of computer art series

Their redesign has created a series of linked spaces, large and small, most of them elegant and serene in proportion and bathed in natural light.Īs with Mr.

Given the horrors that regularly pass for museums in the late 20th century, this represents a much better than average start, maybe even a miracle that is undiminished by a few missteps in the opening shows and an awkward just-moved-in sense of presentation.Ĭarved out of five buildings in a 27-structure mill complex dating from the 19th century, the arts center is the work of Henry Moss and Simeon Bruner of Bruner/Cott &d Associates of Cambridge, Mass. The museum, more than 10 years in the making, has a home so plainly beautiful it barely needs art.

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the sprawling complex that opened last weekend in the heart of this old New England mill town, looks like a museum that the Shakers might have built, if the Shakers had liked very large, multimedia works of art and performance events poised on the cutting edge of computer imaging technology.