01.27.2008: MASS MoCA & The Norman Rockwell Museum

Went up to MASS MoCA — the contemporary art center in far western Massachusetts —where my friends Terry and Jo Harvey Allen were showing a music theater piece in progress about Antonin Artaud. It’s a great piece, covering the period when Artaud completely lost his mind and was strapped to an iron bed in a straightjacket in the hold of a ship. He was being sent back to France after causing trouble in Ireland, where he lived out the rest of his days in an insane asylum called Rodez. (Oddly, his asylum days were also very productive!) Prior to his trip to Ireland he’d been to Mexico, intent on visiting the Tarahumara Indians and joining their peyote ceremonies, which he did. They thought he was nuts too.

I’ve read Artaud’s short books on theater — they’re great, and were hugely influential. Apparently he wrote a lot more. Some of it went pretty far out and is not suitable for reading aloud in the office.

Terry wrote some nice new songs for this piece. One is called “Do They Dream of Hell in Heaven?” His wife, Jo Harvey, was the sole actor. She wore a bright red wig and white makeup with thin red lips. She told elements of the story from multiple points of view, cackled ominously, and occasionally quoted Artaud.

In the galleries, there was a huge Anselm Kiefer show and one by an artist Spencer Finch. But I lingered longest in the Jenny Holzer room, which has two incredibly powerful projectors at each end scrolling the text of a poem by an eastern European poet Wisława Szymborska (who won the Nobel Prize in ’96). The room is massive — almost the size of a soccer field — so it’s a bit like stepping into the opening sequence of the Star Wars films where the text scrolls, recedes and distorts into the distant star field.

In this picture you don’t see the nice distortion so much, as the text bumps over the ceiling beams and the giant bean bag pillows. But you can see the overlapping effect of the projections coming from either side.

Holzer has other pieces in the back room, including reproductions of US government PowerPoint slides outlining the plans for Iraq, pre-invasion. In retrospect these look frightening in their naïveté. On the wall hang enlarged reproductions of US government documents about torture and the Cheney decision to adopt a “gloves off” approach. (Which experienced military personal admit does nothing to produce reliable intelligence.) The projected poems may relate to these, but truthfully it’s a little hard to read the poem texts, though I’m not complaining. (But it would have been nice to have the poet’s work available in the bookstore.)

Likewise, it would be nice to see a catalog of the work of Jarvis Rockwell, who had an amazing show here some years ago. C and I stopped at his late dad’s museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts on the way home. His dad is Norman Rockwell, the famous illustrator. From a pretty early age Jarvis collected action figures. But unlike a typical collector, who might normally want just one of each, Jarvis had a new, rather curious method — he wanted to create crowds. In an interview with artist Laurie Simmons, he mentions that he has eighty identical Burt Reynolds figures. Here is a crowd of Ewoks at a business conference.

Photos: Christine Fichera

About this photo, Jarvis writes: "That's essentially my father and me. My father is tied to a tree, with a light set up. I'm standing in a coracle with a pacifier in my mouth and the coracle has no prow, so it just floats like a lily pad. E.T. is reading from the book."

There were more nice stories. In one, his dad visits him in NYC. Jarvis goes to his father’s hotel room to find him sitting on the bed with a postcard of a de Kooning and one of a Piero della Francesca on the pillow. And he's looking at them: "I don't know," he said. "I just can't . . . I just don't understand."

To be fair, his dad never saw himself as an artist but an illustrator, at least according to Jarvis. The implication is that rather than following interior artistic impulses, Rockwell instead saw himself as performing a job for the client, most famously The Saturday Evening Post. Norman often used local townspeople and family members as models in his work. At first he may have had them sit in costume (he had lots available) and with props. But soon he just photographed the various types and characters individually. For example, he would cast an audience for say, a boxing ring scene, or perhaps a telephone lineman, and then photograph them and any other characters, and even the backgrounds all separately.  Only in the finished work would he join them all together.

For one illustration in which an elderly woman and her grandson pray in a diner before eating, Rockwell had his assistants photograph a number of views out the diner window. (Suitably, he chose an industrial landscape from Pittsburgh.) Most of the remnants of his work process are not on view, although one image shows Norman posing Jarvis for a “home from college for the holidays” themed painting. (Norman must have had to come up with endless holiday themed scenarios for these magazine covers.) Jarvis’s back is towards us and he’s holding a small suitcase. Norman stands behind Jarvis facing the camera, making an entirely exaggerated welcoming gesture. I guess I can see why more of these are not on view, but they’d make an amazing show. They relate to a lot of contemporary work— probably more so than the paintings.

Some of the illustrations verge on cartoons or caricature, but maybe those were simply in his casting choices. Appropriately, a show in an adjoining gallery featured contemporary graphic novel work by Will Eisner, Jessica Abel, Crumb (!) and even Howard Cruse, who famously did a series called Stuck Rubber Baby that dealt with being gay and with race and civil rights.

Norman’s caricatures and painting technique reminded me a little of the contemporary artist John Currin, who recently did a bunch of “porn” paintings. Rockwell never did any overt sex pictures, and even if he did we’ll probably never see them, as the folks here have a pretty tight grip on his legacy. But I can imagine what they might be like: a tangle of naked limbs in the hay for example, with some gingham dress partly visible on the floor, and from a side window a freckle faced boy peeks in, mouth agape.