UMOCA

I went to the UMOCA for the first time for this assignment!  I was so thrilled and I went ready to appreciate some contemporary art.  I walked into the first little room and I was kind of pleased by it.  There were these odd figures and these screen prints on newsprint that you could take with you.  Me and my brother took these ones.

  The walls were painted, which I liked and her subject matter felt somewhat lighthearted.  She was talking about every day life and she had what felt like a light-hearted video piece.  I enjoyed it, it seemed playful and thought provoking even though I wished I could hear her talk about her own work.  

There was an interesting feeling video piece of someone in gold dancing through a landfill with a gold gas mask on, to the tune of "I'm singing in the rain."  The message to that felt pretty clear.  I went to another room where they had a collaborative mural of women who were maybe missing from history, who should have been noticed more.  The photographs of the artists were spread throughout the room.

Unfortunately... I felt like my visit was kind of downhill from there.  I don't know if that was a result of me feeling sometimes disenchanted with art, but I just started to feel like... what is the point?

I work at the MOA and we have copyright issues with a lot of contemporary artists, so I kind of assumed I couldn't take pictures.  I did begin to take pictures of what I really found interesting though, and that was honestly the writing on the plaques on the walls.  I found myself curating a curious collection of words and what felt like kind of weird evidence of contemporary art and our ideals and our emphasis.  My curation felt kind of like my own art piece.

 The piece above is one that I found particularly interesting and that made me feel a lot of frustration.  Scared around the room were green and yellow troughs.  I was looking at troughs that really didn't remind me of humans at all.  They weren't the same size and they didn't help me think about what the plaque said they should.  My younger brother came with me, and he was particularly startled by the wording of this plaque.  He was amused that they put "processes of ingestion" instead of eating.  The interpretation that I made of this piece was that we were meant to think about our bodies and everything goes into them.  It might compare our eating to that eating that animals do in preparation to become our food.  It might compare their job, down in the dirt and eating from a lowly trough, to ours.  I think that they were trying to make the point that no matter who we are we are a part of that and it shapes our identity.  I felt frustrated because without the plaque I never would have understood that, and with the plaque it was still difficult for me to work my way past the jargon, if not because some of the sentences made no sense, just out of pure annoyance for that kind of block that they put up for some reason.

I don't know if this was the experience that I was supposed to have but I felt kind of like... why do we make art?  What was the purpose of this?  And that was kind of an uncomfortable feeling for me.  I wanted to be floored by the art, but I instead left feeling disenchanted with contemporary art.  I felt like there wasn't a purpose to the things that I had seen and if there was the artists were selfishly keeping that from me through their jargon and their attempts to be everything at once.  Industrial and domestic.  Rigid and soft.  I thought about a reading that I had to do in one of my classes about a dancer who learned when she got too old to dance that she could gain a lot from giving to her dancer that could still dance.  Sometimes I feel like these artists are hoarding instead of giving.  I know they don't need to spell it out... but I just felt frustrated by the experience of going there.