CAMPUS BEAT MIT Museum/5000 Moving Parts

John Douglas Powers, Haliades, 2012

Guest Curator: Laura Knott

The PR Buzz:  "The exhibition looks at the wide range of kinetic art being made now: from work that's concerned entirely with motion and unpredictability, to sculptures that engage with contemporary political topics, to work that brings ancient myth into contemporary life."

Recommended For: the kind of quirky inspiration you can expect from the MIT Museum

The Experience:

Less than a week since the last time, I was again hustling through chilly Central Square on my way to the MIT Museum. They must be doing something right, right?

As you turn the corner into the entrance of 5000 Moving Parts, your ears are met with the pervasive squueeeeeeeeeee! of the moving sculptures. Trust me, do not turn and walk away. Thanks to the fabulous label writing of curator Laura Knott, this sound will have a very different meaning for you by the end of the show.

The introduction rightly locates the show on a continuum from Marcel Duchamp's 1913 Bicycle Wheel and its modes of meditating and commenting on the "kinetic world of material life." The selection of works in the show eloquently demonstrate these voices of critique.

It is a good choice to begin the show with the very interactive Please Empty Your Pockets by Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmel.  This deceptively-simple illuminated conveyor belt uses a magical/mechanical form of intrusion to bond together one of the hidden spaces we all carry around with us. As Knott puts it, Lozano-Hemmer "misuses technologies of control" to relate us to each other.

A cluster of works by Anne Lilly, To Caress (which was heartbreakingly out of order), the mesmerizing Eighteen Eighteen, and To Conjugate anchor the center of the gallery. To Conjugate, with its antique fire engine fly wheels brings visitors expressively back to Duchamp's quote in the introductory text, "to see that wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of other avenues than material life of every day..."

At one end of the gallery there is a collaboration, or perhaps symbiosis might be more appropriate, between pioneer Arthur Ganson's Machine with Breath and Christina Campanella's BREATHE.  I found Campanella's soundscape of Ganson's work is worth spending some time with. Listening to the headphones as I watched Machine with Breath, the layers of mechanical rhythm expanded until they gave the impression of great physical volume and distance.  It was an uncanny sensation.

It is Knott's label writing for John Douglas Powers's seductively sinuous Haliades and deeply hypnotic Ialu that transform the dissonance of the gallery into the purposeful groan and squeal of ocean-going ships and the skirl of seabirds. Sound impossible?  Come experience it for yourself! I have to say that I have rarely experienced an exhibition in which the label text adds as much to the experience and appreciation of the objects across to board as in 5000 Moving Parts. Knott's clear and eloquent voice finds details and connections that enhance the power of the objects themselves without crowding them or coming across as overly didactic. These wonderful mini-essays are helped greatly by the placement, size and design of the labels themselves. Well done, Laura and MIT Museum!

If I have one critique of 5000 Moving Parts (other than the one sculpture that was out of order), it is that the show should have been mounted in the Epstein Innovation Gallery on the ground floor so that these works could have beckoned through the windows to the "kinetic world of material life" passing on Massachusetts Avenue.

-Vident Omnes

While You're There: See Stanley Greenberg: Time Machines reviewed by me here.

CAMPUS BEAT: Peabody Museum (Harvard)/Translating Encounters

Plaque Depicting Chief Flanked by Two Warriors, 1550-1650, (detail)

Link the the Exhibition Website: https://peabody.harvard.edu/node/572

Co-Curators: Stephanie N Krysiak, Emily P Pierce and Drs. Diana Lauren, Peabody Museum Associate Curator, and Christina Hodge, Peabody Museum Senior Curatorial Assistant

PR Buzz: "This exhibition broadly explores the material ways in which encounters were experienced, translated, and memorialized by peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas."

Recommended For: a trip to the Peabody is always recommended by Vident Omnes

The Experience:

On a sunny weekday, I threaded my way through the idiosyncratic warren that is the Peabody Museum of Anthropology and Ethnolog. The inspiring noise of an enthusiastically engaged school group echoed through the halls. I eventually found my quarry.

Translating Encounters is a terrific idea on a number of levels that falls down a bit on execution. The exhibition is the product of a collaboration between two Harvard classes working with the collections of the Peabody and various Harvard library and archival holdings.  That, in itself, is a wonderful experiment that I hope is repeated in the future. The subject of the show is a fascinating topic that deserves room to be explored.

Unfortunately, room is something this show is not given. Tucked into a corner of the 4th floor galleries, Translating Encounters is difficult to distinguish from the Pacific cultures material and dioramas of Native Americans that surround it. The exhibition takes a swing at some very big ideas it doesn't ultimately have the bandwidth to deliver. This shortcoming is compounded by the inclusion of some late 19th or early 20th century African objects, such as the magnificent Kuba royal masks, whose presence in the show is not fully explained.

I found myself wishing that the true early-17th century materials that were displayed had been featured, or brought to the fore, more effectively. Among these objects are a spectacular bronze Plaque from Benin depicting a chief flanked by warriors, a remarkable Spanish (or Spanish-American?) painted leather shield, and a ceramic Jaguar Warrior figurine. The period prints, drawings and engravings were all shown in reproduction- a disappointment as surely the Harvard collections have more than a few of these in the original. An image of an elaborate 17th century celestial globe from Harvard's own collections is shown. Why not have the real thing?

In summary, the exhibition should have either been given more real estate to make its statement, or should have focused on the thoughtful juxtaposition of fewer, more original objects and artworks.

-Vident Omnes

While You're There: see the wonderfully-intalled Wiyopiyata: Lakota Images of the Contested West on the first floor just as you enter.

Jaguar Warrior Figurine 14th-16th century

CAMPUS BEAT: MIT Museum/Stanley Greenberg Time Machines

Bubble Chamber image by Stanley Greenberg

Link to the Exhibition Website: http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/greenberg.html

The PR Buzz: "New York-based photographer Stanley Greenberg has long entranced viewers with his stunning black-and-white photographs that provide unparalleled access to objects and places ordinary prople might otherwise never see- from New York's century-old water system to the hidden infrastructure of some of the world's most impressive architectural works. In this exhibition, Greenberg turns his lens on the unfailingly strange world of nuclear and particle physics."

Recommended For: a unique cross-over of art and science.

Curator: Gary Van Zante, Curator, Architecture & Design, in collaboration with Dr. Janet Conrad, MIT Professor of Physics

The Experience:
Brrrr, it's getting chilly in the Hub! I hustled along the breezy sidewalks of Central Square to the MIT Museum on Mass Ave and made my way up the stairs to the second floor galleries.  The Kurtz Photography Galleries are tucked in the far back corner, so you have to make your way through a number of other exhibitions to get to the Greenberg show. This is hardly an imposition. I got to pass through 5,000 Moving Parts, an exhibition of kinetic sculpture, while it was under installation.  It opens Nov. 21st, and I can't wait to see it.

Time Machines is attractively installed in the Kurtz galleries. Greenberg's silver gelatin prints look just right on the walls and encompass the mind-boggling array of inscrutable geometries- from retro scifi to angularly futuristic-  involved in the engineering of subatomic inquiry.  The prints are devoid of human presence so the scale of what you are looking at is often ambiguous and requires careful study to figure out.

The photographs are accompanied by fascinating, but excruciatingly small labels. Less dedicated label readers than I will miss some of the more compelling descriptions. For example; did you know that there was a neutrino observatory at the South Pole that is installed in a cubic kilometer of clear Antarctic ice? Or that Argentinian cows once upset the observation of cosmic rays? Or that a subatomic detector at Stanford was made from steel recycled from a ship sunk at Pearl Harbor because the immersion of the metal meant that it was less radioactive than new steel produced today? Or the dizzying alphabet soup of acronyms including  LIGO, TRIUMF, IceCube, CERN, ATLAS, KEK, DESY, OPERA, MINOS, LHC, KLOE, CMS, KamLAND, CEBAF, SLAC and SNO. And then if you're a really careful reader you'll also find ZEUS, which is actually a physics joke, and a reasonably funny one at that.

You  would also miss this compelling quote from Greenberg himself about film negatives used in the observation of the results of particle collisions, "Just as most physics experiments have shifted to electronic and digital representation of particle collisions, the photographic world has largely abandoned film for digital media. The idea that the photons from particles actually touched the substrate reminds me that film has an unparalleled tactility that has never ceased to work visual- and scientific- miracles."

By now, you probably get the fact that I liked this show.

-Vident Omnes

P.S. If you ask nicely at the desk, you can get a free booklet entitled Backstories: The Physics Experiments Behind Stanley Greenberg's "Time Machines"

While You're There: I bookended my visit with stops at Central Square's Mariposa Bakery and Cafe Luna, both highly recommended!

TGC Wheel, CERN, 2006