Art, Found Objects, and Stuff

October 24, 2017

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing arts in the country. The museum is housed in a vast complex of 19th-century mill buildings on 16 acres of grounds in North Adams, Massachusetts.  MASS MoCA exhibits art by both well-known and emerging artists and features large-scale, immersive installations that would be impossible to display in conventional museums.

The “No Experience Required” exhibit features musical instruments made by Gunnar Schonbeck—a professor of composition and ethnomusicology at Bennington College in Vermont, who died in 2005—and his students. Schonbeck believed that everyone was a musician; moreover, constructing musical instruments with materials available in one’s environment.

Schonbeck collected a wide range of objects—rebar, car parts, steel tanks, plumbing, and more—from acquaintances and the local transfer station. He and his students used the “found objects” as raw material for the fabrication of more than 1000 instruments, from stringed instruments to xylophones. The inclusion of Schonbeck’s instruments in an art exhibit is merited by his belief in making his instruments in unusual shapes and in larger than life scale.

Schoenbeck stated, “Everything has its sound. You just have to bring it out.”

In The Archaeology of Another Possible Future Los Angeles-based artist Liz Glynn expresses her interest in the rise and fall of empires, society’s assignment of cultural value, and labor and production. The exhibit combines visual, sound, and scent in a massive display stretching nearly a football field in length.

The artist invites viewers to explore the changes happening in our world as we move from production and transportation of massive amounts of consumer items to an increasingly digital world of the internet, automation, and 3D printers. 

By Athena Lee Bradley

The photos were taken by Athena Lee Bradley. Many thanks to MASS MoCA for allowing museum goers to take photos of their wonderful art displays!! Credit goes also to MASS MoCA for providing background information used in this article. Also, appreciation to my friend Karen Bouquillon for playing the Schonbeck instruments for the photo opportunity.