Film review: Museum Town traces MASS MoCA's impossible trip from abandoned factory to world's biggest contemporary-art gallery
The art is mind-blowing but the picture isn’t all rosy in Jennifer Trainer’s compelling documentary at VIFF Connect
VIFF Connect livestreams Museum Town from May 21 to June 17, in a presentation with the Audain Art Museum
MUSEUM TOWN opens with panning overhead shots of what almost looks like a picturesque European village—complete with canals, a maze of brick buildings, courtyards, and a clocktower, all set in the green Berkshire Hills.
It’s actually the site of a 160-year-old abandoned factory that has been turned into North Adams, Massachussetts’ MASS MoCA.
Jennifer Trainer’s compelling new documentary traces the journey from an old mill that dates back to the Civil War to the largest contemporary-art museum in the world. It becomes a fascinating history of North Adams, a blue-collar town still reeling from the social fallout of the shutdown of its main economic generator, and the replacement of it by a 26-building facility housing art that’s often incomprehensible to local residents. One working-class security guard with a spectacular mullet says if she wanted to see trees upside down (as they hang in the MoCA garden) she’d stand on her head in her back yard.
Trainer, the first director of development at the museum, goes at this story of artistic adventurousness in somewhat traditional, low-key-doc style. With narration from Meryl Streep, the director mixes found footage and interviews, and follows the fabrication and setup of a football-field-sized installation by Nick Cave (no, not the musician). The Black American artist’s work, 2016-17’s Until, is a perfect example of the boundary-breaking, audacious scale of exhibitions that MASS MoCA has become known for. It requires hundreds of vintage antique figurines, miles of crystal beading, and tonnes of welded steel to hold it, suspended from the ceiling. The wild, nostalgia-laden pastiche also integrates personal history and socio-political themes, surrounding gallerygoers with an added thousands of sparkling bullet- and target-themed wind spinners as a commentary on police shootings of Black Americans.
The story of how this boundary-breaking facility came to be funded and built in an American factory town proves as mind-boggling as anything Cave can conjure. The film’s most fun insights come from a nonagenarian gallery volunteer who worked at the Sprague Electric Co. factory till it shut down in the 1980s, and now finds herself shuffling past giant outdoor phalluses and into neon-pink-light-flooded exhibition rooms; her old office has even been turned into the funky MoCA bar. The former mayor, the first visionary curators: they all retrace the impossible task of renovating the unheated, dilapidated site into a world-class facility. Amid many colourful twists, David Byrne and a Republican governor who happens to be a Talking Heads fan help turn the tide on what at one point seemed like a doomed multimillion-dollar project.
But MoCA still has a ways to go to turning the tide for its hometown. Trainer visits soup kitchens and the boarded-up Main Street, talking to townsfolk who’ve never set foot inside the museum. The Guggenheim may have given down-and-out Bilbao, Spain new life, but North Adams still awaits steady waves of tourists, and the type of trendy shops and restaurants that follow them.
In the end, Trainer’s film is a lesson on reaching for impossible dreams, the power of art without the confines of a traditional gallery “box”—and also the importance of culture as a viable economic generator. (These are insights that resonate not only in a world that needs to rebuild after a pandemic, but in Vancouver, where an ambitious new purpose-built gallery is on deck.) Pursuing such dreams does not come without costs, and the film touches lightly on some of MoCA’s controversies—such as the museum suing for the right to show Christoph Büchel’s collosal unfinished work.
Still, Museum Town is well worth the trip for visual-art fans confined to home. Trainer’s love letter to MASS MoCA is the closest we’ll get to the labyrinthine complex anytime soon—and after you see it, you’ll feel like you’ve ventured into all its hangar-sized halls and brick-walled corridors, and even into the courtyard with the upside-down trees.
Related Articles
