Stars & stripes & heavy machinery

PROVIDENCE -- If Betsy Ross and John Deere had a love child, it would be artist Dave Cole.

This weekend, Cole and a team of assistants will be out in the courtyard of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, using heavy machinery -- two excavators -- to knit a 20-foot-wide American flag. The excavators will hold needles crafted from aluminum utility poles. To make the flag, they'll use almost a mile of red, white, and blue acrylic felt.

''I'll be up on a boom lift, throwing the stitches with a 5-foot-long fishing gaff," Cole reports. ''There will be a guy in each excavator, and I'll give hand signals to them: Angle it up, lower it down. A lot of it is just plain fun: Just boys playing with trucks."

He calls it ''The Knitting Machine" and aims to finish the flag on Sunday, followed by an afternoon cookout and opening reception, although visitors are welcome throughout the weekend. It's part of an exhibition of his work at Mass MoCA, ''Dave Cole: The Knitting Machine," which includes a flag made from 18,000 toy soldiers, and a fictional recounting of the history of the knitting needle in modern warfare. When the knitted flag is completed, it will be folded into a triangle and placed into a box nearly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

''The Knitting Machine" comes to the sprawling contemporary art museum as part of ''American Traditions," a collaborative project involving many Berkshire-area institutions.

''A lot of other museums were talking about showing folk art, and we were wondering, how can we do this?" says Mass MoCA curator Nato Thompson. ''Then Dave brought us a maquette, and it tickled us pink to think of this project -- a Mass MoCA version of folk art. It had scale, and knitting, and a nice twist on a domestic, small process."

Cole, who operates out of a studio in Providence and an Airstream trailer that he takes on the road, has been knitting since college.

''I started knitting hats in lectures at Brown. I'm really hyperactive, and to be able to pay attention I'd knit," explains the artist, sitting in his trailer recently at the Steel Yard art center in Providence. ''I started thinking about knitting more abstractly. Not just as a specific domestic task, but as a trope for work, a metaphor for every kind of production."

The artist, 29, comes across as deeply thoughtful and tightly coiled, as if his ideas are a way to route his intense, sometimes wayward energy.

''At the time, I was also coauthoring a book on succeeding in school with a learning disability," says Cole, who has attention deficit disorder. ''[Knitting] ended up accurately reflecting the feeling I had of growing up in school with a learning disability. It's obsessive, repetitive, grinding work. So was my trying to memorize the multiplication table. The result was absurd and grotesque."

He smiles ruefully. ''All my work goes back to the special-ed room."

The artist grew up in Hanover, N.H., the son of an attorney and a bookkeeper. He struggled at school, but thrived in the metal shop. He made his first metal sculpture at 4; when he was 11, his father taught him to weld. When he was old enough, he got work in construction, and then he went to Brown University.

Knitting hats during class led to knitting sculptures, using materials that echoed the harshness of Cole's special-education room.

''I spun and knit steel wool, and knit a teddy bear from Kevlar decommissioned body armor," Cole recounts. Another teddy bear, made from nearly 1,500 pounds of fiberglass, was featured in the DeCordova Annual Exhibition in 2003. Cole, who is represented by the Judi Rotenberg Gallery, makes smaller pieces as well.

His work is full of contradictions: cuddly yet dangerous, feminine and domestic, yet masculine and industrial.

''It's something a girl could do, in every way a boy could want to do it," Cole says of ''The Knitting Machine." ''It's bigger, louder, faster, heavier, and more dangerous." But that's not the point, he says. ''Dig deeper, and you get to the idea of work, and of identity in work and production, and how work and production relate to the machine, and how the machine relates to national identity."

Cole graduated with an art degree from Brown in 2000, and immediately began working full time as a sculptor. As he was crafting teddy bears that could scrape and splinter your skin if you tried to snuggle with them, Americans' sense of security was shattered on Sept. 11, 2001.

''I spent the week after Sept. 11 in New York, doing search-and-rescue work, helping to run a supply depot," Cole says. ''I knew enough to know I'd never be able to get my head around what was happening. So I went down to get my hands around it. That's how I understand things."

A year later, the city of Providence commissioned him to create a public-art piece to mark the anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Cole came up with ''The Knitting Machine."

It wasn't easy to transfer the fine motor skills used in knitting to two heavy machines. ''When does the needle encounter force? From what direction and to what degree?" Cole asks. ''If we do it wrong, the coupling gets sheared and the piece drops, or somebody's hand gets crushed."

To figure it out, he went to the experts: A construction crew.

''I have an enduring mental image," Cole says, ''of sitting in a circle of folding chairs, teaching construction workers to knit."

''The Knitting Machine" struck a chord, a year after the terrorist attacks.

''What does it mean to make art in the public space, with the preordained connection to this national tragedy?" Cole asks. ''It turned into a piece about the relationship between place, art, and nationalism."

Nearly four years later, the same work of art has a different resonance. ''Now, it's about nationalism, internationalism, and colonization," Cole says. ''It's a darker piece. My feelings about our behavior internationally have gotten darker."

But he's quick to point out that the piece is not all dark, nor is it ironic.

''Within the same piece, you might be making one statement, and then making a contradictory statement," he says. ''Both are true. It's not something in between. Somehow it's both. The flag is a symbol of hope and promise and what Army recruiters would like you to think. And it's a symbol of shortsighted, greedy international behavior. It always has been. I like that the flag means a lot of things."

''In a politically charged period, Dave brings a critical sense to an important American image," says Thompson. ''A great art piece makes you vacillate between emotions."

As for Cole, he says he's looking forward to the weekend. There will be hot dogs and beer, heavy machinery to operate, and a flag to be made.