Spare parts become interactive art
Huck Finn is spending April in North Adams, in the guise of a young artists collective called the Miss Rockaway Armada. The group is best known for building rafts out of trash and floating them down the Mississippi River the last two years. Now its members are bringing their spirit of adventure and seat-of-the-pants aesthetic to Mass MoCA, erecting a kid-friendly interactive installation with the unwieldy moniker "Being Here Is Better Than Wishing We'd Stayed." It opens on Saturday.
Part treehouse, part cave, part gigantic Advent calendar with surprises behind trapdoors, "Being Here" promises fun for youngsters who like to climb, burrow, uncover, and more. The installation is coming together in the museum's Hunter Center Mezzanine, an ample hallway where school groups bring their brown-bag lunches. Last weekend it was still a construction zone, with wooden platforms, sawdust on the floor, and electric drills buzzing. The group had a rough plan in place — the tree, the cave, the Advent calendar motif — but the outcome was uncertain. Anything could happen. The Miss Rockaway Armada works like a group of kids in a backyard, building a fort with whatever materials are at hand.
Several members, all in their 20s, gathered on a plywood stage about 18 inches off the floor. Mike Boushee, lean and bearded in a baseball cap, described his vision for the platform.
"The bench starts here," he said, moving his hand across the wall. "Then it horseshoes here."
"You haven't talked tunnel yet," pointed out Marshall LaCount, a slip of a fellow with an ornate tattoo on one arm and giant glasses that make his eyes bug. He's the de-facto foreman on this project, with experience building stage sets.
"No, we haven't," agreed Boushee. "We're hoping this bench will be open..."
"Dude," interrupted Nona Invie, a lanky, raven-haired woman, also wearing enormous glasses. "The benches could open like those kids' benches, and you could have a diorama inside!"
"Or you could have art supplies inside, and a table for doodling space," put in Jonathan Kaiser, clad in black right up to a jaunty narrow-brimmed hat.
Invie jumped up and down. "A chalkboard! You could draw on it and erase it!"
Jennifer Sichel, a graduate student in the Williams College/Clark Art Institute joint program in art history and an intern at Mass MoCA, organized the exhibition.
"Every time I go in, there are five new ideas," Sichel said. "The last time I went, there was a spaceship 10 feet in the air and a tree in the gallery."
She loves the unpredictability. "Allowing them the freedom to come with no plans has allowed for this really organic creative process," Sichel said. "Very few institutions would be willing to invite artists to come without a plan."
"The aesthetic gets intensely sensory," explained LaCount. "Unexpected things come up from working with so many people. I can't expect what people will add to it."
The group is as amorphous as its plan. The Miss Rockaway Armada claims 30 members, 18 of whom may ultimately contribute to "Being There." Thirteen were on hand last weekend. Some have never met before, and many don't know one another's last names.
"We're new old friends," quipped Gabe Meyer, a Hannibal, Mo., native and sculptor who signed on with Miss Rockaway when the rafts passed through his hometown.
In the summer of 2006, the group took two biodiesel-fueled handmade rafts from Minneapolis to St. Louis. They were works of art, ornately outfitted with moldings and frames and built to look like scrappy tree houses. The next year, they piloted four rafts and one customized boat.
"We spent three to five days in towns along the river, doing art workshops, silk screening, juggling workshops," said Tod Seelie. "We're limited in financial means, so we give back with art or assistance."
The Miss Rockaway Armada is still financially constrained. Mass MoCA puts up the group members and gives each of them $12 a day for food, but otherwise they're not being paid. Still, they're happy to be here.
"We're all excited to make something new," said Seelie, who lives in Brooklyn and freelances as an artist's assistant. "I've had to turn down jobs I would get paid for, but I want to be here."
Video documentation of the river trips will play a part in "Being Here," as well as a mural collage inspired by old Mississippi River bridge trestles. But "Being Here" is not an effort to recapture that Mississippi magic.
"We wanted to try our process in a more formal setting," said LaCount. That setting comes with certain restrictions dictated by the museum: The mezzanine must seat 25 for lunch. The sprinkler system must be kept clear, and a 5-foot-wide passage has to be maintained throughout the space.
"On the river, people would propose anything and realize it," said LaCount. "That spirit is here, and we need to take the institution's needs into consideration."
"Our rafts were never wheelchair accessible," said Angela Coppola, another Miss Rockaway stalwart.
As on the river, the group has salvaged local materials. Nearby residents have dropped by with windows and a chandelier. Whether those items are used will depend on the whims of the artists, who seem to be pulling an art installation out of thin air, beginning with a three-tiered platform.
"The tunnel starts here, or the cave or crawl space," Seelie pointed out during a tour.
As of last weekend, they were still looking for the light at the end of the tunnel.
