Site-Specific Impasse

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.—Building 5, the hangar-like main gallery at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, is the largest contemporary art space in the country. But for nearly two months, its current exhibition has been covered by a yellow tarp. The reason for this is none of the usual suspects—renovations, building maintenance, faulty plumbing—but rather a tense standoff between the museum and Swiss artist Christoph Buchel that has left the football-field-size gallery filled with a massive, yet incomplete artwork, the status of which has prompted the two parties to file lawsuits against one another.

While the courts may mull over the dueling claims throughout the summer, both sides have already used high-profile public forums to plead their cases, hoping to shore up support, save their reputations, and avoid any economic fallout from the controversy. Their respective public-relations campaigns, however, take aim at radically different audiences, mapping along a classic fault line in the art-appreciating population. Mass MoCA, which as a destination museum in the Berkshires has to coax a wide swath of the public—everyone from well-versed curators to curious laypeople—to its off-the-beaten-path location, has responded to the conflict by playing up its populist commitments. The artist, in turn, has made his case to the art-world elite. After offering a statement to the press back in March, which his gallery claims was twisted and misconstrued, he has kept silent on the matter, opting instead to respond through a work of art—on display at last month’s Art Basel fair—in an attempt to win over the curators, collectors, dealers, and museum directors who will sustain his career going forward.

Anatomy of a Disaster
For more than ten years, Buchel (b. 1966) has used actual objects—rather than stage sets or props—to construct unnervingly realistic installations that evoke political narratives and overt social critique. His works are laid out like obstacle courses, mazes of rooms that viewers enter and explore as if wandering through a physical description of a dark, singular imagination. For his first U.S. solo show in 2001-02, the artist filled the Manhattan gallery Maccarone, Inc. with an attendant-manned bathroom, a claustrophobic classroom, a bomb shelter, and several other interiors. As visitors climbed and crawled through the space, they experienced his idiosyncratic take on terror, economics, and other American preoccupations.

Buchel’s installation at Mass MoCA, which was to be titled Training Ground for Democracy, would have been his most ambitious work in this mode to date and his first solo museum show in the United States. Though it remains incomplete, the work is well underway, and those able to peek behind the yellow tarp in Building 5 will find a war-torn suburb, reproduced on a one-to-one scale. A derelict cinema, a two-story house, a guard tower, shipping containers, a mobile home, and a bomb shelter are but a few of the menacing and meticulously assembled objects that fill the space.

The problems with Training Ground began early on. Almost from the beginning of its installation in November 2006, the process was fraught with logistical and budgetary disagreements between the institution and the artist. Shortly after overshooting its December 16 opening date, tensions boiled over and the nearly completed project ground to a halt. Since then, both sides have been waging a public relations battle, trying to tell their side of the story.

And yet what is interesting about this aspect of the dispute (as opposed to the legal battle) is how much the two sides agree on. In fact, the disagreement in the court of public opinion is less about facts than about the interpretation of those facts—or rather who is to blame for the feud that brought the project to an end.

The basic conditions of the original agreement, which neither side disputes, are as follows: Buchel gave Mass MoCA a proposal listing in broad terms the work's major sections. Each large component—from the theater to the mobile home—was to be populated with a detailed list of objects to be determined by the artist throughout the course of the installation. The museum, however, would handle the logistics, including financing the construction, soliciting the in-kind donation of objects and materials, and hiring craftspeople.