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.

The argument arose over the fine print. As Buchel got into specifics, the museum began to feel that his requests were overtaxing their resources. Meanwhile, the artist became more and more frustrated with what he saw as the institution's blundering execution and inefficient spending.

"There were elements that the artist wanted that we just couldn't muster," said Mass MoCA director Joseph Thompson. "We ran into the real limits of time, space, and money." The gallery floors had to be reinforced to support a cinder-block wall. A door was enlarged to allow the shipping containers to be installed. From the museum's point of view, Buchel's vision appeared to grow ever more elaborate. By the time Mass MoCA said no to including the charred fuselage of an airliner, the project had roughly doubled its initial budget of $160,000, a not insignificant amount for an institution with an $800,000 annual exhibition fund. "It put serious pressure on our other programs," said Thompson. "Despite our best efforts, we were unable to come to a solution with the artist."

According to his New York dealer Michele Maccarone, Buchel counters that the museum grossly mismanaged the execution of the work. Squandered resources, second-guessing of his expertise, and a lack of logistical creativity ultimately killed the project. "They just failed from beginning to end to manage it," she said.

Maccarone insists that Buchel gave the institution clear lists of specific objects that he required to create each space within the installation, but rather than following his instructions to the letter, the museum solicited donations of similar objects from the local community, which caused several delays when the approximate objects did not fit his needs.

Maccarone also claims that the museum failed to take advantage of opportunities to stay within budget, citing several items that were purchased at great cost but could have been procured more cheaply. Even the jet fuselage, she says, could have been acquired through the artist's contacts in the scrap metal industry and shipped to North Adams with help from public funding sources that the museum never researched. "Nobody was up to the whole challenge of problem-solving, which is ironic because the museum acts like that's what it does," said Maccarone. "Christoph started feeling really defeated because they had accepted this proposal and then started backpedaling."

Communication Breakdown
Communication between the museum and Buchel was sparse throughout the winter, though the artist did send a list of demands to Mass MoCA in January, which were reiterated in a statement to the press prior to an article on the standoff that ran in the March 28 edition of the Boston Globe. While Buchel, according to his gallerist, feels that the story tended to favor the museum's point of view, it quoted him as saying, "The museum treated the project as though it was the artist's wish list for Christmas, eliminating necessary and key elements that were always listed as part of the artwork from the beginning." Although the Globe reported that Buchel would finish the project only if there was no negotiation about its scope, on the same day the article appeared, an exasperated Thompson sent the artist a letter informing him that he could either declare the work complete within a museum-approved time frame and budget or pay for the removal of the objects from the gallery.

Anticipating that Buchel might fail to agree to either option, Thompson’s letter proposed an unusual third scenario: the museum would allow visitors to view the project in its current, unfinished state. "We will clearly articulate the fact that the work is unfinished, describing the materials and partial assemblies on view as the remnants of an unfinished installation," the letter read.

After a few unfruitful communications, in early May, Buchel officially responded to the letter's ultimatums through Donn Zaretsky [see his blog], a lawyer whom Buchel retained after receiving the letter; but by then the museum had already filed a suit in Federal District Court in Springfield against the artist, seeking a ruling that would allow the show to see the light of day.

Buchel responded by filing his own action that would require the museum to remove the work, unseen, from the gallery and cover all the costs of extracting every last bombshell and shipping container from the cavernous space. "It's unprecedented for an art museum to be suing an artist for the right to show his unfinished—and, in this case, modified and distorted—work against his will," said Zaretsky. (His language draws directly on the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, which provides that an artist has the right to "prevent the use of his or her name as the author of the work of visual art in the event of a distortion, mutilation, or other modification of the work which would be prejudicial to his or her honor or reputation." The legal question at stake concerns whether, even though the artist's name has been removed, these objects constitute a work of art in progress, or the raw material of an abandoned project.)

People's Court
Rather than wait to see how the courts decide, it seems that Mass MoCA and Buchel have both taken steps to protect their reputations, mounting exhibitions in efforts to garner support from two different segments of the public. On May 26, the museum opened "Made at Mass MoCA," an exhibition documenting some of the 60 or so large-scale works that have been installed at the institution over the last decade. On display are photographs and other materials documenting the triumphant realization of major works by Tim Hawkinson, Gregory Crewdson, Ann Hamilton, and other notable artists. But "Made at Mass MoCA" also includes a display of press clippings that describe and respond to the Buchel debacle. This part of the exhibition has drawn much criticism—most notably from Ken Johnson at the Boston Globe—for painting the artist as a brat with a wish list, who walked away from the project.

Further enflaming the controversy, the show actually incorporates elements of Training Ground for Democracy—at least in silhouette—into its body. Visitors who make their way through Building 5 to the exhibition space pass by the unfinished installation, which has been covered with tarps in an effort to obscure it from full view, but the curious still catch glimpses of the assembled materials on their way and get a sense of the work's intended scale.

The exhibition has been steadily drawing curious visitors since its opening, and no doubt many of them are lured more by the Buchel controversy than the content of the show. Thompson hopes that the exhibition illuminates the process that the museum engages in with artists who make work there, showing the institution as a good-faith collaborator routinely giving a green light to even the most ambitious work. "Making art and working with artists to realize projects that might not be able to happen in other situations is really the core of our institution," said Thompson, "and we really enjoy showing the process of making these works as we go."

Seeking Supporters
While Mass MoCA attempts to draw support from a local museum-going public, Buchel has taken his case to the international art world, courting the support of artists, dealers, collectors, and curators attending June's Art Basel fair in his native Switzerland. At the booth of his European dealer, the Zurich- and London-based Hauser & Wirth, Buchel presented a work called Made by MASS MOCA (Training Ground for Democracy) (2007), which responded directly to the Massachusetts exhibition.

A series of three documents mounted in chronological order and framed, the work portrays Training Ground for Democracy's descent into litigation from the artist's point of view. The first document is a letter to gallerist Iwan Wirth from Thompson expressing a desire to exhibit the project. This is followed by the March 28 letter sent by the director to Buchel and, finally, a facsimile of the claim that Mass MoCA brought against the artist in court.

"The reason he made the piece was to use the tools that he has as an artist and the platform of Art Basel to respond to 'Made at Mass MoCA,'" said Hauser & Wirth Zurich director Cornelia Providoli. "Also, by selling the piece, he can pay his lawyer," she added. The work, which sells in an edition of two, plus one artist's proof, was priced at €45,000. As of mid-July, each version is on hold for sympathetic collectors.

Facing the Fallout
All this finger pointing feeds an ugly rift in the museum world. As Mass MoCA plays up its commitment to saying yes to incredibly ambitious installations for the benefit of the public at large, it inevitably paints Buchel as an arrogant, ungracious, and even recalcitrant collaborator, who squandered public funding and then refused to allow visitors at least to learn firsthand about the debacle. The exhibition demonstrates that he failed to partner with the museum and complete the installation as so many other great contemporary artists had done before.

Buchel's work, on the other hand, drags the museum in front of a comparatively small, but internationally influential art world and accuses it of being disingenuous at best when it claims to give artists carte blanche to enact radical projects. Worse, his Basel work implies that now, rather than bearing the cost of removing his unfinished installation, the museum is attempting to litigate the piece into a summer exhibition and profit off gawking crowds.

And yet, though Zaretsky cautions that the legal repercussions of a Mass MoCA victory could have a devastating impact on artists' ability to control their unfinished work in the future, and the dispute has dealt a blow to the museum's 2007 budget, neither party's behavior in the situation seems to have impacted their projects in the long term.

Thompson maintains that Mass MoCA has no plans to begin requiring artists creating work for Building 5 to provide detailed, budgeted proposals prior to beginning work on large-scale projects. And other art institutions have hardly shied away from Buchel. In the spring of 2008, he will construct a large installation at Paris's Palais de Tokyo, a work that was initially slated for 2007 but was bumped back to clear space in his schedule for the Mass MoCA project. And the artist displayed a more noteworthy work in Basel—an installation called Unplugged (Simply Botiful) that contained a bar, shipping container, and dumpster—which has been placed on hold for a private museum in Europe.

And according to Hauser & Wirth, there is another buyer waiting in the wings should the deal fall through.

Editor's note: The original version of this story contained some inaccuracies and misleading statements. One of Christoph Buchel's works on view in Basel, Switzerland, in June was incorrectly referred to as Simply Botiful; the correct title is Unplugged (Simply Botiful). Joseph Thompson's letter to the artist on March 28 detailed conditions under which the exhibition "Training Ground for Democracy" could be completed, canceled, or opened to the public in an unfinished state; the letter did not directly cancel the exhibition. The original version of the article also stated that the artist did not respond to this letter until early May; ARTINFO has now learned that there was some contact between him and the museum during that time. Finally, the story implied that a cinder-block wall was not part of the artist's original plan for the project, but according to Buchel's New York gallery it was included in the initial proposal that he gave the museum.