5-Dec-99 MOBA nudes
The combined choirs of Temple Emanuel and Temple Emeth were singing at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center, a huge nursing home, this afternoon. We met at Temple Emeth at noon for a final warm-up and rehearsal. When I got there there was a Sunday School Chanukah party going on in the big basement hall where we usually rehearse. Chaos! Little kids were running around and working on crafts projects. Pearl, a sweet but not all that with it little old lady in our choir, was scarfing up latkes at the food table. A couple of other choir members were there, looking around to figure out where we should be. We moved a piano into the next room, which was otherwise empty, and hoped Gennady and the rest of the choirs would show up before we were disgusted with ourselves for paying attention to the time he asked us to meet. He did, and we warmed up and started to run through the program. A couple of kids wandered through, looking for someone. “Have you seen two girls, one big and one little?” they asked. With that much description and the chaos next door? “Yes, they left without you. They're already home,” Gennady told them with a straight face.
The concert was in the synagogue of the rehab center, on the third floor and at the far end of the complex. The walkway included a glassed-in catwalk between buildings with a view of the other buildings in the complex and the gardens below (not much there this time of year) and a display case with Israeli dolls, a dozen or more family groups of four or six dolls each in various ethnic group costumes, Bedouins, Yemenites, Kibbutzniks, and more. There were teenage volunteers all over pushing patients in wheelchairs and helping us find our way. We were standing up on the bimah, packed right up against the ark. Most of the audience seemed to be pretty much with it, though there were plenty of people in wheelchairs who probably didn't have a clear idea of what was going on.
For a complete change of setting, in the evening we went to the opening of the Museum of Bad Art exhibition “Buck Naked” at the Blue Hills Spa off Route 1 in Norwood. If you don't know the MOBA, click that link when you're finished reading this entry; not before, or you'll never come back here.
It must be a year and a half ago that we went to the MOBA proper. It's in the basement of the Dedham Community Theatre, an old-fashioned movie theatre two towns from here. It's not just a joke, though the people who run it have a lot of fun doing it. The MOBA specializes in “art too bad to ignore,” as it says. The pieces they display are arresting in their badness. They make you look and ask, “what were they thinking when they did that?” With just crummy art you don't wonder that, you just look, nod, and figure that someone was asked to paint or draw something and did it in an innofensive, unobtrusive way, or did something that had a chance of selling. A typical MOBA piece exudes passion. You can tell that the person who painted it was driven to create, but just wasn't able to pull it off. The failures are spectacular. Many of them have no sense of perspective, but don't have that internal logic of primitive art that makes perspective unnecessary. Others have no sense of how to direct the viewer's eye to a center of interest -- for instance, one big painting in the Buck Naked show was of a nude wearing a bright red cap sitting on a stool. The figure wasn't badly done (or not all that badly), but the bright red cap kept pulling your eye away from anything else. Similarly, another painting had a complex, contrasty background and a huge low-contrast gray and pink sculpture right in the middle. You just couldn't adjust your perception to see the stuff in the middle. Another one had a tortured figure done all in hellish reds and yellows and blacks -- except for an electric blue disembodied face that looked as though it belonged to another picture or era.
Well. We drove down 128 (I-95) to route 1, south through the Automile, to the third set of traffic lights just as the directions said, found signs saying MOBA (small signs, in marker on corrugated cardboard. Hard to read in the dark. Bad signs for bad art.) and found the place, just as described. The parking lot was packed. We parked in a strip mall lot up the street. The neighborhood looked like a little tissue graft from southern California, parking lots, strip malls, industrial buildings, medium-sized highway.
As soon as we walked in, through a doorway of glass bricks, someone pointed us towards what the announcement had called the grand common room. Sure enough, bad art was everywhere. The room, cinder block and glass brick, with a stairway up to a little mezzanine and a bridge over the hallway from the front door, was two stories high and had ample space to display big bad paintings. A large crowd of bad art lovers was looking at the paintings and eating bologna or cheese whiz on ritz crackers and drinking kool-ade. The MOBA is very consistent about having poor taste. An e-mail announcing the show had defined the dress code: although the art was nude, the public was to be clothed. That seemed open to interpretation; one of the people who seemed to be a MOBA official was dressed in jacket and tie and boxer shorts, and another guy was shirtless.
The MOBA can give even as poor an artist as me a good feeling of knowing a little. There's a surprisingly large amount to think about in figuring out why a show like that is interesting and in analysing what went wrong.
Bad art loses a lot on the web. It doesn't get worse, it gets less itself. It loses a lot of the passion that makes it so interesting, and the big pieces lose the scale that makes you wonder why the artist bothered to make something that big if it was going to end up that bad. It's still worth checking out, though. Go back to the MOBA link and see how awful the art is and how well they write about it.
 |
 |
 |
|