MOCA Detroit: A favorite in the making

Having heard lots about MOCAD on Ann Gordon's former (?) blog, I was eager to see for myself what all the fuss was about.

Said fuss was well-placed. MOCAD is an artist's studio made large, a barely-refined shell barely ready for contemporary art. The space, designed by Detroit architect Andrew Zago, consciously rejects the fashionable fetishization of both gallery space and art objects. In so doing art installed here doesn't look like a commodity or feel like someone's possession generously made available to us, the unwashed masses. Instead, art here feels like something made available to us by an artist, someone who has just created an object that is still finding its way in the world, something still fresh enough that it need not be over-fussed about. The artist cares most about this piece, and the curator cares second-most, I thought as I walked through. This is the way most artists want their art shown. This is the kind of space in which contemporary curators want to work -- or should. Barriers between viewer and art are absent. That is so cool.

I don't mean to suggest that Zago and the museum did nothing but install a front door. Someone(s) made the decision to let laissez-faire be an architectural style here. Walls are neither white nor any other particular color. They are not smooth, but then again they aren't necessarily rough. The walls have about as much consistent surface as they have normalized color. The floor is made up of whatever you happen to be standing on. MOCAD is the anti-Renzo, the anti-Gluckman, the anti-Miami Beach Convention Center.

When NYTer Nicolai Ouroussoff reviewed this building he cited Michael Maltzan's MoMA QNS and Frank Gehry's Temporary Contemporary (more buildings should have aliases, no?) as precedents. True, kinda. I think that MOCAD is much more naked, much less built-into than either of those places. For me the most obvious parallel is PS1, the current incarnation of which received architectural attention from Frederick Fisher in 1997. (Note: All three architects mentioned in this paragraph are based in Los Angeles. Which means...?) The difference is that PS1 is a series of little rooms joined with hallways. MOCAD is a a series of seamless spaces.

Would I want to see Matisse in here? No. But that's a good thing. We've become so used to seeing contemporary art -- and I mean the really new stuff -- in the institutional-cum-commercial white cube. That kind of installation strips art of immediacy and urgency. It would be nice if contemporary art got away from being a commodity and became a little needy. That's inevitable here: MOCAD is set in a city where art isn't taken for granted. It must earn its audience. Its home is sited on a gritty boulevard where there's only one Starbucks between you and the next two interstates. Good.

Related: The locals say it MO'-CAD, pronounced as if they were receiving yet another computer-aided design program. I guess that's better than MOCA-D, which sounds like where a slightly inebriated artist might want to get some chicken McNuggets. Explore the building via Flickr stream.