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| Sanford Biggers, "The Cartographer's Conundrum", 2012 |
Sanford Bigger’s installation at MASS MoCA, “The
Cartographer’s Conundrum” offers a journey I highly recommend taking. The space for it is arguably a bit
bigger than it needs to be, but considering the scope of the piece, it worked
for me. Large tetrahedrons like
patterns on a quilt are constructed out of basic floor linoleum often found in
churches. Stars of many sizes cut out of mirrors lay in rough broken piles,
which, in conjunction with slightly mangled musical instruments, look like they
might have been mysteriously ejected from a wind tunnel. The star’s reflections are musical
notes rising towards the sky. As
you continue your journey, sounds of spiritual Brazilian music emanate from the
wall and light passes through bright colored plexi. Sacred geometry gets more
sacred when you reach pews that gradually descend from the heavens, and change
materials from brightly hued Lucite to a traditional wood. What continues throughout the entire
install, are the mangled instruments and shattered stars.
When you arrive at the final row of grounded pews, you become witness to a kind of rumpled up Mothership (borrowing from P.Funk), comprised of shattered instruments and stars, where instruments parts speared through space and their meteoric parts lodged into the ground, or alternatively, they exploded outward and landed like a knife thrower’s daggers into the walls.
When you arrive at the final row of grounded pews, you become witness to a kind of rumpled up Mothership (borrowing from P.Funk), comprised of shattered instruments and stars, where instruments parts speared through space and their meteoric parts lodged into the ground, or alternatively, they exploded outward and landed like a knife thrower’s daggers into the walls.
In an adjoining room, there are two very large screens, which
play the video from his “Cosmic Voodoo Circus” installation, “Shake” mirrored, consistent
with the symmetry of the pews in his ‘cosmic slop’ of splattered stars and
pianos. One flashback has the Brazilian
artist walking into a coffin shop, where he randomly steals what appears to be
a red and gold detailed, Indian sari. In another cut, he is in a bar with
staggered hallucinations of himself in a sort of minstrel performance. In addition to being rich in color and texture, it has a
musical quality to it, like his oceans filmed in reverse. I stood transfixed in a dark room
watching this man, Ricardo
Castillo, with silver painted face and high heeled silver boots, with
outstretched arms reaching to the heavens, and it was moving without even
knowing what I should be feeling and why.
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| Sanford Biggers, "Splash", 2011 Image courtesy of MASS MoCA |
Admittedly, when I first walked through the installation, I
missed the reference to quilt patterns with the linoleum flooring. After it was
pointed out to me, it was impossible not to think about it, and of course, by
the time you reach the final room of the installation, on the top lofted floor,
there is an enormous reproduction of Sanford’s cousin, John Biggers’ painting, “Quilting
Party”, 1980-81, together with a quilt upon which Sanford painted patterns that
are like cosmic trajectories from the installation below.
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| Sanford Biggers, quilt, image courtesy of MASS MoCA |
I’m hardly scraping the surface of what invariably is an
intricately woven tapestry of afro-culture, with texts and subtexts and
allusions of illusions. I stumbled
into the “Conundrum” and lost myself. It felt a little like going to an extravagant place for a three-day
vacation. With so much to see and not time to see it all, I savored and took in
what I could. And for that I feel
richer and won’t soon forget it.
