MoMA's Night At The Rave

PopRally’s latest multimedia exhibit, “A Night At The Rave,” explosively transformed the logic of space at MoMA. Solo artist Black Meteoric Star mixed the polyphonic beats while avaf, an anonymous collective of artists called “assume vivid astro focus,” did the lights. The extravaganza held Saturday, May 23, at Marron Atrium demonstrated the noticeable break between the patricians of the modern art milieu and the kids.



Anyone who’s been in Marron Atrium can attest to the seemingly impenetrably expansive white walls. An all-white room is the perfect blank sheet of paper for all the media fusion that a bill like “A Night At The Rave” mustered. The light show has advanced since the days of Bill Ham in the Haight-Ashbury, incorporating new laser technology and better technical equipment. Not surprisingly, the walls were subsumed in flashing images that extended beyond the realm of paisleys and Möbius strips, leaning more toward the stylistic attributes of the graphic novel.

Light shows experienced the same cultural acceleration that has influenced all the arts. The atmospheric tension that the light show provides is enhanced with the technological opacity of the computer. These patterns swirled over about twenty or so giant balloons tied to the makeshift stage where musician Gavin Russom, AKA Black Meteoric Star, performed his set. Musically, Russom is influenced by old style house, techno, and European dance beats.

He was decked in a tall, white feather headdress, sweating and filling the room with a pulsating, electronic sound-scape. The room seemed to swell with the energy of the music, becoming spherical and wave-like from the music and lights instead of remaining a non-living, passive entity. Russom is the realization of the protean man: the human being that is comfortable speaking in pictures, rather than language.

It was impossible to focus on a single element of the show at once. I tried close my eyes to concentrate on the music, but then I regretted neglecting the surreal dances on the wall. Vision, after all, was thematic. To enumerate, at the door all participants were given two masks that had facial features that had been cut out and pasted on, respectfully, skin made of tree bark and a door with graffiti on it.

There was a glossy element to the noses, mouths, and eyes of the masks that made them appear in grotesque contrast to the wooden door and tree bark. In particular, one of the masks bore a striking resemblance to Pamela Anderson, or say any other woman who becomes more a caricature of big, bottled femininity through ‘zounds of plastic surgery. The lips of this mask were super-sized and highlighted in a smear of incendiary fuchsia and then pasted with aplomb on the tree bark, kind of like those of mutant Mr. Potato Head toy assembled by Chuckie.

Both masques provided one hell of an intimidating statement about the architecture of the face. No one wanted to wear the masques, in fact, about five minutes after everyone gathered into the concert hall, everyone removed the 3-D glasses from the mask, untwisting the staples with dexterous fingernails; no one wanted to wear a mask of a mask.

“I bet there’s a lot of older people here who are donors who just print out the tickets to events MoMA probably sends them,” my friend said. She then pointed at the older patrons who were gamely watching at the edges of the crowd, “Look at them! They must be thinking, ‘Who are these kids?’”



She adjusted her cowboy boots and laughed.

I looked around and could see what she meant. It was kind of like stumbling into a These New Puritans concert at Williamsburg Hall of Music and hearing Jack Barnett chanting “the colors that you don’t see” over and over again as lasers with ROYGBIV flashed on the ceiling, the 3-D glasses bisected the light of the four projectors providing the installment into rainbows, and the music seemed to gyrate on the walls.

At one moment, the walls were drenched in black and white squares like a checkerboard, but the next rotation of the template would reveal these black and white squares deliquescing into a consistency not unlike that of the pulp used to create a paper. As the resolution appeared to grow increasingly blurry, the squares resembled the static of a television more than paper. The gradient of the light show reminded the audience of the transience of mediums while the music reverberated on the floor and enveloped the crowd in its ambiance.

In the middle was Russom on a stage that looked more like a steel cage, wearing a big feather. He was flanked by female dancers wearing shiny tops and leopard print underwear, possibly signifying the fusion of the technological sparkle, but still bearing the primitiveness of man underneath. More likely, the dancers kept people in the room. They provided the crowd with one recognizable element: scantily clad women dancing in a cage.

But, surely, there couldn’t be a more appropriate place for an audience to experience fringe art than MoMA? MoMA attracts many visitors who come to see innovations in art that, back in the day, critics like T.W. Adorno would have lambasted against as the infiltration of low culture On the corollary, the fusion between high and low art has been thoroughly indicted by modernism and is a typified feature of American culture. Let’s not forget, either,that art is a biz and one of MoMA’s biggest donors was John D. Rockefeller, Jr. MoMA is home to everything from The Persistence of Memory entire fucking Bell 47D1 helicopter. All in all, the 150,000 paintings, 22,000 films, and 4 million film stills are priceless.

The crowd was a work of art. The ticket holders were a mixture of the typical Art Snobs of those more into digging the society-type attendees than the show, ravers dressed in white, hipsters wearing ascots, models, and bottles. Some of the beleaguered older set hobnobbed and discussed, I’m sure, the riffraff the noise attracted. Who are these people?

“He didn’t break,” one fellow in an all-white smock, clearly prepared for a rave, lamented, “He just kept and that peak and kept going and going and going. He should have released that pressure and broke like a good DJ.”

Except, I don’t think anyone is really interested in breaking anytime soon. What does waiting for a break mean, besides the signification of the end of the show? It is more appropriate that there is no ending because the statue of limitations that modernism posed on the art world has passed. It’s about time someone brings contemporary art up to the hyper-inundation of the present that influences the young generation rather than big donors. Stepping outside, the sensory bombardment has no release. Why should it break?

While cutting edge, MoMA houses the art that is popularly different, the known unknown, if you will. That doesn’t mean that The Voice wasn’t on the scene with the press passes or that artists like avaf and Black Meteoric Star aren’t already firmly established within the framework of hip. What was more interesting, perhaps revolutionary, was that “A Night At The Rave” was more reflective of a true convergence of a spectrum of generations. It was like we were all tuned into the same channel for half a second and watching one attempt to answer the eternal question of what consciousness, or maybe consciousness on speed in the modern age, entails.

Jennifer Sussex has been featured in The Village Voice, The Chicago Tribune, PBS Student Voices: Washington Week, Our Young Art, The Gargoyle and The Michigan Daily. All material on this site is subject to licensing under the Creative Commons.