At the same time that it challenges us to reconfigure notions not only of identity and scale, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) imposes further questions about the purposes, actions, and ultimate effects of art world institutions. When it opened its doors to the public in late May of 1999, MASS MoCA inspired mixed rejoinders of provisional suspicion and dazzle. In a review for the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl was impressed enough to gingerly speculate: "It’s the damnedest place—a grandiose proposition about art’s institutional future which exalts and irritates in equal measure. It’s a great philosophical site, and it’s fun." This last sentence the museum employs in its promotional material.

It’s difficult to refute MASS MoCA’s claims to be the "largest center for contemporary art in the United States." In the otherwise inconspicuous and diminutive urban setting of North Adams, Massachusetts, MASS MoCA comprises a massive physical plant, a sprawling 13-acre complex of 27 renovated factory buildings from the mid-19th century. Constructed as a textile printer mill and operating as such for nearly a century, after 1942 it became an electric company that by 1966 employed over 4,000 workers in a community of 18,000. The complex was eventually abandoned in the mid-’80s, like so many other industrial plants of its kind.

Now, as a creative center and a potentially profitable hub—for the local economy and for social currencies elsewhere—MASS MoCA features 100,000 square feet of exhibition space, two indoor theaters, performance courtyards, an outdoor cinema with a 50-foot screen for a 70mm projector, and equally mammoth office space for commercial tenants—to date, primarily in the communications, e-commerce, and computer animation industries. In this, MASS MoCA stands as a material reminder of how closely aligned the wreckage of labor is to these newer relations around art-making, no matter the time-lag in between. Together with present-day industrial parks, the MASS MoCA grounds are referred to as a campus.

This is all relevant to the kinds of work that were commissioned as permanent installations, as well as those displayed in MASS MoCA’s rotating exhibit galleries. The building complex was salvaged and fitted by the architectural firm of Bruner/Cott & Associates (Cambridge, Massachusetts), and then foregrounded by two time-based interventions. In The Clocktower Project (1997), German artist Christina Kubisch resurrected the long-defunct bells and timepieces of the tower overlooking the confines. Powered by solar panels, an electronic sound system produces a light-sensitive composition from a database of musical ideas drawn from the giant tower bells as played and recorded by the artist herself. The timbre of the infinitely variable chimes is relational to the sunlight and makes reference to the distribution of time between past and present use of the built environment. Also deceptively playful but foreboding is Tree Logic (1999), by Natalie Jeremijenko, in the courtyard below. The artist suspended six young maple trees branch-down from inverted steel planters, harnessed by cables and poles in the form of an outdoor scaffold for torture, the tree foliage writhing—as if to relate, in this former factory courtyard, a natural history as rendered by a hangman assembly line.

Space is MASS MoCA’s unique brand of capital, doubtless inspiring investor confidence in prospective artists, lenders, and donors alike. (Who can help but wonder what the facilities report reads like?) In these halls—perhaps the only ones in the United States with the capacity to house such a project—a potential permanent display of bulwark American Minimalism would certainly complicate the notion of an artform becoming obsolete before it can ossify. Last year, the Building 5 Gallery housed Tim Hawkinson’s Überorgan (2000), a wheezing respiratory system of translucent air bags, fishnets, and telescopic tubing in an expanse the length of a football field. In Robert Wilson’s 14 Stations (2000), originally commissioned by the German city of Oberammergau, and currently on display, the interior space is converted into a cathedral nave flanked by shrine-like woodsheds that serve as shadow-boxes. Each one houses a tableaux, some with levitating tables or iron stoves, others guarded by a type of Shaker madonna, still others threatened by stone boulders or carpeted with glass vials. By turns effective and fatuous, Wilson marries postmodern puritanism to baroque theatrics.

Space and time give rise to a sort of brute wonder—the point, it seems, of Joseph Beuys’ solemn Lightning with Stag in Its Glare (1958-85), a mythological slab of cast bronze and its primordial debris. Or perhaps it gives way to microphobia, the fear of small things. In Domestic Disturbance (2001), Mona Hantoum counters the art-historical throwback of her gargantuan metal cheese grater with some restrained but unsettling works on paper—rubbings produced from the trace of kitchen utensils. MASS MoCA’s winter/spring 2002 schedule launched Game Show, curated by Laura Steward Howard. It featured work that ranged widely, from the tedious text-heavy photographs of Sophie Calle (Double Game, 2000) to the sly techno-amateurism in the pencil-drawing video game produced by Lonnie Flickinger’s Pencil Whipped (2000) (www.maxminn.com/chiselhead/pw.html). If other works confused game-playing with the economy of accumulation—more equals more—or the logic of the obstacle course, Game Show also featured small-format items (circa 1965) from the Silverman Fluxus Collection. Next to the contemporary work, the Fluxus material made the relevant, if unintentional, point that play is especially profitable when true to scale.

MASS MoCA makes no apologies for the élan that art can be an entertaining drive to critical thought and action. With this in mind, curatorial practice is made the source of amusement and the object of scrutiny in the display (Your Show Here). The public is invited to install a virtual exhibition out of an art-historical image bank, and to consider what it means to write interpretive materials, not unlike the gallery cards generously made available for nearly every artist and exhibit in the museum—in two versions: one for adults and one for children. Like the high-culture-hipster mix of other institutes for contemporary art, MASS MoCA programs a social calendar of live music, performance, dance, film, and other parallel events, but more in keeping with a twofold aim to fashion art-consumers out of local residents and to make museum-going a happier public practice.

What MASS MoCA invites by way of viewpoint can be found at the level of community building. Located in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, MASS MoCA forms a cultural corridor with other resources in nearby Williamstown: The Clark Art Institute and the Williams College Museum of Art. In the potential making is a new museology that would connect the visual culture scholarship of those institutions with the space for applying theories into unforeseen practice—to be placed under further scrutiny again. The miraculous story of MASS MoCA’s renovation and founding is exemplary, even as it painfully bespeaks a political economy, not so very long ago, when it was possible to obtain $22 million of the $31.4 million cost through economic development funds provided by the state of Massachusetts. Originally conceived by Thomas Krens, current director of the Guggenheim Museum, MASS MoCA became the more overtly municipal task of founding director Joseph Thompson. Thompson pursued venture partnerships with North Adams mayor John Barret III, with private collecting institutes and granting foundations, and with local citizens themselves—1,200 of whom were workers in the museum’s prior factory life, and now contributing members. In a documentary about North Adams and its new museum, local filmmaker Nancy Kelly (Downside Up, 2002) gestures to the pitfalls of such fairy-tale discourse, suspicious of an avant-garde disguised as trickle-down economy, and of the significance contemporary art may have for the daily life of a region in need of broader agency. Nevertheless, MASS MoCA stands as a refusal to comply with the neoliberal notion that cultural interchange between the cutting-edge and regional productions of meaning can only be articulated through the metropolitan market and its global demands.

I write this from Buffalo, New York—a city in such dire economic straits as to sabotage the intellectual resources that still rival those of affluent urban centers. A city largely abandoned by the suburbs of yesterday’s urban development, and by a debilitated State of New York, it is as long in its tradition of avant-garde practice as it is short on the visionary stewardship of its public trust. (The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, by nearly every account, is at least 25 years behind the times, and totally oblivious to its constituency.) As a feasible option for artists and writers who hail from hubs with a housing crisis, especially New York City, Buffalo enjoys alternative art spaces such as Hallwalls, the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art (CEPA Gallery), and Big Orbit. These continue to be focal points for art-making that combines social aims with postmodern savvy, drawn from a significant pool of artists, local and otherwise. They feature programming that tests and expands the boundaries not only between art and the community at large, but between the artist-run, the public arena, and image-making itself.

At the conceptual and social level—with links between artists, advisors, and the local community—MASS MoCA has plenty to offer other institutions as a case study of what Mieke Bal refers to when he engages "the museum [as] a social institution which has the debate on aesthetics at its center." But MASS MoCA may also be equipped to guide other museums, both old and new, toward the relevant questions of relation prompted by any site of knowledge that manages to connect individuals to objects and social geography to cultural politics.

MASS MoCA’s 1999 launch took place a mere three months before the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s noisier Sensation controversy. In retrospect, I wonder whether active ventures like MASS MoCA, and those that can be modeled after it, might thrive at the margins of reactive art-world debates. If public participation in museums must indeed be framed, as Andrea Fraser writes, "in terms of democratic values and rights"—and not in terms of that "very particular and privileged form of freedom: the freedom from economic rationality claimed for ‘disinterested’ art"—then it’s perfectly viable for the improbably-situated museum to become the more relevant focal point for navigating the future relations of the visual, the local, and that pervasive institution known as international contemporary art.

Roberto Tejada is a poet and critic who has published widely on Latin American visual culture, politics, and the language arts, in Aperture, SF Camerawork, and Third Text.