Images of disaster and wreckage dominate the entrance to MASS MoCA’s Game Show exhibit. Although the nature of the artwork in the show is generally fun and interactive, these images have taken on an inadvertent meaning. They strike a particularly sensitive chord these days.
Christoph Draeger, artist and creator of these catastrophic visions, wears many hats in his exhibit. He is painter, photographer, modeler, sculptor and installation artist. Whatever the medium, Draeger invokes disasters in manner that forces the audience to reexamine the ways in which we view and react to them.
Draeger’s installation, “Puzzled,” is perhaps the most light-hearted of the pieces. A pile of thousands of pieces lay on the floor, as if there was an explosion in a nearby jigsaw puzzle factory. The only survivors are three TVs, partially buried in the rubble. On the screens are computer games, cutting from scene to scene of car chases and violence. They display the kind of fast-paced video and computer games that we have grown so accustomed to seeing.
There is chaos here. Noise and violence surround us. But, there are also the bright colors, the thrill of a video arcade and the pieces of a puzzle. There are mixed messages along with his mixed media. Have we witnessed the destruction of old ways of playing games? Have the peaceful games of past generations been usurped by the chaotic and violent ones? Draeger creates his video screens without controllers. They are games that we can only watch, we cannot participate and we cannot control them. Then again, the piece is inherently fun. There are bright colors and exciting videos. Maybe the destruction of the old is a good thing.
“Oiltank” looks like a make-your-own-disaster kit. In a small aquarium, there rests an off-balance oil tanker on top of a layer of oil. Underneath the layer, water lies trapped, turning yellow from the oil. This is one of the more eye-catching pieces of the artist, but it isn’t much more that a pseudo-science experiment.
The real meat of Draeger’s work is in his paintings-cum-jigsaw puzzles and the large photographs of his scale models. The puzzles are the most affecting of the images. They are also the most poignant by virtue of their reality. They are images taken from real events, peopled with figures who are completely dwarfed by the huge size of their respective disasters.
“TWA 800 #3” is pieced together from 43 separate video stills of the destroyed TWA flight, and then cut into a jigsaw puzzle. Dragged from the sea after the flight exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, the sections were pieced together by officials trying to recreate the crash and figure out what happened on the flight. Destroyed planes have been implanted into our subconscious lately. This work is particularly moving, expressing the immense task of the backtracking process.
“Tornado, Kissimmee, Florida,” “Earthquake, Armenia, Columbia” and “Tornado, Spencer, South Dakota” are stunningly similar images. Although the areas represented are obviously very different, the tornadoes and earthquake have rendered them virtually the same. They too are paintings of real images subsequently cut into puzzles. The disasters, from our aerial view, are overwhelming. A house is transformed to something that has sheltered to something the tiny figures need shelter from. These people are inadequate to deal with the scale of what nature has done to their lives.
These puzzles are not a game that can be played. The wreckage is unable to be put back together. What were once distinct houses in neat rows have become piles of lumber and building materials come undone, all looking the same.
Puzzles at first give us control. They allow us to take what is broken and fix it. Initially, depicting these events seems strange. We may feel better about what we can’t control by putting into puzzle form. We can fix it, make it better, have some control over nature. Then the realization comes that we can’t do anything. If taken apart, these puzzles will never be able to be put back together. We can’t control nature, and these jigsaw puzzles only serve to illustrate the sense of frustration we have at a situation that is out of our hands. Draeger allows his audience to feel just a bit of the powerlessness and frustration of the disaster’s victims.
“Catastrophe #1” and “Catastrophe #2” are extremely large painted representations of photographs of miniature models that were made and sculpted into landscapes by the artist. They turn this traditional genre on its head. They’re not composed pictures of nature, but instead, are landscapes of utter decimation. Everywhere the eye looks, it is greeted by the ruins of a contemporary city. Buildings are barely visible beyond the rubble they’ve created. Advertisements peek out of the ruins, now meaning nothing. Fire trucks lay ruined as well, unable to do anything. People aren’t visible. This is a post-apocalyptic imagining on which the dust have recently settled.
Previous to Sept. 11, this view destruction wouldn’t mean much to the viewer. But, like almost all of Draeger’s artwork in this show, it has taken on significance that the artist could not have predicted. Once clich
