An exhibition laboring to make a statement

art REVIEW

Artists get their hands dirty on a promising subject

December 18, 2011|By Sebastian Smee, Globe Staff

From The Workers at Mass MoCA, a scene from Adrian Pacis 2007 video called… (COURTESY THE ARTIST AND…)

THE WORKERS At: Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, through April 14. 413-662-2111, www.massmoca.org

NORTH ADAMS - On the face of it, everything about “The Workers,’’ a group show at the wonderful Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, looks auspicious. Above all, the timing: The show, which opened back in May and continues through April 14, has coincided with a period of high unemployment and with the Occupy protests, which together have intensified society’s focus on the plight of workers in a sputtering economy.

Across the country, there has been a great deal of soul-searching about what constitutes work in a globalized economy. Increasingly, people recognize that the types of work that make up the US economy have been rapidly changing. Manufacturing jobs, in particular, are being replaced by jobs in service industries, and these jobs are, by their nature, more precarious.

People are conscious, too, that one of these service industries, the financial services sector, helps choreograph the increasingly acrobatic movements of capital, generating great quantities of wealth but also, as we have seen in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, devastating fallout.

“The Workers’’ tries to address all these phenomena, and many more besides.

But it’s not just the timing that makes this exhibition seem such a promising prospect: It’s the venue. Mass MoCA is situated, after all, on what used to be the site of the Sprague Electric Co. in North Adams. When that factory closed shop in 1985, nearly a third of the local population was left out of work.

Mass MoCA owes its very existence to this traumatic closure. Since its opening in 1999, its rise as a dynamic cultural institution is viewed as an antidote to - or at least a consolation for - the shutting of Sprague, and is seen by many as a beacon of hope for the North Adams community. As the town tries to generate new sources of economic and social strength - in short, of work - Mass MoCA can seem emblematic of the wider national shift from the production of things to the provision of experiences (experiences being, in the debased and humiliating language of economics, a subset of “services’’).

Unfortunately, “The Workers’’ is a dreadful show. Although it is alive to many of the issues that make work such an interesting subject right now, and although some of the art in it is sensitive to the specific history of Mass MoCA, it simply fails to ignite.