MTAA

MTAA: All the Holidays All at Once

June 26 to October 2, 2011

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

MTAA: All the Holidays All at Once

MTAA is a Brooklyn-based artists’ collective that originated in 1996 and com-prises Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden. The practice of this troupe is based in per-formance and relies on the participation of the community to create the work, which is generally ephemeral. For example, earlier this year in a project titled All Raise This Barn, MTAA built a commercially available barn by asking the general public to vote online to decide whether it should have windows and where, what color it should be, and if the construction crew should take coffee breaks. Once the votes were in, the performative aspect of the work was initiated by raising the collectively designed barn in compliance with the voters’ requests. In a similar strategy, the 2008 Automatic for the People project listed ten elements typical of art performances and asked the public to vote which of those should be included in MTAA’s performance for SFMOMA. The title of the performance, We Solemnly Promise That No One Will Get Naked, was voted on, as well as the props, cultural references, refreshments offered, and wardrobe—which explains the per-formers’ robot attire. For their project at The Aldrich, All the Holidays All at Once, MTAA made a call to the community asking for the temporary loan of holiday-themed lawn ornaments in order to display them in the sculpture garden. The call came through posts at the Museum, local papers, Craigslist, and the artists’ URL, holiday.mtaa.net, where interested donors were given information on the project and the specifics of the loan. In exchange for borrowing the ornaments, MTAA will give each lender a signed

“thank you” certificate. Decorations celebrating holidays as varied as New Year’s, Martin Luther King Day, President’s Day, Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Independence Day, Halloween, Day of the Dead, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christ-mas, and Kwanzaa will be arranged in a parade-like procession. A picnic/perfor-mance during the summer will attempt to celebrate all the holidays at once over the course of the picnic. This project, like most of MTAA’s inclusive and participatory projects, deliber-ately attempts to blur the boundary between artist as active producer and audience as passive receptor. These artists commend themselves by creating work whose ma-terial form is secondary, thus placing primary relevance upon the voting, the perfor-mance, and the Web discussions, all of which favor the idea rather than the object. And the fact of coming together to accomplish something, to democratically orga-nize ourselves to create something—even if that something may seem absurd—is a great testimonial to the potential of engaging and feeling engaged, and the different strategies that led to that accomplishment.

Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, curator

MTA

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The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877Tel 203.438.4519, Fax 203.438.0198, aldrichart.org