Domestic Left #47: Assume the risk
On a recent Sunday, I finally visited the Mattress Factory, a contemporary art museum on Pittsburgh’s Northside which is maybe ten blocks from my apartment. I had been there once for an event, but the museum itself was closed.
The museum is, as its name implies, located in a former industrial building (though it was a mattress warehouse, not a factory), built in 1900. Like the much larger Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MASS MoCA, which I visited several times while my son was attending nearby Williams College, the Mattress Factory has left the utilitarian brick-and-wood interior of its lodgings unfinished.
Both museums are mostly home to large-scale contemporary-art installations. The turn-of-the-last-century feel of the buildings makes for a stark contrast to the sleek modernity of, say, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, or the Carnegie in Pittsburgh. It makes the artworks, which are often challenging and provide few immediate aesthetic rewards, seem less contemporary and more otherworldly, as if they come from an alternate timeline which simply skipped the modernity of the 20th century, where the headlong industrial growth of the late 19th century crashed immediately into the technological dystopia of the early 21st.
The Mattress Factory consists of the four floors plus the basement of the original building, plus two additional buildings that they have acquired since the museum’s founding in 1977 (one of which currently houses an installation incorporating original cartoons by UE cartoonist Fred Wright, about which I hope to have more to say in the future, perhaps here or perhaps in the UE NEWS). Like the seven-story Andy Warhol Museum, also located in a former industrial warehouse on Pittsburgh’s Northside, they recommend taking the elevator to the top and then working your way down.
Upon exiting the elevator on the fourth floor, the first thing that greets you is a row of hardhats and safety glasses, required for the full appreciation of Asim Waqif’s Assume the Risk. Using construction materials salvaged from a closed factory, a scrap yard, and an architectural reclamation company, Waqif has filled the gallery space with a dense web of wood, metal, fabric, and other materials. You are invited to walk through it, but doing so requires ducking your head, contorting your body, and finding your balance on uneven and angled platforms.
According to the description on the wall, the artist “makes discarded materials visible in new ways” and “emphasizes that the systems that shape how we acquire, use, and discard objects seem designed to keep the full impact of our actions out of sight.”
However, Waqif has also invited the public to reshape the artwork as they visit, and many of those who have visited have clearly had the assumption of a different kind of risk on their mind: