The Mattress Factory

I look up things to do off the beaten track in Pittsburgh, and the Mattress Factory keeps showing up on all the lists. I don't understand what could be so great about a mattress factory, until I realize that the Mattress Factory isn't a factory, and there are no mattresses there. When I figure out it's an art museum, with large scale immersive installations, I put it on our list. And a few days later we drive to Pittsburgh to immerse ourselves. We eat a big greasy breakfast at a diner in Lawrenceville, then head to the Mexican War Streets neighborhood to find the modern art museum with the funny name.

It's half price Tuesday, so we pay half price, pick up headphones from the bowl by the desk, and take the elevator up to the third floor. 

We go past a door and around a corner, and find the white trash house installation of the woman who used to be a man. There is green astro turf on the fake front porch. There are crucifixes and raggedy anns and empty pill bottles inside the house. There is horror and hunger and love and loss. We listen to the narrative on our headphones, and try to connect to the human being that created this, to hear what she has to say. And when the loud kids come in, mocking and laughing, I feel sad. And then mad. But when they see us, and what's inside the windows, they get quiet, and quickly leave. Because what's inside the windows of this house, which is built inside this museum, is the inside of a real person's head, and it isn't easy to see.

Then we go around the corner and find a basket full of booties that we are instructed to put on over our shoes. We open a door and go inside a mirrored room, and there are fluorescent dots everywhere, and black lights making everything glow. We take pictures, but we can't figure out how to make ourselves disappear.

Infinity Dots - Yayoi Kusama

There are more doors, and we go through to the next room.

It's bright, and white, with painted mannequins and orange dots on everything.

Repetitive Vision - Yayoi Kusama

Two of the three mannequins are Asian, and all of them are naked and nippled. We are immersed in dots, and we can't escape ourselves, because everywhere we look we are reflected back.

Then we go down to the second floor, which we have been warned doesn't have much light. When we get off the elevator it's dim and quiet. There's a gallery attendant standing there to help us figure out what to do. She says there are three exhibits on this floor and that we can go left or right, but there is a fifteen to thirty minute wait for the one in the middle. So we go left first, and I run into the wall. Then I stretch out my hands and grope my way into the room with the blue rectangle of light. We've been told the best way to experience this one is to go in and pause, and then go all the way forward. So we go in and pause, standing in light and shadow. I go forward first and see that up close the blue box looks three dimensional. From back by the door it looked flat, like paint on a wall. I go back and forth and all around. Then Gary goes up to the front, and we wander for a little while in the small dark room. We're getting ready to leave when Gary asks if I touched it. I say no, and go up to feel the rectangle of light. And it isn't there. And even when I was standing right next to it before, I didn't see it was an emptiness that went inside the wall. And as we leave I'm thinking about how easy it is to believe in things that aren't true, about how you can't just stand next to something and think you know everything about it.

Danae - James Turrell - photo credit Heather Kresge

So then we go to the right and find the red room. Where there's a projection of light in the corner. It's a three dimensional red box hanging there on the wall, and it could be poking out, or it could be poking in, depending on how you look at it. I go up and touch the red light box. But it's flat. Only light on the wall. I walk all around, and stand back and look, and it feels like something is missing.

We go out of the red room and stand in the hall, because the last exhibit is different. Only two people can go in at once, and it takes fifteen minutes to fully experience it, because your eyes have to adjust to the dark. So we wait. There are two couples ahead of us. People keep getting off the elevator in the dim light looking confused and unsure about what they're supposed to do. Gary and the gallery attendant exchange life stories, and it turns out she has made a study of these light art pieces. Her name is Heather, and she seems really happy to be standing there helping people in the gray light of the hallway. We make plans to find each other in cyberworld.

Finally it's our turn to go in. We fumble in the dark and find the two chairs, one on each side of the room, and sit down. We're staring straight ahead in the almost blackness. There's a very faint big squarish light far away in front of us. It's so dim I don't know if it's really there, and there's so much noise from the people waiting in the hallway that we both plug our ears with our fingers. We're quiet and it's dark, and we're trying to see or find or experience whatever it is this artist wants us to see or find or experience. I look away from the faint square. I look up and down and all around, and after what must be five minutes or more I start to see little purplish wisps of smoke-like things flying upwards above my head in three different places. Upwards in the same shape, always the same shape upwards, and then dissolving. I think I'm imagining it, I'm pretty sure I am, but they keep doing the same thing in the same way with the same patterns. Then they disappear, and I see little whooshing lights like meteors, and then sparkly dots like stars, little pin pricks of light, and then white gaseous floaty smoky shapes, in and out, growing and dying. Then the purple things come back and they're more intense, making outlines of faces or creatures, moving always from down to up, and always floating like smoke or ghosts or mist. I'm mesmerized and I don't want it to end. I ask Gary if he sees it and he says, see what? Then Heather comes in and tells us our time is up. I get up reluctantly and we stumble out. Back in the dim light of the hallway we try to talk about what happened, why Gary didn't see anything, or only the same thing he sees when he closes his eyes, and I saw purple ghosts. Heather says it took her four times to see anything, the first time it was only like white noise on a tv. But she doesn't tell us what she saw the fourth time. And we leave with more questions than answers.

Pleiades - James Turrell - photo credit Heather Kresge

There are two more buildings left to see, so we head out the door and down the block to an old converted house. We go inside and climb the stairs and see a created room filled with color and chaos, order in disorder, endless things to look at, piles of everyday objects tumbled together constructed. Somehow it feels comforting to me. And when I listen to the artist's words in my headphones, talking about family and foundations and collective agreements, things that are solid and things that are not, I want to stay in this room for a long time, and look for everything I can find.

The Color of Temperance: Embodied Energy - Julie Schenkelberg

The next room is the colored strings that make my breath pull all inside, they are there and not there, translucent, barely seen, but making all the difference.

Shift Lens - Anne Lindberg

There are other realities in other rooms, and then we are out the door and down an alley to the last building, which is another old house, only this one is filled with black spider webs. There are three stories of rooms and every room has an object, or objects, stacked or suspended or silently sitting. And every room and all of those objects are covered and connected and controlled by layers and layers of black woven yarn like cobwebs. And the words in my headphones are words about memories. Threads of memory everywhere, memories of the house itself, of the people that lived there, of objects used and unused. And it feels like the artist has made touchable things that cannot be touched. Everyone that comes in is hushed, and no one disturbs the black cords everywhere. And I think about how long it must have taken to fill this whole house with these black memory webs, and about how fine the line is between art and insanity.

Trace of Memory - Chiharu Shiota

And when we finally walk out of the Mattress Factory, we've been immersed in the minds of strangers for hours. We walk over the uneven brick sidewalks and find our car. We drive back to Gibsonia, eat dinner outside on the deck, and watch the light in the trees going away for the day. And then I go to my computer and start reading everything I can about James Turrell and his light art. I am fascinated that sitting in that dark room with my fingers plugging my ears, staring at the amorphous gray shape in front of me, and the cloudy smoky purple things swooshing above me that were either there or not there, is the thing I am still thinking about eight hours later. And that I still don't know what I saw, and if what I saw was real.

As I'm reading I come across this quote from James Turrell: "I was maybe 5 or 6, and my grandmother would begin sitting me in the Quaker meeting house. I asked my grandmother, What am I supposed to do? and she said, Just wait, we're going inside to greet the light."

"We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality.  

So the work is often a general koan into how we go about forming this world in which we live, in particular with seeing.  

I'm very interested in how we perceive because that informs how we live."

James Turrell