MOCAD's Kresge Art's Experience: Rod Klingelhofer

I hope everyone in the Metro Detroit area has had the opportunity to get down to Detroit this week to take part of the awesome new art movement Art X Detroit, a unique celebration of the 2008-2010 Kresge Eminent Artists and Kresge Artist Fellows. There is a plethora galleries, museums, and spaces around the city that are participating in Art X Detroit, where exhibitions, poetry and musical performances, and panel discussions take place. I recently took a trip down to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) to listen to a poetry reading, watch a few wonderful musical performances, and view the Kresge Art's Experience exhibition that is currently on display.

There are many incredibly talented Detroit artists featured in the Kresge Art's Experience exhibition (planned by Luis Croquer). All of the work is organized around the theme of "Reimagining Detroit," in which many works focuse on building a healthy and vibrant artistic ecology. Though there are many visually stunning pieces in a variety of medias, I was particularly intrigued by Rod Klingelhofer's Stuffed: A Theory of Human Motivation (2010).

Klingelhofer's mixed media sculpture is set up as a sort of assembly line, with pulleys, moving belts, and plastic tubing. There are several bean bags (or stuffed with something else - I wasn't able to touch them) that line up along the belts, where they are transported up to the top of the sculpture. They land on a clear plastic surface, where they sit and build up. As they continue to collect, it becomes too much and the bags eventually drop down a clear plastic tubing to a table below. The table also has belts that churn along and force the bags back onto the belts that will take them to the top of the sculpture, starting the process over again.

Though I am not typically interested in sculpture and such, I couldn't help but find myself intrigued with Stuffed: A Theory of Human Motivation. It wasn't plugged in when I visited MOCAD, so I circled around the structure, looking at it from different angles and inspecting the materials that were used to create it. I believe not seeing it in motion helped me to use my imagination, gave me a challenge, and motivated my curiosity.

As I put together the pieces to understand the purpose of the belts and how the bags moved throughout the structure, I began to understand Klingelhofer's work in different ways. At first, I saw it as a study of motion and kinetic energy. Then I tried to understand it in a more conceptual way. The table looks almost like a typical picnic table, which brought concepts of consumerism and the family life to mind.

Everything made much more sense after reading Klingelhofer's artist statement, which is why I chose to write about it. I find the concept behind Stuffed: A Theory of Human Motivation very relevant to today's American society. Klingelhofer explains that we are tempted to equate getting stuff with being happier in this consumer culture.

The way the bean bags collecting at the top is the equivalent of the stuff we collect over life and the conveyor belts "feed" the stuff to us. They fall through the hole after collecting too much, which I equate to the times in life when times get tough and things feel as if they're falling through your fingers. All the stuff we gather won't keep us happy in life. We must find joy within ourselves and be content without worldly collections.