KVT – SOUND and LIGHT at Museum of Fine Arts

Singing in a Green Field at Museum of Fine Arts

How many of you were lucky enough to catch Dinh Quan’s installation Singing in a Green Field at Museum of Fine Arts last Friday night? I got there early to get a front spot and watched the crowds devour a magnificently loaded buffet and sip some very delectable red wine.

What was it all about?

I’m still perplexed but still enjoying the spectacle in retrospect. And it was a spectacle with the whole of the facade of the museum used as a sound and light canvas and the lawns as a sculptural installation of immense, grimacing heads. It was an audacious undertaking. When you think that the artist probably self funded the extravaganza the audacity, the brazen eccentricity, makes you gasp.

How to interpret the piece! Is it about some inner conflict in the artist’s psyche or is it, as I wanted to read it, a comment on humanity’s plight in a world that seems to be spiraling out of control. It was almost apocalyptic. The music was sometimes lush and symphonic almost putting us as viewers in a belle-époque mind space, sometimes in that cold war- triumphalism reminicent of block buster movies in the sixties and seventies. At times the lonely flute spoke of times when memories were laced with innocence. The tribal chants dreamed of creation legends dead and perhaps to be reinvented. At times it put us into a sense of new age delusion and then perhaps the selfishness of denial.

It was a bit like being in a collision with 2001 A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, Ben Hur and The Lord of the Flies with the surrealism of Apocalypse Now hovering wildly around the edges.

The sense of being in a place haunted by encroaching climate change was as obvious as is the obviousness of most of us denying its cataclysmic creep. The way it kept us grounded in the hedonistic present while visually surrounding us with an agonistic possibility was  powerful. Subtlety was not on the agenda and in my translation we got hit about the head with the message but necessarily so.

In the end we were left with silent monolithic heads that someone afterwards described as so reminiscent of the mysterious, inscrutable stone visages on Easter Island except the faces of these were frozen into contorted masks. All but one which looks about quizzically, impishly…..so perhaps the artist is suggesting that there is a chance of redemption.

Whatever…..even if Dinh Quan is rolling about in the aisles as he reads this…I loved the whole, full blown, over the top, in your face totality and I was so glad I had my up front vantage point and if it was on again tonight I’d be there again and probably weaving some other story through the light and the sound.

FABULOUS!