MOMA millenial (draft)
John Haber
Modern Art. The institution born to chart the twentieth century must
somehow face the twenty-first. Perhaps even more than the fabled
Armory show, exhibitions at the Modern nearly sixty years ago changed
the course of Modernism in America. Along with Betty Parson's "Art of
This Century," they spurred Abstract Expressionism, and Parsons has
died long before her gallery's name can disturb computer search
engines. Now what?
Stubbornly, the Modern keeps collecting. With P.S. 1 in Queens, it has
even taken over the best contemporary-arts space I know. It can hardly
stop now. To become merely old-master galleries for a soon-past
century, it would have to define an era once and for all. But that
would just repeat the Modern's original project, throwing the museum
right back into its prime after all.
Fittingly, the year 2000 offers one more attempt, this time as
big-time celebration. The Y2K bug demands major reprogramming. For
once, the Modern is clearing out all its galleries devoted to the
permanent collection. Over three years, the entire museum fills, bit
by bit, with a look back at the last hundred or so.
This fall and winter manage just the opening decades, to roughly 1920.
They hit every medium from painting to posters. If that obsession with
detail were not enough, not to mention part of its conception of
Modernism, the museum manages to rely entirely on its own holdings.
For it to celebrate Modernism, the Modern has first of all to
celebrate itself.
For this first segment, each of the museum's three main floors gets a
theme: <em>People</em>, <em>Places</em>, and <em>Things</em>. It
sounds vacuous enough. Gee, that about covers it, right? Within each
show, one in turn finds subdivisions, of two to three rooms each, each
just as artificial. I have already forgotten all their titles.
Maybe I should think again. The best way to spot the museum's
importance is to look for ideas behind the labels. People, places, and
things -- they turn out to suggest limits of Modernism as well. More
interesting still, Postmodernism may not know those limits so well
after all.
Start with a trivial matter: one can take the concentrations in any
order. Hear an echo of random access on the Web? The museum in fact
scatters about the joint some helpful computer monitors. By contrast,
the Met would be pushing print catalogs alongside brightly lit
souvenirs.
Call it sane curating. Call it yet one more insistence on the
century's relevance at the end of the century. Either way, if the
Modern has a bad Y2K problem, this exhibition will definitely find
out.
Like the whole, each concentration utterly ignores chronology. Works
sit side by side according to theme, comparing subjects and styles. In
addition, a handful of works from decades later than 1920 slip into
the mix. A contemporary photograph hangs near Cézanne's
standing male bather. As an image of man, <em>Vir Hiroicus
Sublimus</em>, Barnett Newman's 1951 abstraction, even greeted me on
the way in. (Well, in line with random access, make that <em>one</em>
way in, of many.)
If the Whitney's millennial now drowns art in cultural values, this
show tosses historical narrative out the window. What is left looks
pretty good on screen.
Timelessness, a sense of play, an openness to technology, and an urge
to document itself: all of them go into the Modern's act of
self-definition. Already one sees the limits of formalism, a step
outside of history. At the same time, one sees how little Modernism
matched that image of overblown men soberly pursuing the limits of
abstraction and old media. This stuff can mix fun and self-analysis
with the best of them. It just had this way of getting a bit
self-involved.
The sense of playful self-discovery never leave. One thinks of
Modernism as wrapped up in fine art by men. Instead, one keeps finding
alternative media and cultural representations. In fact, I am hard
pressed to say into which camp photography falls, high or low, but it
practically runs the show. Berenice Abbott's photograph of hands hangs
next to Oskar Kokoschka's double portrait in oils. The Austrian
couple's gestures come thoroughly alive -- with all the fragility of
emotion, human flesh, and paint. Yet I knew I owed my insight to a
different kind of portrait, from an American woman.
Along with chronology, the Modern bursts the old march from realism to
abstraction. Categories like people, places, and things have little to
do with either. Realism would demand a genre -- like portraiture,
landscape, still life. Abstraction would look quite elsewhere, to
extend experience rather than represent it. Modernism hinges on that
extension, but as examination of the real.
Here one sees a restlessness, a continual urge to recreate experience.
That same urge underlies every stage of Modernism, from Cubism's manic
reality to Surrealism's unseen one, from Dada's institutionalization
of the ordinary to Minimalism's break with the old sites for art, from
Abstract Expressionism's erasure of symbols to Pop Art's erasure of
brand names. At the Modern the works' exceptional placement adds to
one's sense of dizziness. One turns one's head in surprise between
Giacometti and Rodin.
The categories suggest another undercurrent of Modernism: an
exploration of the human. People, places, things -- it describes a
world as seen from the human perspective, as held in one's hand. That
humanity corresponds to Modernism's turning of nature inward, from
eternal truth to patterns of the mind. Postmodernism actually confirms
that prejudice, seeing even the most raw perception as colored by the
limits of human culture and human understanding.
Of course, one <em>expects</em> an extraordinary collection, and one
gets it. Restriction to twenty-five years hardly stops the Modern from
filling the walls with modernity's pleasures. To me, they look better
taken off the old walls. <em>Les Demoiselles d'Avignon</em> had its
impact before on a free-standing wall. It became a kind of gateway to
the century, policed by women. Now one feels able to get close to it,
to thrill to its confrontational image all the more that one can
appreciate the paint and handling.
Matisse, too, has more room than in his usual, oppressively tight,
low-ceilinged galleries. For a colorist, he left me aware of the range
of grays in his woman seated on a stool. I focused on the rough
brushstrokes near her seat. For all her rigidity, she has no visible
means of support. I could see her become looser than his bright-red
<em>Dance</em>.
Throughout modernity, the museum sees a lightness of being, a
rapidity, and a reaching for the sky. For places, it takes the
unfinished Eiffel Tower as emblem. After the Whitney's flat, gloomy
hanging, I can only look forward to how good it will look when Jackson
Pollock's works literally leap off the floor.
The show's pace has a way of backfiring, though. As a textbook on the
walls, the hoary old permanent collection risked announcing its
obsolescence. The finer it looked, well, the more Postmodernism had
won. And naturally the more Postmodernism had won, the finer Modernism
looked. At the century's end, the two sustained each like Matisse's
dance partners.
Now Modernism loses in another way. Without history, it seems to admit
Postmodern criticism of its formalism. And with its breakneck speed,
it seems to give in to Postmodernism's critique of the world. Once
again, the two concepts seem destined to live with each other into the
Y2K.
Meaning has a way of vanishing here. Juxtaposition of forms such as
hands covers too much -- a search for optical reality, formal
variation, a mere backdrop for other meanings. It is not only that the
loss of chronology takes away the sense of things, both as history and
as art history. Works hang apart that depend on one another for sense.
I think of the Matisse room in which that seated woman hangs on the
wall, one layer of reality within many. One can become a dervish
spinning about to compare the Picasso and Braques guitarists.
I found myself moving through the galleries far more quickly than
usual, allowing those photos to push me toward just a few works.
Perhaps that experience will only add to arguments over what gets left
out. I myself had to miss Picasso's <em>Ma Jolie</em> among the
people, to name one. Most of all, I missed history. All the lightness
of being really had grown unbearable.
I even started to think again about the Modern's immersion in the
present. The purchase of P.S. 1 comes with the age of museum empires.
The dazzling shift of the permanent collection comes with a closing of
several galleries to permit a construction project, yet another
big-money museum expansion.
I think again back to P.S. 1, where Mike Bidlo has wallpapered a
bathroom with Marcel Duchamp's urinal. Bidlo means to criticize how
museums incorporate, repeat, and numb protests against them. By the
playfulness of theft, he hopes to revitalize Duchamp after the
Modern's age-old institutionalization of tradition. In restoring
<em>Fountain</em> to the bathroom, he restores the kick of Duchamp's
gesture. On top of that, when he worked, P.S. 1 was still an
alternative space. It was actively coping with institutionalization.
What happens now that the Modern has bought P.S. 1 and begun its
millennium? Maybe one should ask Duchamp. He understood that he could
not create an object that would function forever as anti-art. Today,
one calls it art, dignified as conceptual art, and he went along with
the retrospective transformation of his work without complaints. He
could find no response possible to the end of Dada and the birth of
our museum space.
In Duchamp's hands, hypothetical art grew fluid enough to chart
historical changes while accepting the power of an artist's gesture.
Each one creates a reality -- and so posits a fiction. Is that fiction
straining to be heard during this mammoth exhibition?
Perhaps the museum is not quite so happy after all. Faced with the
Y2K, it looks back instead at the start of the previous century. Like
an adult dealing with recovered memories, it is obsessed with its
roots. Like a badly corrupted computer, it resets to 1900 or, as with
Windows programs and Modernism's critical orthodoxy, to 1980. The
fascination of the installments over the next two years will be to see
how much -- or little -- it has learned.
John
~Artist~
LOL
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In article <381ceff2...@news.onepine.com>, jha...@haberarts.com (John
~Artist~
Well boys put your money where your mouths are and go to the Brooklyn Museum
and organize the first RAF show.
Contact me when you are ready to ship and hang.
~Artist~
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In article <7voara$ns5$1...@bgtnsc03.worldnet.att.net>, "~Artist~"
<matt...@att.net> wrote:
If you can't get that space. I will offer mine in Silly Icon. The geekers
will eat it up believe me they believe their own press round here worse than
artists!!!!!!
You all will have to find funding, support staff, press people etc. for the
show.
I am tooo busy.
LOL
M
mdeli
wrote:
>
>Well boys put your money where your mouths are and go to the Brooklyn Museum
>and organize the first RAF show.
>
>Contact me when you are ready to ship and hang.
>
Don't contact me when you're ready to hang youself.
Mani DeLi
...no skill no art
Check out my web page, A Skeptical View of Modern Art and
my book, comments, work at:.
http://www.interlog.com/~hugod/
~Artist~
LOL
Mattison
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In article <38225c4f...@news.psi.ca>, hug...@interlog.com (mdeli)
wrote: