Rigorous Self-Referentiality
Published in Disegno, Issue #25, Winter 2019/20.
by Glenn Adamson
Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) comes under curatorial scrutiny in the new MoMA.
The helicopter is still in place. There it hangs, the Bell-47D1, right in its traditional spot, overlooking the Museum of Modern Art’s multi-tiered sculpture garden, which is still just as Philip Johnson designed it in 1953. The garden has had a thorough gussying-up, to be sure, and a few new works are on view. But visitors seeking out Picasso’s She-Goat will still find it waiting for them. More generally, any expectation that MoMA’s latest expansion would entail an overhaul of its institutional personality has proven to be misplaced. Those who feared chaotic, cross-cultural virtue signalling should be relieved. Those who wanted to see the canon displaced are likely to be disappointed. Those who come without such preconceptions, though, will find one of the world’s greatest museums bigger and better than ever.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s handling of the site is vastly more successful than the previous redesign in 2004, by Yoshio Taniguchi, which made the place seem impersonal and vacant, like the corporate headquarters of the art world. The new MoMA is much more generous, nuanced and transparent. Exhibition space has been increased by a third and visitor circulation greatly improved. One gallery feels like a VIP lounge for the general public, thanks to its provision of seating and commanding view over the sculpture garden. Cordoned-off departmental galleries have been abandoned, too, in favour of a fully integrated storyline. Thus, the very first space – chronologically speaking – offers an inspired juxtaposition between the strange, serpentine forms of Vincent Van Gogh and the twisting, tortured ceramics of George E. Ohr, the so-called “Mad Potter of Biloxi”. The potential to present craft and design in this way, as genuinely equal to fine art, has existed at MoMA since the 1930s. Now – praise be to those on high – it has finally come to pass.
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According to chief curator of painting and sculpture Ann Temkin, the curatorial ethos for MoMA’s reconfiguration has been to achieve something “familiar, but provocative”, so that iconic masterpieces jostle with the unexpected. This means that the museum is now constantly doing two things at once. It continues to provide the traditional modernist narrative, the bible of a secular religion that holds the succession of discrete avant-garde movements – cubism, abstraction, surrealism, abstract expressionism, minimalism, conceptualism – to be something like the stations of the cross. But now it also has the space (and the impetus) to provide a running commentary on that established narrative. It’s a little like watching an old movie with a newly commissioned voiceover. For a long time – since the 1970s, arguably, and the rise of the postmodern – the question of contemporary relevance has hung over MoMA like a cloud. Now, it is making a new and persuasive case: that its own institutional legacy is so immense, and so far-reaching, that coping with it is a full-time occupation and one that concerns us all.
A good example of this approach is a gallery devoted to postwar “Architecture Systems”. In the middle of the room stands an impressive fragment of the United Nations Secretariat Building, designed by Le Corbusier and a team of other architects in 1952. Despite its size, the slab of curtain wall feels like a precious relic – not too different, materially, from the pieces of the World Trade Center displayed downtown at the 9/11 Memorial Museum. The fragment’s steel joints, corroded and scraped, bear witness to the length of the building’s history, a reminder of just how long modernism has been the official idiom of power. And, of course, one couldn’t find a better exemplar of the international style than the UN. Yet, visible right through the framed windows is a film that sends a very different message: a sequence from Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967), in which his hapless alter ego Monsieur Hulot becomes bewilderingly lost in a modernist skyscraper. At one point, Hulot accidentally breaks into a high-powered board meeting – a phalanx of white guys in suits. He then stumbles to an interior window, through which he gazes down in awe on a floor of innumerable secretarial cubicles. They look an awful lot like Donald Judd boxes.
This dehumanising aspect of modernism is also addressed in an earlier gallery, devoted to the “Vertical City”. The curators’ wall text underlines the anxiety that people felt when first encountering skyscrapers: “What if offices towered over churches?” Of course, that is exactly what they now do, in Manhattan and countless other cities. One gallery over, the curators (a team including Martino Stierli, Juliet Kinchin, and Paola Antonelli) fill out the message with a section on modernism as applied to real office spaces, including an absorbing selection of corporate stationery designed by luminaries such as László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, and Jan Tschichold. You get the point: from the beginning, this progressive style was also the style of bureaucracy. The curators are fulfilling the promise of MoMA’s recent programming that led up to this reinstallation, featuring shows such as The Value of Good Design (on view earlier in 2019),1 which similarly interrogated one of the museum’s most well-known historic initiatives – the influential Good Design home furnishings exhibition series (1950-55).
American People Series #20: Die by Faith Ringgold is displayed next to the Picasso.
This contrapuntal approach, in which modernism is simultaneously summoned and critiqued, occurs again and again. The most striking example is the positioning of American People Series #20: Die, a violent race-riot scene painted by Faith Ringgold in 1967, which is in breathtakingly close proximity to MoMA’s Most Important Painting, Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It’s a thunderous piece of curatorial clap-back, an indictment of the sexual violence implicit in Picasso’s canvas. Another pairing, subtler but equally powerful, presents documentation of a Fluxus sidewalk performance, in which a violin player is tied up with string, alongside a gorgeous, lumpen sculpture of found objects and yarn by the visionary artist Judith Scott, who suffered from severe Down’s syndrome. You almost wince to see self-conscious avantgardism so thoroughly overwhelmed by the potency of her work.
“I couldn’t quite decide whether this was intended to be deadly serious or deadpan hilarious – maybe a little of each”
— Glenn Adamson
Modernism is even called to account in the museum café, through a treatment by the Dutch graphics firm Experimental Jetset, which is inspired by the De Stijl artist Theo Van Doesburg’s Café Aubette (completed in Strasbourg in 1928, and created with the assistance of Sophie TaeuberArp and Jean Arp). The designers did what they could to turn this heavily trafficked space at the MoMA into a “total environment”. In practice, this means a set of paper placemats and wall graphics that feature angular configurations of modernist terminology (prismatic, transient, elementary, and so on); and a series of brightly coloured wall panels, which simultaneously allude to the floating planes of the Aubette and the windows of Philip Johnson’s 1964 MoMA extension, and which also look a lot like giant iPhones. I couldn’t quite decide whether this was intended to be deadly serious or deadpan hilarious – maybe a little of each. But when even placemats are recruited to rigorous self-referentiality, you know the institution is on a mission.
If the current suite of temporary exhibitions is any guide, this self-critical approach will also now animate that aspect of the museum’s programming. The most crowd-pleasing of the new shows, in the museum’s spacious top-floor galleries, is Surrounds: 11 Installations, which gathers together large-scale works acquired by the museum over the past two decades. Design is again an equal partner in the proceedings, both as a methodology and raw material. Architect Sou Fujimoto contributes a room of tiny elevated platforms, each with a simple arrangement of objects and a beguiling proposition about the built environment. A pile of potato chips is captioned: “layering hills is architecture.” A textured sponge: “people live in nooks and crannies.” A pinecone: “if you think about it, this form has been a friend of architecture for thousands of years.” Another installation, Work of Days, originally created by the Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander, is a room entirely lined in adhesive vinyl. As visitors walk through it, the space gradually gathers dust, becoming an archive of its own transient inhabitation.
Design also plays an important role in Sur Moderno: Journeys of Abstraction, which is built around gifts from the collector Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. It is hard to think of another patron who has had a comparable impact on a major museum’s collecting priorities. Almost single-handedly, she has used her philanthropic resources – both artworks and money – to pry MoMA open to Latin American art and design, which in turn has led it to begin exploring other parts of the globe more vigorously. (In this respect, MoMA has emulated Tate Modern’s ambitiously global acquisition strategy, though it is operating from a much stronger base collection.)
Sur Moderno, the largest of the temporary exhibitions mounted for the re-opening, includes a gallery on intersections between fine art and design, showing how abstraction “became synonymous with modernity in South America, spilling over from artworks into the everyday – to tablecloths, chairs, and even cities”. The exhibition demonstrates convincingly that designers in this part of the world – like the architect Lina Bo Bardi, for example – were not simply copying European precedents but developing their own distinctive ideas about the movement. They also found correspondences in vernacular culture.
One quiet but powerful object in Sur Moderno is a bowl-shaped bark basket by the Hiwi-Guahibo people, who live in the Orinoco basin of the Amazon; it is of a type that inspired the Venezuelan abstractionist Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt). Here MoMA is exploring similar territory to curator Zoe Ryan’s recent exhibition In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair at the Art Institute of Chicago, which looked at Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks and others who were working at the interface of the folk and the modern in mid-century Mexico. In fact, Hicks has a huge work upstairs in Surrounds – a majestic column of polychrome threads, which falls to the floor like an upside-down geyser– while Albers is central to another of the current temporary exhibitions, Take a Thread for a Walk, which reflects on MoMA’s early involvement in textiles.
That story began in the 1930s, when the museum was first developing its design programme. It all but ended in 1968, with an important show called Wall Hangings, which (despite its prosaic title) recorded the increasingly sculptural ambitions of the fibre art movement. After that, the door slammed shut – maybe weaving had got too close to fine art for the museum’s comfort? So MoMA’s decision to mount this new exhibition can be considered a rapprochement of sorts. Even the title seems to signal the curators’ willingness to pick up where their predecessors left off. The show could perhaps be criticised for overeagerness: it compresses several decades’ worth of material into a smallish space, and ranges from Albers and her Bauhaus peers, to commissioned tapestry (Le Corbusier again) to fully developed fibre art by the likes of Aurèlia Muñoz and Magdalena Abakanowicz. It’s a bit of a hectic dash through the medium’s possibilities – the show could easily be 10 times the size and cover similar ground. But you know what? I’ll take it. The curators are to be congratulated for giving a platform like this to a previously marginalised discipline.
“While Picasso, Corb and the rest of the boys still front the MoMA brand, the institution also contains all the constituent elements of today’s woke culture.”
— Glenn Adamson
As it happens, the quintessential artwork of the new MoMA is also woven: a newly commissioned tapestry by the Polish-born, UK-based artist Goshka Macuga. Titled Exhibition M, it is closely based on a 1954 photograph of André Malraux. In the original image, the famous arbiter of postwar French culture surveys hundreds of pictures, laid out for his inspection as he assembles one of his books. Macuga restages this with herself in the leading role, but replaces the photos with a personal pantheon from MoMA’s collection and archives. Pride of place goes to a Guerrilla Girls mask; Nan Goldin, Martha Rosler, Robert Mapplethorpe, Howardena Pindell, Elizabeth Catlett and many other activist, female and/or queer artists are also featured. It’s a powerful reminder that, while Picasso, Corb and the rest of the boys still front the MoMA brand, the institution also contains all the constituent elements of today’s woke culture.
Macuga’s choice of medium is terrifically smart. Tapestry was, historically, the most elite of art forms, available only to the aristocracy; and, of course, it is still expensive today, despite advances in Jacquard loom technology. So her use of it here, at a grand scale, alludes to MoMA’s own unavoidable, unassailable position as a fortress of culture. Yet the way Macuga has constructed the image – it was shot in her London studio and then enhanced by dropping digital versions of the depicted works into place – calls to mind the frictionless glide of an online image search, which is how most of MoMA’s enormous collection is accessed by the public today.
Macuga’s tapestry will reportedly stay on display for five years, but I can’t quite imagine the new building without it. Tara Keny, a curator who worked on the installation with the artist, remarked to me, somewhat offhandedly, that the work helped “avoid a bank-lobby experience”. She could not have been more right. Last time it expanded, in 2004, MoMA arrogated to itself an air of unquestioned, off-putting dominance. Now, though it’s even larger, it has lost that overconfidence. The museum is interrogating its own past, considering the broader implications of modernism, perhaps even asking where the institution itself has done more harm than good. These are the right questions, and they come not a moment too soon.
Words Glenn Adamson
Photos Courtesy of MoMA
This article was originally published in Disegno #25. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.