On MoMA's top floor, the walls of one room are filled floor-to-ceiling with artwork (and though some smaller flat pieces are hung, most rest on a white platform raised just above the floor, leaning. They are more or less equalized as objects (not salon but studio style). "Shape” is what conducts Sillman's delightfully superficial curation (history and genre disregarded. Sillman imagines a transhistorical movement depending on neither biography nor oeuvre, just appearance). The selected work is freed: from placards, from history, from artists. The white platform suggests a stage on which actors sans roles perform a plotless play. I briefly believe this could be MoMA’s new identity, a locus for the free play of forms, lines, and their opaque ideas, for the condensation of art rather than hegemonic rhetoric. (Would MoMA let the artist die for the artwork to live?)
Elsewhere on the floor I move through the early section of the collection in its new "loosely chronological" arrangement. In one room is Edmondson (qualified by a placard bearing his mythic biography) and Traylor. In the next is Modigliani and Matisse. In another, a dozen Picassos envelope Ringgold’s Die and an especially wistful Bourgeois, whispering an apology. (Sorry, but no.)
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Hey Jennifer - You've done a terrific job of describing the space here. I appreciate the reference to Invisible cities, but I believe it might come a bit late in this post. Though your description provides a pleasant walkthrough of the space itself, perhaps describing more parallels between the space and "modern society" in the method Calvino's Marco Polo uses in Invisible cities could create a balance between the contemporary world the exhibit represents and the old world that is described so lusciously by Calvino. This way we could see exactly how you were informed of our modern world in Hasselknippe’s exhibit while maintaining some of the awestruck whimsy that makes your post such a pleasant read.
ReplyDeleteI can visually imagine myself walking through the space because of the thorough description you had provided us; well done. I do wish you would have gone in depth on the idea of how a work of art can take on life of its own; separating itself from the constraints of its history. Can a work of art truly be separated from what has come before it since as people we are constantly influenced by what is taking place before us, whether subconsciously or consciously. I also wonder if the MoMa is going to rebrand themselves and what that would entail.
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