Category Archives: MoMA

How to Destroy A Cocktail Party, or Create Change

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If I were to give you instructions on how to destroy a cocktail party at the Venice Biennial, I would give you a list like the Top 200 Artists and let the hourdes of opinionated art lovers devour each other. Why is Rauchenberg at number 13 compared to Francis Bacon’s number 12 spot?, etc. To offend even further, the artists at the party probably didn’t make the list! You then might smile oilily and ponder aloud why so few woman are on the list? Chaos would ensue.

If you wanted to stimulate such a phenoma online, look no futher than Jerry Salt’z Facebook page, where the art critic for New York Magazine post a short message to his friends questioning the scanty representation (4% !) of women in the permanent collection of pre-1970 art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Thousands of people responded on Facebook. Normally, discussion of top artists is mere cocktail party banter and the Guerilla Girls have seen their heyday, but in this case the social forum of Facebook took things one step further. Here is a discussion more like an online protest against MoMA.

The screen shot captures Jerry posting the following:

Your comments over the last 2 weeks have been truely amazing. MoMA gave its initial response. Next, I’m sending myself to Venice (yes, I pay my own way, D’oh!). Around June 17 we’ll re-engage & ask for a response from the Curator of the Perm. Coll. of P. & S. Ann Temkin. We won’t talk about the entire museum or new buildings. We will say it is time to install A LOT more work by women on 4 & 5 NOW, no matter what.

MoMA had noticed the thousands of comments on Saltz’s Facebook page and the outcry there was enough to galvanize an official response via Facebook!

MoMA had responded to Jerry, per the below, thus opening a dialogue:

Jerry Saltz (New York, NY) wrote on June 3, 2009 at 1:49pm

This is to all of you from MoMA (you all need to ask yourselfs if this is enough; we also have to ask how we also have to ask how many TOTAL works of art MoMA counted to arrive at its figure; and what gallereis were excluded):
Hi all, I am (Kim Mitchell) Chief Communications Officer here at MoMA. We have been following your lively discussion with great interest, as this has also been a topic of ongoing dialogue at MoMA. We welcome the participation and ideas of others in this important conversation.And yes, as Jerry knows, we do consider all the departmental galleries to represent the collection. When those spaces are factored in, there are more than 250 works by female artists on view now. Some new initiatives already under way will delve into this topic next year with the Modern Women’s Project, which will involve installations in all the collection galleries, a major publication, and a number of public programs. MoMA has a great willingness to think deeply about these issues and address them over time and to the extent that we can through our collection and the curatorial process. We hope you’ll follow these events as they develop and keep the conversation going.

To which Jerry adds:

Jerry Saltz (New York, NY) wrote on June 3, 2009 at 2:01pm

A note to all of you: Now is NOT the time to “get tired” or back off. You all have MoMA on the line, right here, right now! Even if you contributed to previous conversations, you owe it to yourselves to say something HERE. Keep it SHORT, direct, and respectful. Artists, this is your chance. Even those of you just ‘listening in… Read More.’ Now is the time. I promisde you MoMA will not PUNISH you (if they do, tell me); it will RESPECT you for speaking up. All 4900 of you need to STEP UP NOW, otherwise …

So a comments section on a Facebook page has gotten the attention of MoMA, and opened a dialogue. This strange public campaign headed by Jerry Saltz, art critic by day, Knight-on-Charging-White-Steed by night, is going to discuss including more works by female artists in the permanent collection and is now trying to plan a letter. God help them, the thousands of them trying to decide on what exactly to say, which sounds near impossible, and, to be cynical, I would be shocked if MoMA actually did anything but talk with them.

Still it is an amazing use of social media as its most vocal, and it is amazing to think what is often idle, angry talk could generate something positive. I hope something comes of it. And all this from the man who doesn’t have a blog because it would be too much work…

The Good, the Idiotic and the Brilliant: Stars Like Fleas at MoMA Monday Nights

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Museums really do try not to be stuffy, quiet libraries of art. Point in case, MoMA Monday night events. Yesterday, it included an excellent Brooklyn band, Stars Like Fleas, which sounded a bit like Radiohead and a bit like a college friend’s experimental rock band. While it was a lovely evening to wander about the sculpture garden, or, oh, I don’t know, look at some art, I was glued to the lobby. As you can seen from the pictures, I was hardly alone. That’s the good.

What’s the idiotic? Me, taking photos on my Iphone. Yes, I did get a lovely, HD Flip video camera for my birthday which would have beautifully conveyed the atmosphere and great music. But I left it at home. Why yes, I do have a handy digital camera that also shoots video as well as much better pictures than these. I left that at home too. I hadn’t planned on going to MoMA; I just felt like popping in.

Which leads me to the brilliant: museum memberships. I have one at MoMA, and I walked into the concert last night without a ticket. That’s awesome in itself. Plus I work within walking distance of MoMA, so I can pop in on my lunch break or after work without paying $20. I just walk past the ticket lines. The way I visit MoMA, I figure it has paid for itself 5X over. And did I mention you also get free movie passes to any of their screenings?

I’m starting to sound like a salesman, so I’m going to stop.

L

The Writing on the Wall: Tangled Alphabets and Words

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Leon Ferrari, left, and Mira Schendel, right

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a picture containing words has worth to the nth power. The special exhibition up at MoMA now, Tangled Alphabets, examines the works of two artists who explore words extensively in their works, and it got me thinking about how words have been used in art. Writing on an artwork exists traditionally as a signature or a date, or perhaps an inscription such as ‘Marcus me fecit.’

Tangled Alphabets focuses on the work of South American painters León Ferrari and Mira Schendel. The show says that the artists “produced their works in the neighboring countries of Argentina and Brazil throughout the 1960s and 1980s, when the question of language was particularly central to Western culture due to the central role taken by post-structuralism, semiotics, and the philosophy of language.“

Franz Kline, left, and Cy Twombly, right.

Since the 1950s however, writing has come into prominence in the visual arts. Surrealism, and the automatic writing it inspired (where the author writes from his or her unconscious) combined with an interest in the East, led to the prominence of the written word in Abstract Expressionist works. And, at least according to the critic Harold Rosenberg, the action painting popular at the time allowed the psyche assert or express itself, similar to the process of automatic writing.

From Wikipedia we have it that “automatic writing was an important vehicle for action painters Franz Kline in his black and white paintings, Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey and Cy Twombly who used gesture, surface, and line to create calligraphic, linear symbols and skeins that resemble language, and resonate as powerful manifestations from the collective unconscious.” In the hands of artists like Kline or Twombly, writing becomes a lush visual element. (Kline denied that it was in fact calligraphy; Twombly’s graffiti-like scrawls are legible.)

Andy Warhol, left, and Roy Lichtenstein, right.

Of course, pop art took words in another direction, as they exploited comic books (Roy Lichtenstein) or packaging (Warhol) In these works, the words are an intrinsic part of the image being reappropriated. In the reuse of printed materials, like some of Robert Raucheneberg’s collages, words become part of the material itself.

For a contemporary approach to automatic writing, look no further than MoMA’s recent acquisition. This untitled work, above, by British artist Jack Strange features a lead ball pressing down the g key indefinitely. (I was born the same year as the artist, 1984, and feel like I desperately need to catch up with someone who already has 2 works at MoMA!)

Words are conceptual and tied to a specific meaning, while the visual arts are just that, visual, visceral and more fluid in meaning. The combination of words and images makes your mind work overtime. Having to read something uses a different part of the brain that looking at something, and sometimes words seem too explicit. On the other hand, they certainly pack a punch.