Category Archives: MoMA

Yoga Invades MoMA

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Pippilota Rist’s video and sound installation Pour Your Body Out at MoMA is a engrossing and delicious experience. Lights fill the white walls, and people lay back to watch the film with their shoes off. (The smell of feet is the only disquieting element.) This kind of exhibition could be enjoyed lounging, hungover, and–according to Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine–doing yoga.

To increase engagement with the installation, artist Cheryl Donegan arranged an impromptu yoga demo at MoMA that had museum goers doing triangle poses. If only I had been there! I second Donegin, that audience participation at the exhibition and at theanyspacewhatever exhibition at the Guggenhiem could have been greater, especially at the latter exhibition.

Museum goers are so used to feeling like an audiences that it can be hard to break out of that mold and touch the art and think about space playfully. Saltz describes the experience, in jealousy-inducing terms, thus:

On Friday night, I arrived to find the darkened atrium teeming with hundreds of people; Rist’s wonderful droning, chanting soundtrack filled the air with drowsy delirium, and her images of gigantic naked floating bodies, lush undergrowth, and water filled the walls. A few minutes before the appointed starting time, a dozen or so people, almost all women, shed their coats to reveal work-out clothes. At 7:00 p.m., the tall, fit, and charismatic Auder, outfitted in a gold-lamé leotard and striped leggings, announced that she was leading a free yoga class.

City People ala Giacommetti

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This small bronze by Alberto Giacommetti at MoMA has always enchanted me more than its small size and simple compisition seem to allow. I love how his contoured bronze people seem strong despite their unnatural slenderness and the sense of movement overall.

Entitled City Square (1948), for me it encapsulates how people walking by each other in the city, each absorbed in his own world and striding purposefully. This is probably true anywhere, but I associate the sculpture and the feeling with New York City.

Reflections of Mylar

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Here we have me, Iphone photo taker extraordinaire, taking photo of Josephine Meckseper’s photograph on view at MoMA, with reflection of other huge print on facing wall.

Call me conceited, but I think it does more justice to the size and quality of her work than the MoMA’s exhibition images. She prints on mylar, which gives a viewer/viewee quality in its reflections of dull images of consumerism from a typical 1970s German catalog. Her work seems a little dated to me, both in the images she choose (quite purposefully dated on that account) and in the themes of consumerism, societal construct, and advertising effects on how we view ourselves.

MoMA is showcasing her work along with another photographers as noteworthy of 2008. Ah how quickly we pick favorites from the old year and move in. And I’m not over 2007 yet.