BOIS, Yve-Alain - The New MoMA

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Ttulo: The new MoMA

Autor(es): Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchlon, Cynthia Davidson and Mark Wigley
Fonte: Artforum International. 43.6 (Feb. 2005): p130.
Tipo de documento: Article
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
Texto completo:
SINCE ITS FOUNDING IN 1929, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART IN NEW YORK HAS BEEN A BEACON OF MODERNISM, ACTING AS A SINGULAR advocate and home for some
of the most significant works of art made over the last 125 years. Although scores of museums devoted to modern and contemporary art have sprung up around the world, for many of us MOMA
will always be the Museum of Modern Art, indisputably worthy of the definite article preceding its name. But with this pre-eminence comes a heightened level of scrutiny, and one of MOMA's
most important functions--along with the presentation of its incomparable collection and the promotion of scholarship--has always been to catalyze and encourage vigorous critical debate, both
within its walls and without. And, of course, the reopening of the expanded museum on its seventy-fifth anniversary inherently provides an important opportunity to reflect on such issues as
museum architecture and patronage, the legacy of MOMA's former curators, and the very way in which the story of modern art is told. For this occasion, Artforum asked four writers--architectural
critics MARK WIGLEY and CYNTHIA DAVIDSON and art historians YVE-ALAIN BOIS and BENJAMIN H.D. BUCHLOH--to consider architect Yoshio Taniguchi's physical reinvention of
the museum and the curators' reinstallation of its permanent collection, which together constitute one of the most important museum events of the decade. To complement their takes, the magazine
also invited photographers TODD EBERLE and LOUISE LAWLER to offer their own perspectives on the museum and its renewed place in our cultural landscape.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
THE 425 MILLION STEPS FROM INTIMACY TO ELEGANCE
AFTER A DECADE OF PLANNING, AN ENDLESS STREAM of symposia, surveys, retreats, reports, competitions, publications, exhibitions, reconnaissance missions, and negotiations,
enormous investment, and three and a half years of construction, the new MOMA is open. An old friend has returned from the spa--refreshed.
As with any extreme makeover involving reconstructive surgery, daring implants, and advanced skin treatment, there is no point in extravagant celebration, even less in criticism. To complain that
the resultant building is attractive but tame, that the architecture has been domesticated, neutralized, just as the artworks it houses have had their social and intellectual edge removed to be enlisted
for a singular global mission, is as pointless as accusing a church of preaching. MOMA is devoted to a particular form of education and does not pretend otherwise. With unmatched expertise, it
dedicates itself to carefully training its visitors, endlessly editing the objects it shows and the story it tells about them. Any increase in exhibition space only serves to widen the field being edited
and thereby intensify the sense of reduction, the curated narrowing and focusing of the view. No matter how big the building gets--and it would be foolish to imagine that this latest expansion is
anywhere near the end--the MOMA project is a minimalist one aimed at a maximum global audience. With the new building, the issue is therefore not the usual one in museum design of whether
the architecture competes with the artworks, but rather how the building contributes to the narrative that the curators wish to convey. The only artwork that really matters here is the institution
itself.
If you look at the extended history of any of the pieces in the collection--from the scene of their original production to their first exhibition, from their first sale to a collector until their final
acquisition by MOMA--it becomes readily apparent that they can survive almost any building. It is one of the most unconvincing vanities of the present to imagine that the art of the recent past is
so vulnerable that its power can only be experienced in the sterile atmosphere of a hospital ward. What is fragile are the stories we tell about the objects--and the role of buildings in the
storytelling. The museum was understandably cautious, even afraid, and went to unprecedented lengths to avoid summoning the force that our best buildings can generate.
If the new architecture is to play a key role in the training of the visitor, acting as a reliable guide in the designed experience of this remarkable collection, we must first be trained how to
experience the building itself. Our apprenticeship begins the moment we enter the lobby, where the ticket counter offers the ubiquitous Visitor Guide in six languages. The cover of the folded,
single-page brochure bears an image destined to be the most reproduced of all--an image to be carried from gallery to gallery and beyond by more than two million visitors a year. Before we can be
trusted to look at anything, we are asked to look at this one photograph.
The black-and-white image positions us halfway up and to one side of a big space, without giving any clear sense of its scale. A bridge with glass parapets passes overhead and disappears through
the top of a vertical slot in the white wall suspended opposite us. Through the lower part of the slot, we can see the zigzag of a white stair presumably linking floors we cannot see. High above,
narrow slits in the white ceiling cast a series of parallel diagonal lines of light across one side of the wall: white on white. Below us, a dark floor passes underneath the floating wall and disappears
around a shadowy corner. The big white wall is abstractly tattooed by the lines of light, but there is no art or person on show. This must be the face of the new museum, and the collection we want
to see must be behind it.
On opening our guide at its prominent question mark to learn more, a single short paragraph in bold welcomes us and identifies the role of the architecture we will encounter, ending with the
words, "The renovated and expanded Museum was designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, whose uniquely elegant design enhances the presentation of the Museum's dynamic collection of modern and
contemporary art." The completely different ambitions for the building and the art it exhibits could not be more clearly stated: The art is "dynamic," the building "elegant." The architecture is
unlike the objects it houses, subservient to them, with its elegance somehow enhancing the experience of their dynamism. The adjective for the art is no surprise. It is hard to think of twentiethcentury art, of modernity itself, outside a sense of dynamism. Yet it is equally hard to imagine many, if any, of the artists in the museum's collection of 150,000 objects aspiring to have their work
summarized with the label "elegant," a word irreducibly associated with the very world their art is seen as modern for challenging and outdating.
The use of the word is no accident, of course. It is precisely the point. In a 1997 announcement, Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the museum, explained that Taniguchi had been chosen ahead of
the other candidates because his designs "combined an elegance and clarity of conception with a sensitivity to light and space." The word reappears in the official press release for the museum's
reopening and in the description of the architect's work on MOMA's website. Even Modern Kids: The New Building, the children's version of our guide, tries to introduce the word to the very
youngest visitors. The brochure begins by explaining who the architect is and his role before suggesting that each junior-apprentice art lover go to the fourth-floor balcony, a vantage close to that
of the official photograph, and choose which words best describe what is seen. Only one of the fifteen words offered, the one placed top and center, is unlikely to be part of any child's vocabulary:
"elegant." The first lesson in architecture, then. Critics around the world learned quickly, and faithfully repeated the magic word while singing the praises of the new architecture in virtually every
publication. Veterans like Paul Goldberger and Ada Louise Huxtable (or at least their savvy editors) knew to work it into their headlines, with "Yoshio Taniguchi's Elegant Expansion of the
Modern" in the New Yorker and "In MOMA's Big, New, Elegantly Understated Home" in the Wall Street Journal. By contrast, the word often used by the institution and critics alike to describe
what was valued so much in the old museum is "intimacy," a quality engendered by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone's 1939 building, which successfully maintained the domestic scale of
the museum's original townhouse on the site donated by the Rockefeller family. With the loss of the domestic intimacy that sheltered the visitor's personal encounter with singular artworks and the
arrival of vast spaces filled with drifting crowds and substantially more works of art, the cultivated elegance of the original patrons must now be absorbed by the building itself. It is the refinement
of the building, not the configuration of spaces it offers, that provides the needed sense of "home."
Despite this commissioned reticence, the discreet charm of saying as little as possible, the new complex does have strong qualities. The single entrance lobby straddling Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth
streets, the lively restoration of the 1939 building, the refreshing of Philip Johnson's 1953 sculpture garden, the puncturing of holes in many walls to offer vignettes of the city or other parts of the
museum, the galleries' calibrated range of scale, and the reverse chronology of the main galleries as the visitor ascends are all convincing. The promenades along the edges of spaces, the sense that
everything is a kind of threshold, is pleasurable, and almost all the spaces where the visitor finally stops moving--the cafes and shops where the building itself is savored along with the food and
purchases--are wisely given the best locations; different architects (Bentel and Bentel for the eating and Richard Gluckman for the shopping) have sensuously refined the settings. The museum has
taken a quantum leap forward.
Yet it all adds up to so much less than the strategy promises--less than even the "more of less" doctrine calls for. The potential strength of the scheme is to oppose two large open spaces, the
horizontal volume formed by the 252-foot-long sculpture garden and the vertical volume of the 110-foot-tall atrium space featured on the Visitor Guide. Floating apart and off axis from each other,
but close enough to generate a rich play between them, these outer and inner voids promise to unite the whole complex of diverse structures from different eras that now occupies the majority of a
midtown block. The garden is an unambiguous success, building on Johnson's celebrated design to establish an atmosphere that is good for the art and for the visitor--a pleasure to look at from the
spaces that border it on three sides and a pleasure to look out from, whether to those spaces or to the surrounding city. In contrast, the atrium is good neither for art nor people. While supposedly
"the defining feature" of the new design, its form is unclear because there is too much pushing and pulling to its vertical and horizontal limits, as if it has to absorb a range of pressures, when in
truth it is freshly constructed on the only freed-up part of the site and could easily operate, like the garden, as an oasis from the urban and exhibition density surrounding it. To savor the holes that
puncture its sides, offering framed glimpses of movement beyond, is to welcome relief from an indeterminate blandness that is a remarkable achievement, given the scale of the space. The vast
void is meant to unify the project and offer a sense of orientation, yet it obscures so much more than it clarifies. A simple concept gives way to a stilted choreography of awkward and confusing
movements.
The disenchantment is only intensified by the fact that our experience of the building starts off so well. Having picked up the guide and deposited our coat in the cloakroom off the lobby, we turn
to face the garden through a delicately gridded wall of clear glass. While pocketing the coat check tag, we can shift our gaze from the horizontal volume ahead to the vertical one above, looking
directly up through the one narrow slot of unblocked space that passes all the way up from the lobby to the ceiling of the atrium six tall floors above. The bridge depicted on our guide jumps across
the gap far above us. To reach it, we first have to move toward the garden, entering a transitional space whose features seem to be mirrored on the face of the new Education and Research building
at the far end of the garden. The shimmering white face of the 1939 structure stretches down the right side of the open space, and the city rises up behind the garden wall on the left. A simple,
movable rope line (where our member's card is electronically scanned) marks the initial moment of entrance--so much more welcoming than the old building's narrow border-crossing stations. We
step forward with anticipation.
A second, even more subtle sense of entrance is established by a set of four steps that approach the glass wall, where we are offered the choice of turning to the left corner of the glass, to pass
informally out into the garden, or turning to the right corner, to head up the formal stairway attached to the black side wall. The steps are precisely aligned with the tallest slice of vertical space,
and the eye is aimed at the elusive bridge above as we ascend. Arriving at the top of the stairs, we are suspended for a moment on an edge overlooking the lobby we just came from. The full
dimension of the vertical volume is immediately in front of us, and the full dimension of the horizontal volume of the garden immediately behind.
It is while poised here that, for the first time, we see all of the floating white wall featured in our guiding image, the blank facade that we correctly suspected marks the presence of the major
galleries, but we are still looking at it from a lower point of view. To get to the heart of the new MOMA, we will need to climb higher. But no more steps are offered. The floor simply stretches out
beneath us toward that mysterious opening in the bottom left of our image, while an odd-looking path heads off to the immediate left and a small bookstore is suspended over the Fifty-fourth Street
entrance to our right. Unfolding our trusty guide to figure it out, we are presented with a stack of poorly drawn floors. Axonometric plans without walls are of no help with a project that is all about
wall planes and volumes. Even the atrium we stand in cannot easily be read in the drawings. Nevertheless, a beige block of color lets us know that the opening on the other side is the smaller of
two ways to enter the "expansive" Contemporary Galleries. On the way there, we pass some big works, like Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, 1963-69, and Monet's Water Lilies, ca. 1920,
suffering from exposure in the great white void, but a new brochure awaits us at the larger entrance on the right to guide us through the landscape of art since 1970.
What if we want to go higher first? Or directly to Prints and Illustrated Books or to the Media Gallery on the same floor? We would have go along the passage behind one face of the atrium,
finding a set of escalators and two elevators hidden around a corner with the bathrooms, like a necessary but unfortunate embarrassment. In an overreaction to the disdain with which the central
escalators in Cesar Pelli's 1984 expansion were held for their association with shopping malls, most of the escalators are now buried underneath Pelli's residential tower. Only when the first of the
tower's apartment floors forces the escalator between the fifth and sixth floors of the museum to turn at a right angle and emerge across the face of the atrium does the simultaneously horizontal
and vertical gesture of the moving steps take advantage of the hinge between the garden and atrium volumes. The visitor literally glides into a spectacular view on both sides, rising up over the
huge portico that holds the garden in place to meet the atrium's skylight. More crudely dynamic than elegant, this one diagonal accent in the whole complex, the very means by which we finally
arrive at our bridge across the void, is strangely omitted from the architect's richly detailed digital renderings of the project displayed in the exhibition of his work on the second floor and featured
in the museum's new book on the project's design sold right there as we step off the phantom escalator--as if such a crucial decision was regretted. This disavowal through continued celebration of
an earlier version of the project is symptomatic of a concerted effort throughout to minimize the perception of vertical movement in favor of the horizontal.
The escalator and elevators had already been veiled from view on the ground floor behind the sides of the formal entry approach toward the garden, with the steps presented to us as the superior
way to ascend the grand narrative, as it surely is. Yet the whole building provides only three disconnected sets of stairs. The beloved, newly reconstructed suspended stair in the 1939 building links
the smaller-scale exhibition spaces of the second and third floors, stitching the Prints and Illustrated Books Galleries and Media Gallery below to the sequence of Architecture and Design.
Drawings, Photography, and Special Exhibitions above. Its new cantilevered echo--the staircase revealed in the slot in the atrium wall--links the 1940-70 works on the fourth floor to the 1880-1940
works on the fifth. The wide horizontal separation of these sculptural stairs encourages a rich range of vertical movements through the building, but only the embarrassing ready-made escalators
offer access to and from the heart of the museum collection on the fourth and fifth floors, as if the institution is uncertain about the addition of the vast spaces for Contemporary below and
Temporary above.
There is reason to be uncertain. The medium-scaled spaces on the fourth and fifth floors successfully update the museum's traditional strategy, with three different openings to most rooms offering
a multiplicity of trajectories between the accumulated treasures, even though the relentless preservation of the single hanging level effectively counters that new freedom. Horizontal dynamism is
again tamed by vertical restraint. In contrast, the huge spaces above and below the middle gallery floors serve only to highlight the museum's greatest weaknesses of collection, exhibition, and
explanation. On the Contemporary floor, the artificial segregation of video art in a smaller-scaled gallery threatens the basic understanding of the other work in a multimedia electronic age, and the
temporary-exhibition space on the sixth-floor is just a gaping question mark, a hotel ballroom barely occupied (if only for the museum's opening) by the sixty-five feet of Ellsworth Kelly's
Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1959, and the eighty-six feet of James Rosenquist's F-111, 1964-65--the dimensions of the artworks, like those of the building, having become their central feature. For
now, the twenty-plus-foot-high gallery volumes work against the museum. The institution will no doubt reconfigure them and eventually develop new forms of understanding and expertise in this
area, learning many lessons from the newer work, with the temporary-exhibition floor perhaps acting as a place to test emergent curatorial thinking without regard to media or period. It will always
be a complicated relationship, since so much contemporary art is produced in pointed reaction to MOMA's canonical view of prewar (largely Eurocentric) and postwar (largely American) art. Yet
it will not be long before a new generation of bright minds in the museum takes advantage of the complications to develop new forms of storytelling.
Meanwhile, the smaller-scaled galleries on the second and third floors are a compliment to the architect and the respective curators. Each room is a distinct pleasure. In my own field, Terence
Riley, Paola Antonelli, and Peter Reed have chosen thoughtfully for the Architecture and Design spaces, with a refreshing presence of models of innovative buildings by architects like Toyo Ito
and William E. Massie situated within the open display of industrial-design objects rather than confined to the closed gallery. The looser design landscape overlooking the sculpture garden has
something of the feel of a tropical garden, with its series of differently shaped beds overflowing with a diverse array of species. It offers an energetically different model of density and fluidity to
the rest of the museum.
The quality of these displays only highlights the fact that the new design of MOMA would not itself normally be collected by the museum. Of course, it is too much to expect any project to shine
alongside the best architecture and design of the last seventy-five years, but the decision not even to try remains a disappointment. This is not to doubt the great success that the freshly made-over
museum will enjoy or to question the thoughtfulness of the trustees and the curators--if anything, there may have been too much self-reflection. It is just to point out that the chosen game of
discretion could have been played much better and that this game is anyway not so discreet in the end. All architecture intrudes, must intrude, and, despite its advertised politeness, the rebuilt
museum is no exception. The real issue is which forms of intrusion are seen to enhance the particular story being told and which ones allow that story to evolve.
It was the 1939 building that established the international reign of the ubiquitous white wall, replacing Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s preferred wall covering of beige monk's cloth. The slide of our sense of
neutrality from beige to white, which was facilitated by removing color from the whole building, was a more radical move than any geometric complication or refinement conjured up by the most
gifted designer. Taniguchi adds some nuances to this strategy while being careful to keep the end result the same. One of his unheralded achievements is to have built the whole new complex as a
black-and-white photograph, with the single row of red chairs in the restaurant (chosen by a different architect) coming as a complete shock. In a color image, only the sky, trees, visitors, products,
food, art, and exit signs would look different. Our guiding image of a punctured white wall might be in color after all.
On the two street facades, the architect skillfully confuses the effect of polished stone and glass to present a unified composition of black, white, and gray planes with accents in aluminum. The
interior palette systematically blurs these tones, steadily working through every possible combination in between, starting with the green-gray stone with light and dark streaks in the new lobby
floor and the black stone with white flecks in the old one. Each spatial transition is sensitively modulated by a slight shift in the balance. But the black surfaces quickly recede as one heads deeper
inside, leaving the main dialogue between whites and grays, with a single white soon emerging as the clear winner. The white-coated atrium has a dark floor and the Contemporary Gallery a light
gray floor with white flecks, while the smaller galleries are allowed the occasional gray carpet or wall; but the generic gallery floor is white oak and the walls of all the major galleries are white.
Except in the Media Gallery, every ceiling, even the skylight of the atrium, is white. It is as if the mission of the new design was not to increase exhibition space but to increase the amount of white
surface. Even one of the inner walls of the "black box" for video works is white, and some of the glass itself contains fine horizontal strips of white ceramic. The craft of the architect is to soften or
veil the ultimate imposition of white. The purpose of all the nuanced transitions is to have the color and diversity of the outside world steadily but almost imperceptibly give way to a uniformity of
white, so that the diversity of the work itself should dominate--or so the story goes.
The dark grooves cut into the white for light fittings, for moving walls, at the base of every wall, and at every joint between ceiling and wall hint at a hidden technical condition of the white surface
that seems to be confirmed when one of the grooves comes all the way down the edge of an atrium wall and a strip of aluminum glimmers inside the darkness. On the fourth and fifth floors, each
deep opening between galleries is lined with aluminum, with a small gap between the metal and the white surface, as if the display wall itself has a technological heart, its thin surface suspended
on a hidden metal core. Yet technology is basically hidden throughout the building, starting with the veiling of all the structural ingenuity provided by Guy Nordenson. Mechanical systems like
escalators, elevators, and bathrooms are carefully wrapped. The sides of elevators, escalators, steps, and bridges, or any exposed floor edges, are covered in a matte-finished, whitish-gray
aluminum, with shiny aluminum or stainless steel marking the rare points where technological systems almost surface: air-conditioning grills, sliding doors, bathroom fittings, recessed lighting in
the ceiling, elevator buttons, and so on. Yet only the white light fixtures, a few video projectors, the audio guides, the moving stairs, and the bathroom fixtures are visible in the end. This illusion of
emptiness requires a massive effort. The museum's vast technical infrastructure of transportation, storage, conservation, security, archiving, administration, accounting, and marketing has to be
hidden so that the rooms can seem empty of everything but art. This is no different than the way that an extensive hidden infrastructure allows any family to sit down to have a quiet meal in their
apartment, but it has its effect. The apparent absence of moves, the endless discretion of the architectural servant, is dominant in the end, and actually places a great pressure on the artwork. The
endless horizon of white constrains the work it supposedly liberates.
Quiet architecture gets in the way. And this is precisely the lesson offered by contemporary art. From the first work we encounter on entering the Contemporary floor, by Gordon Matta-Clark, and
on up through each level, so much of the famous collection is actually about architecture. Not just in the most literal cases of the more recently collected works by Matta-Clark, Rachel Whiteread,
and Robert Smithson, but in the works of every medium and period. Can so-called modern art and whatever came after be thought of outside the condition of the city? The famous collection is a
collection of reflections on space. The call for a tame architecture actually makes it harder to appreciate the collection for what it is. Take Rosenquist's F-111, flying along one enormous wall in the
highest gallery. The work was violated by the blank volume. It is precisely not a painting. It is a room. The work originally lined all the walls of Leo Castelli's gallery in 1965, creating a new sense
of space, and Rosenquist insisted that all his work was concerned with space, not image; that the images were but a tool, a means of engaging space. Something similar can be said of so much of
what is on exhibit in the museum.
The real design question is not how to suspend insulated images in a monolithic space and efficiently choreograph the visitors' movements between them, but how to support a cosmopolitan urban
dialogue between diverse concepts of space, a multilevel conversation in which the building itself will always be active. All the talk of architecture not intruding on the art is nonsense, given the
violent acts of unfolding the Rosenquist, putting Barnett Newman's sculpture indoors, and displaying Donald Judd's Untitled, 1989, on the diagonal. It is obviously the curators' work that is not to
be intruded on. Every curatorial act, from the smallest label to the most extreme repositioning, radically changes the works it presents, transforming the way we see things--and so it should. This is
itself an art, the real art of the museum. Yet architects are meant to lower their sights and withdraw, like the artists before them. Since exhibition is itself a form of architecture, the curator and the
architect are rivals, but the tension should be productive. Curators are understandably annoyed when prodded into new modes by a building, but that is architecture's role. An architecture that
serves only the current wishes and the predictions of the best minds in the museum is unable to help the curatorial breakthroughs of the future. The best architects not only satisfy their clients'
desires but stimulate new desires. Potentials emerge in the collaboration that surprise and intrigue both sides, and further surprises happen in the building itself.
No amount of detailed planning, none of the admirably self-reflective thoughtfulness by the museum about its unique mission and the inevitable changes that will define its future, could more fully
embrace that future than taking the risk of a strong work of architecture. While savoring the return of this wonderful collection and expressing our appreciation to the museum, this is not a moment
to celebrate architecture for its capacity to maintain subservient yet elegant good manners. Like the best art, the best buildings make us hesitate, disturbing our routines so that we see, think, and
feel in ways we simply could
not have imagined before. Architecture itself should be an education.

MARK WIGLEY
Mark Wigley is Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York. (See Contributors.)
CYNTHIA DAVIDSON: ON THE MODERN AND ARCHITECTURE
SEVEN YEARS AGO, WHEN YOSHIO TANIGUCHI was named winner of the MOMA architectural design competition, the museum rejected the more dynamic and experimental forms
proposed by Herzog & de Meuron and Bernard Tschumi (having rejected Rem Koolhaas's daring proposal at an earlier stage). In choosing Taniguchi, MOMA not only appeared to take sides in the
current debate on architectural form, it also seemed to turn its back on the very ideology of the modern that was its founding core. The popular and critical success of recent museum projects by
Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Daniel Libeskind can arguably be traced back to MOMA's 1988 "Deconstructivist Architecture" exhibition, which shut the door on the historical pastiche of
postmodernism and opened the way to irregular, if not expressionist, forms. Taniguchi rejects architectural expressionism, but only to offer a seamless continuity with MOMA's past, suggesting
that the museum, for all of its progressive ambitions, is today locked inside its own history, unable to escape the corporate modernism that Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock begat with
the museum's "International Style" exhibition in 1932. That show, "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition," all but eliminated the political ideology of the Left, a tenet of modern
architecture that was beginning to be abandoned.
Few museums have the kind of influence in modern and contemporary art that MOMA has attained, but its new building is not likely to enhance its influence in contemporary architecture. In
hindsight, the timing of MOMA's "Light Construction" show in 1995--which featured new ideas about surfaces, translucency, and transparency--seems to have predestined the museum we see
today. Taniguchi's work was not included in the exhibition, but the current show of nine of his museum designs raises several questions: Is this MOMA's way of promoting its architect (arguably a
fair thing to do), or is it suggesting that this is some of the best work occurring in architecture today (the standard held up for its exhibitions)? How are we to reconcile MOMA's new building with
the museum's ambitions in its Department of Architecture and Design, most recently manifested in the "Tall Buildings" show at MOMA QNS?
A new Architecture and Design brochure available in the galleries rattles off numbers: 1,900 architectural models, drawings, and fragments; 3,600 objects in the design collection; over 4,300
examples of graphic design. (There are also 18,000 drawings by Mies van der Rohe, most of which will never be seen by the museum-going public.) The numbers reveal the innate difficulty of
collecting and exhibiting a volumetric, material art, and the new building does nothing to make it easier. Though the Architecture and Design Galleries are together 25 percent larger than in the old
building, this is difficult to see in the architecture gallery, which seems simply to gain some wall space by inserting a T-shaped partition in an otherwise square room. Carving up the space for the
sake of a few walls essentially precludes the representation of architecture at any scale other than fragmentary, as drawings and models that are not ends in themselves but extracted from a process.
Realized full-scale architectural fragments from the collection are combined with design objects in the escalator lobby to the galleries, with all the effect of a department-store display on the
furniture floor.
Ironically, the pieces that exhibit the most radical and critical ideas in architecture are found in the Contemporary Galleries, where there is space to exhibit large work. The text, drawings, and
collages that constitute Koolhaas's 1972 project "Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture," done in collaboration with Madelon Vriesendorp and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis, stretch across
an entire wall, hung opposite the projection of Joan Jonas's film Songdelay, 1973. Together, the two pieces conjure an image of the city and its walls that touches on architecture's power. Gordon
Matta-Clark's Bingo, three pieces from a house he sawed apart in 1974, exposes the thinness of the wall and facade to which we attach such significance when they enclose a volume called home.
This work leads directly to Rachel Whiteread's Untitled (Room), a 1993 plaster cast of a "featureless room" that illustrates the architectural idea of the void as an inaccessible solid.
By comparison, the new acquisitions in the architecture gallery include Lebbeus Woods's six-piece Terrain Project, 1998-2000, a musing on space using drawing, writing, and collage; UN Studio's
wire model of its built Moebius House, 1998-99; Preston Scott Cohen's 1999-2002 Torus House model; and Lauretta Vinciarelli's Orange Sound Project, 1998. A wail text explains that
architecture's recent investigations "challenge the rational clarity and perfect totalities of Euclidean geometry, producing works of disconcerting fragmentation but also delirious beauty." Physical
evidence of this, however, is minimal, and the new MOMA itself sends a different message. There is a difference between showing a model that is an idea and showing a model of a building, just
as architectural ideas are not necessarily found in models of function or circulation. In the museum, it is not important to show architecture that works but to exhibit drawings and models of
architectural ideas. The building is here to stay, but the exhibition of architecture can and should work to overcome it.
Cynthia Davidson is editor of Log, a journal on architecture and the city, based in New York.
EMBARRASSING RICHES
I HAD BEEN WARNED. FRIENDS OF ALL PERSUASIONS had told me that even if I did not find MOMA's new architecture offensive, I would certainly object to the reinstallation of the
collection. They mentioned troubling details as supporting evidence: Matisse's Dance (I), 1909, in a staircase; David Smith's Australia, 1951, pushed against a wall at the foot of an escalator; the
dire and (by comparison) tiny space devoted to Conceptual art; Ellsworth Kelly's Colors for a Large Wall of 1951 placed next to a generic late-'50s Hans Hofmann with colored rectangles; a large
multicolored Judd floor piece thrusting diagonally across a room--even though the artist, to my knowledge, always presented his work on the orthogonal--and thereby squeezing another Kelly, this
one a delicate white relief, on a wall busy with doors and other visual disturbances, etc., etc. Schadenfreude not being my thing, I was in no rush to inspect the disaster, especially after months of
robotic praise from the New York Times. But after I finally paid the new MOMA an extended visit, I was left wondering, What's all the fuss about? Even after experiencing the blunders mentioned
by my friends, why did I feel so numb, so devoid of passion, that I couldn't muster any anger? The answer, in the end, may have to do with the difference between the courageously bad and the
commercially bland.
Let's start with the architecture: It's very tasteful, minimalist-chic. The detailing is as discreet as possible; the lighting generally excellent; the circulation not too coercive--three tremendous
improvements over MOMA's previous incarnation. Yoshio Taniguchi is rightly celebrated for the intelligent manner in which he managed to circumnavigate, without ignoring, the hideous Cesar
Pelli tower (in the museum's entrance lobby, it becomes an entropic black box) in order to link his new wing (baptized the David and Peggy Rockefeller Building) with the old Philip Johnson and
Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone buildings (both entirely gut renovated, they now form the Ronald S. and Jo Carole Lauder Building). Taniguchi has also been deservedly commended for the
numerous vistas he has cut onto the cityscape: Like the ha-has in a picturesque garden, they winningly punctuate the otherwise utterly predictable race through the galleries with welcome blips of
surprise.
True, there are a few senseless features, starting with the colossal Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, a pure sumptuary expenditure, the sole practical function of which must be to host
fund-raising events. But even it manages to look relatively subdued: One sees none of the vulgar brass or polished marble usually found in spaces of this kind in luxury hotels and corporate lobbies
around the world. It should be said, however, that this hotel-lobby model does impinge on canvases by Monet, Brice Marden, and Agnes Martin, all of which look lost in the vastness like homeless
decor tacked behind a busy front desk. As for Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, 1963-69, it survives only if you avoid looking at it from above, which you are invited to do from the multiple
apertures and gangways that Taniguchi generously provided over his central void (a view that effectively undermines the great pains Newman took to invert his Obelisk in the first place). Another
odd waste of space is the considerable volume rendered basically useless by an enormous ceremonial staircase connecting only the fourth and fifth floors, which are devoted to the historic,
pre-1970 collection. The staircase seems designed mostly for photographs and views from below, since it connects two installations at midcourse and is therefore little used (a fact that seems
doubly perplexing, given that the escalators, which are used, enjoy no such dazzling views). Despite its size, this interstitial space can only accommodate a few works on its two landings--the upper
one, rather optimistically labeled the Riklis/Lindner Gallery, is home to Brancusi's Fish, 1930, which faces Matisse's Dance (I), hovering unapproachably over the stairs; the lower one, dubbed the
Emily and Jerry Spiegel Gallery, houses two Diebenkorns and a Milton Avery seascape, as if to suggest that the effect of Matisse's chromatic innovations on American art was pretty inoffensive
after all. (I have heard the awkward hanging of Dance (I) defended on the grounds that this is how it would have been installed in the stairwell of the Russian collector Sergei Schukin's Moscow
palace. But this is a convoluted argument, since this particular painting was never destined for Schukin, who only commissioned two panels for his grand staircase after seeing it in Matisse's studio,
and it should be noted that Matisse deliberately intensified the colors when he worked on the second version of his bacchanal, in order to counter its inevitable toning down once inserted in
Schukin's pompous architectural setting.)
Waste is not confined to these ambulatory spaces but pervades the museum as a whole (with the notable exception of the third-floor galleries devoted to drawing, photography, and architecture and
design, where lower ceilings and more intimate proportions feel soothing after the exhausting giganticism of the other floors). The sixth floor's hangarlike space, usually reserved for temporary
exhibitions, was empty when I saw it, but my guess is that it will have a dwarfing effect on whatever art is displayed there. MOMA's curators may have been wary of this, hanging for the opening
two of the largest works in the collection, Kelly's enormous Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957, and James Rosenquist's famous yet rarely exhibited F-111, 1964-65. I wish I had seen this installation
so as to test my intuition that the Kelly could easily withstand the scale of the room, since it was conceived for a large corporate lobby, while the Rosenquist--meant to exceed our visual field and
shown in the past as a wraparound environment--must have looked a fraction of its actual size. The vast second-floor Contemporary Galleries are slightly less intimidating, perhaps because they
are loosely subdivided and better lit (a fate one hopes will improve the temporary exhibition galleries upstairs). Yet still, the only works on view that can cope with the pressure of the architectural
expanse are a giant gray Cy Twombly of 1970, Rachel Whiteread's Untitled (Room), 1993, and Gordon Matta-Clark's newly acquired Bingo, 1974, all three of which are dialectically boosted by
the de facto miniaturization of the other works that swarm nearby. There is some irony to the gargantuanism of the galleries on these two floors, given that they are rumored to have been designed
with Richard Serra's large-scale works in mind, but they reduce his usually impressive Cutting Device: Base Plate-Measure, 1969, one of the masterpieces of post-Minimalism, to something like
the contents of a schoolboy's backpack spread on the floor.
Vastness aside, the most vexing spatial issue to my mind resides on the fourth and fifth floors. For all the millions spent on the new MOMA, there seems to be little, if any, gain in wall space for
the "historical" collection (even though the floor square footage is probably slightly greater than before). The galleries are much more spacious, to be sure, but they are generally undivided
thoroughfares, each with three openings onto its neighbors (save for a few culs-de-sac like the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund Gallery, the home of Italian Futurism). The awkward result is that,
for all their spaciousness and easy flow, the galleries feel packed with paintings grouped by size, with proportionally little breathing space around them. Sculpture is the big loser in this section of
the museum, which is why, perhaps, a greater number than before are parked in the restored Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, as if a mere accumulation outside--particularly of small
works--could atone for the paucity of sculptures in the historic galleries proper. The Florene Schoenborn Gallery (more commonly and affectionately known as "the Matisse room"), which contains
some of my all-time favorites, should have been relatively easy to install, given that it is one of only two monographic galleries, the other devoted to Pollock. Yet it represents the paragon of the
pervasive dullness that characterizes the hanging of the historical collection as a whole. The five "Jeannette" heads of 1910-16 are aligned as before against a wall, as if in a shooting gallery, but
now their serial arrangement is mimicked on the wall across the room by the row of great paintings from 1911-13, all vertical, all roughly the same size, all framed alike.
This layout is typical of the fifth floor, where paintings are serialized as if they had been translated and reduced into a kind of Esperanto, their common denominator being that they belong to a
modern idiom that is prudently and ecumenically left undefined. We are never required to ponder each work's specificity, never asked to think in terms of oppositions or ruptures. The fact that at
any given moment we can glimpse what's in store for us in the neighboring rooms adds to this sense of a desensitizing leveling off. For example, even before beginning to digest works by Signac,
Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and the Fauves in the first room, the Mercedes T. and Sid R. Bass Gallery, you are already solicited by Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, in one
adjacent space and, in another, by Wilhelm Lehmbruck's large Standing Youth, 1913 (one of the few domineering sculptures in the installation). This axial installation logic is sometimes so
emphatic that works can even be seen two galleries ahead, as in the case of Matisse's Red Studio, 1911, which beckons from beyond the Lehmbruck, and later, in the case of Newman's Vir
Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51, hung in direct contradiction to the artist's express stipulation that his large canvases not be seen from afar. By constructing these carefully framed views through
doorways, the curators seem bent on impelling us along our journey, rather than encouraging us to linger over the works where we are. One could say that this privileging of what comes next over
where you are now befits an electronic age where people flit from one channel to the next, but I hopelessly cling to the idea that museums should be resistant pockets of contemplation and study.
It could also be said that none of this is so bad. Contrary to what one might have feared after the disastrous thematic hodgepodge of "MOMA2000," the three-part exhibition with which the
museum ushered in the twenty-first century, few of the impromptu juxtapositions between rooms are jarring, while, on the whole, chronology is respected without being obtrusive. But this is
precisely my main point of contention: Because of the equal availability of a multitude of problematics, styles, movements, and individual enterprises at any given moment in the course of one's
visit, one is left with the odd impression that such a diversified field of practices--far from having been the terrain of multiple and deadly serious conflicts--was merely a "pluralistic" cornucopia
wherein everything cohabited harmoniously. I should say that I have nothing a priori against perturbing chronology or making jarring juxtapositions, if done for a purpose. For example, in
"Modern Starts," the first part of the "MOMA2000" trilogy, I liked the hanging of Matisse's eerie Blue Window, 1913--the painting that first prompted Andre Breton to write about art--next to a
metaphysical de Chirico, which drew out often-overlooked qualities in Matisse's work and suggested truly meaningful connections across diverse pictorial modes.
The logic now, though, is that of tourism and entertainment, since the collection is presented as a series of landmarks seen at a rapid pace. The proliferation of masterpiece vistas recalls the lure of
Europe in five days or, in Disneyworld's reconstruction of it, just a few hours. (You like the Eiffel Tower? Wait 'til you see the Grand Canal!) MOMA is simply following an international trend
here, with more clout than its peers (the twenty-dollar entrance fee notwithstanding, the permanent collection has never been so crowded). The paradox of the touristic mode of display, particularly
odd given the formidable riches of MOMA's collection, is that one constantly feels as if in a small provincial museum (say, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University) proudly exhibiting its
limited treasures. (In this sense, the difference between the new installation of the collection and the temporary "best of" presentation in Queens--where in one long view you could see from
Mondrian to Christopher Wool--is only a difference in degree, not in kind.)
The current installation has no punch, no rhythm, no strong moment. Even if key works abound, they are deadened by the metronomic regularity of the spaces (all galleries of the same mold) and
of the uncommitted hanging. This is meant to induce a steady flow, not to arrest (the one exception is the extraordinary gallery featuring Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Twombly, a rare
case where curatorial discrimination is perceptible for having remained focused). A particular case in point is furnished in the Contemporary Galleries: Why bother showing just one painting
among the fifteen that constitute Gerhard Richter's "October 18, 1977," the indivisible 1988 series being one of the most spectacular works acquired by the museum in the last decade? True,
exhibiting the ensemble would have decreased the amount of space available to present other artists, but given the work's themes of terrorism and state violence, it would have made a much better
case for moma's commitment to contemporary art than the potpourri of mostly second-rate works with which it filled its second-floor galleries. By the same token, it's a shame that after a
multimillion-dollar expansion an iconic work like Rosenquist's F-111 has already been consigned to storage, another fatality of MOMA's inclusive, pluralistic vision.
One of the main causes of the blandness I deplore is probably the will of the curators to distance themselves from Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s legacy, which was pursued by William Rubin and, to a lesser
extent, Kirk Varnedoe. This implied, among other things, avoiding or at least softening the linear, teleological, and even authoritarian account of modernism that Barr and Rubin (the latter with
Greenberg's occasional help) had shaped into the ruling narrative: Lashing out against the prevailing Whiteness of the Male (or the maleness of the whale) is the easiest route for such an
aggiornamento. I noted above that monographic rooms are almost entirely abolished, and Picasso is the most spectacular victim of downsizing in this regard. The soul of MOMA's modernist
canon, he was previously shown forcefully to bridge Cezanne with Constructivism, Surrealism, and even Pollock. But now, despite the inclusion of a large number of his works, he seems somehow
almost inconspicuous, as if everywhere and nowhere at once. (Perhaps we were supposed to be appeased by the remarkable cleaning of the Demoiselles, whose coloristic high pitch and textural
diversity are now in full view.)
Another sign of the commitment to diverge from MOMA's previous gospel is the noticeable inclusion of many works by Latin American artists. Despite an early endorsement (exemplified by
Diego Rivera's 1931 retrospective, second only to that of Matisse), this part of the world had all but vanished off MOMA's radar after Nelson Rockefeller abandoned his failing strategy of using the
museum as a lobbying tool for the interests of Standard Oil in Mexico and Venezuela, as art historian James Oles has argued. At times this new dedication feels forced: Is it really important to
show a generic Cubist portrait by Rivera along with Picasso's and Braque's most glorious 1912-13 collages? But in a gallery dedicated to the early '60s and dominated by Frank Stella's Marriage of
Reason and Squalor, II, 1959, it is indeed refreshing to discover one of Mathias Goeritz's "Messages" of the same year and two of Jesus Rafael Soto's early "Vibrations," 1959-60, an oxymoronic
combination of Dubuffet's materialism and Vasarely's optical illusions. And, finally, in the concluding gallery of the historical overview, Helio Oiticica's Neoconcrete Relief of 1960 reminds us
that the story of the shaped canvas needs to be revisited, just as his Box Bolide, 1964-65, tells us that American post-Minimalism does not have a monopoly on the anti-form.
I should add that Latin America is not the only geographic region to benefit from MOMA's sudden openness: Postwar Europe also gains a lot of exposure. And here, too, the results are mixed. The
addition of a pitiful R.B. Kitaj, a mediocre Richard Hamilton, and a late Jacques de la Villegle to the museum's insipid serving of American Pop does nothing to spice it up. As elsewhere, this
hanging is merely a buffet-style sampling without an armature: two Lichtensteins separated by a Rosenquist and a Ruscha; two Oldenburgs at opposing corners; and several Warhols dispersed
throughout the room. Given MOMA's considerable holdings in American Pop, it should have been easy to make a choice that, while concentrating on one or two themes or formal strategies, could
have given some idea of what the movement was about. But in the room with Soto, Goeritz, and Stella, a small tribute is finally paid to Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, and Yves Klein (each,
unfortunately, with a prime and a second-rate work), as well as to Dieter Roth and Gunther Uecker--suggesting, albeit all too timidly, that if Stella and Judd could in 1964 condemn European art
for its reliance on late-Cubist compositionality, it was sheer ignorance on their part, as Judd himself later acknowledged.
Such correctives are welcome, needless to say, but they hardly stir the waters. Indeed, the entire installation, including the Contemporary Galleries, is geared toward the avoidance of a clash of any
sort. This sanitization is perhaps most manifest in the Edward Steichen Photography Galleries: Even though they contain a fair amount of shots that one would characterize as prime examples of
photojournalism, one cannot but be struck by the near absence of images dealing with the tragedies in which this century abounds. A few exceptions include a 1944 Robert Capa photo of a shaved
female collaborator surrounded by a hostile crowd in Chartres; Eddie Adams's famous and horrifying 1968 photo of a South Vietnamese police officer shooting a Vietcong at point-blank range; an
anonymous photograph of a demonstration against the military draft in Paris in April 1914; a few others portraying the misery of the Great Depression; as well as images by Louis Hine, Hector
Garcia, and Shomei Tomatsu. I may have forgotten a few images, but that's nearly all out of more than two hundred photographs. The repression of history is almost absolute in MOMA's account
of the development of photography. True, this has long been the case, especially under the rule of John Szarkowski, former director of the Department of Photography, but things had loosened up a
bit lately, perhaps under the pressure of current scholarship. This makes it all the stranger to find that we are now back in the purely formal and rarefied land of photography as the slick, immaterial
substitute of down-and-dirty painting. And one could say the same about the repression of the human body in the Steichen galleries--no more eros here than thanatos. These omissions only help to
reinforce the illusion, as in the painting rooms, that modern art was merely a panoply of complementary ideas, because it has no context whatsoever--or rather, no context outside itself. To begin
redressing this issue, MOMA would have to abandon its principle of departments strictly delineated by media, something that seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Although most of the curators' decisions discussed above were aimed at politely redressing Barr's dogmatic views, they end up as timid as he was on most scores (perhaps even more so) and just as
embarrassed in their treatment of Dada and Russian Constructivism. It's a good idea to show these two movements together in the Patricia and Gustavo Cisneros Gallery, given their parallel attacks
on the institution of art, but that emphasis is lost as their agitprop antics are reduced to mere decoration. Meanwhile, the various realist movements that in the '20s and '30s offered a
counternarrative to the modernist mainstream still remain a hot potato--thus the piling up in a single gallery of the Mexican muralists Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Neue Sachlichkeit
painters Otto Dix and George Grosz, plus Oskar Schlemmer, Max Beckmann, and, most bizarrely, Jacob Lawrence. An argument could be made that these works, despite their stylistic diversity
and contrasting political content (from the Mexicans' die-hard communism to Grosz's nihilism to Schlemmer's reactionary dream of a New Man) have much in common, but the room is too small
and the gathering too scant for this story to be adequately told. It is yet another example of a curatorial attempt to muddy the modernist waters without making any waves, and despite the brilliance
of several of these works, we will remember them as just a crop of figurative paintings.
The question is why. Why in this day and age such curatorial timidity, which inadvertently makes us regret the strong stance of a Barr or a Rubin? The answer is the same as with any other branch
of the culture industry, and Hollywood in particular: MOMA has become, like museums everywhere at an ever-growing pace, a corporate entity, and a universal corporate law is No ripples, please.
(Here we might recall Rem Koolhaas's audacious proposal for the museum's renovation, in which he pointedly dubbed one portion of his design "MOMA, Inc.") MOMA used to be heralded as an
exemplary foil to the Guggenheim Museum, with its crass commercial and expansionist behavior, the rental of its collection, and the sale of its masterpieces. But it's hard to defend the Modern's
superior ethics after the scandalous "de-accessioning" of Picasso's incomparable 1909 Houses on the Hill, privately sold to Heinz Berggruen to help fund new acquisitions such as a late (and
generic) Francis Bacon triptych, not to mention the hefty "lending fee" that the museum reportedly earned after sending its collection to Berlin. Would the old MOMA have so shamelessly planned
the inauguration of its temporary-exhibition galleries with the celebration of a corporate donor? Perhaps it's naivete on my part, but I doubt it. Yet now, "Contemporary Voices: Works from the
UBS Art Collection" opens this month with a catalogue containing an interview between none other than MOMA's director and Donald Marron, founder of the collection, museum trustee, and
namesake of the soaring new atrium. And with this full-fledged transformation of MOMA into a beacon of corporate culture comes a surge in the power of its trustees--most of them CEOs or heirs
of large companies. This is not to say that trustees directly impinge on curatorial choices. In his introduction to Modem: Painting and Sculpture; 1880 to the Present, a volume that celebrates
MOMA's seventy-fifth anniversary and its reopening, John Elderfield makes a sly remark about the "dangerous step" the museum took in 1929 when it let the trustees choose the artists included in
"Nineteen Living Americans." His innuendo is that this has never since been the case. No need for that; Self-censorship is efficient enough. One need not concoct conspiracy theories about Ronald
Lauder demanding that no less than five works figuring in the Contemporary Galleries (by Gerhard Richter, Blinky Palermo, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero e Boetti, and Sigmar Polke) be credited
as gifts, partial gifts, or promised gifts of his. He wouldn't have to, since the museum knows that highlighting such largesse will help ensure that it continues.
By now, the reader must have noticed my deliberately annoying device in the preceding pages of mentioning the names with which various galleries are emblazoned. A few spaces in the old
MOMA were named, and they retain their original labels; for example, the Edward Steichen Photograpluc Gallery, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. But now almost every gallery is
crowned with a huge inscription informing us in petto about the amount of money lavished on the museum by this or that member of the fortune 500. Amazingly, there is still a short list of
available galleries whose god-fathering is for sale. (My advice to billionaires: Don't wait too long, lest only the restrooms and elevators be left up for grabs.) Depending on whether just one portion
or the whole of the Contemporary Galleries is dedicated to Kirk Varnedoe (the sole new space celebrating a scholar--an exception in this baptismal frenzy), I counted seven unnamed spaces in
total, all located on the fourth and fifth floors. While it's unlikely that artworks are assigned in perpetuity to particular rooms, which will no doubt change over time, it's still easy to imagine that at
present some of these receptacles (like the pitiful Conceptual art room) would be a hard sell; others, on the contrary, would win handily on the auction block, such as the
Rauschenberg/Johns/Twombly jewel.
This is not to condemn en bloc, of course, the structure of private philanthropy from which museums benefit so much in this country and on which they largely depend, given the lamentable lack of
public funding for the arts (particularly at the federal level). But while it was an act of courage for a Lillie P. Bliss or an Abby Aldrich Rockefeller to found the museum in 1929 and to remain
indefatigable in their support throughout their lives--probably gaining little for their own reputations among their peers or the growth of their families' businesses--today there is nothing risky about
such patronage, which has become little more than a social function for the affluent. The shame about the new MOMA is not so much its embarrassment of riches but rather its loss of nerve.
YVE-ALAIN BOIS
Contributing editor Yve-Alain Bois is Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. Professor of Modern Art and chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University.
OUR OWN PRIVATE MODERNISM

TWO MAXIMS, PRONOUNCED BY TWO PHILOSOPHER-critics who understood twentieth-century culture better than most, would seem to foil the work of all art historians but in particular
that of the curator. The first one is Theodor Adorno's claim that "each work of art is the fatal enemy of each other work of art." And the second one, more complementary to Adorno's view than
opposed to it, is Roland Barthes's alluring suggestion that each work of art deserves a "proper science all of its own."
When I visited the "new" Museum of Modern Art on its seventy-fifth anniversary, these maxims immediately sprang to mind. For they speak to any spectator's (or reviewer's) simultaneous
struggle with the Modern's three major epiphanies: its collection (in particular its newly presented contemporary holdings), the installation of this collection (executed by a curatorial team working
under the guidance of John Elderfield, the museum's chief curator of painting and sculpture), and the collection's spatial and presentational shell and devices, the architecture of Japanese architect
Yoshio Taniguchi. No doubt it will be difficult to keep these domains distinct, no matter how much we'd like to. After all, one could ask, what do paintings by Cezanne and Matisse ultimately have
to do with the ambitions of contemporary architecture?
This pedestrian question has already been posed by many a visitor--professional and amateur alike--confounded right from the start by a change in the collection's circuit, which is a matter of both
architecture and installation. Missing from the entrance to quarters housing its foundational nineteenth-century belongings is that familiar figure by the painter whom Matisse once identified as "the
father of us all"--Cezanne's The Bather, ca. 1885. This enigma of infinitely complex painterly quietism has lost its place as sphinx at the door to Paul Signac's razzmatazz portrait of Felix Feneon
of 1890, a comparatively minor painting trumpeting divisionist color theory that also provides the first color plate in Elderfield's monumental tome guiding readers through the collection. One
might well want to greet Feneon as MOMA's perfect Penates, since he was in fact a quintessentially modernist personality. His career spanned from bomb-throwing anarchist to brilliant critic,
from fervent supporter of Georges Seurat and Symbolism to director of Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. But rather than announcing a renewed commitment to modernism's innate political radicality, the
shift from bather to conjurer of colors--insignificant as it may be--more likely signals a desire to reignite modernism's extinct embers under the auspices of spectacular sensation.
The visitors' futile demand for continuity in the installation of the collection, as much as in the writing of the history of modernism, articulates, of course, one of the fundamental conflicts
determining the experiential conditions of museum culture at large: that the museum claims to present transhistorical objects (e.g., the "canon," the "masterpieces," the "highest quality") yet must
subject these objects to perpetual change so that it can appeal to and accommodate the demands of new audiences, which in turn propel a continuous renewal of architectural framing. This appeal
to ever-larger crowds with expanded motivations and reduced attention spans inevitably necessitates a shift in architectural size, design, and proportion of the display spaces. One new feature that
responds to these needs at MOMA is the intertion of large metal-clad passageways not only linking the galleries (and breaking their historical precision) but also, most important, stringing the
voracious spectator along a seemingly never-ending line of masterpieces. Crowd management (aspiring to receive several thousand visitors daily at twenty dollars a head) clearly had to be a major
planning and design factor for the new Museum of Modern Art. Nowhere is the clash between the historical nature of the objects and the architectural task to accommodate greater crowds more
painfully evident than in these fifth-floor galleries setting up the Modern's trajectory in 1880 with Cezanne, van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin. Previously that part of the collection was presented in
relatively small rooms, which claimed--as William Rubin once stated, and certainly enacted in his installations--a large, bourgeois living room as their model. These modules had allowed for the
separation of historical phenomena that, while contemporaneous, had in fact been distinguished by extreme oppositions and incompatible artistic convictions (e.g., Gauguin and Cezanne). Now, all
of these founding fathers of modernism inhabit the same white Hall of Fame in a continuous line-up, forced to hang side by side, as though they had never fought for anything in particular anyway.
A second, separate set of problems has become more manifest in the new version of the old institution: the insistence on the law of the medium (concretized in the Modern's traditional
departmental divisions between painting and sculpture, drawing, photography, architecture and design). While Alfred H. Barr Jr. had originally emphasized the equivalence of these mediums after
his return from a trip in the late '20s to the Soviet Union and the Bauhaus, that law of introducing all the mediums into the museum now simply shores up an ever-more-conservative genealogy of
modernism (not incidentally, in Elderfield's introduction, Barr's visit is foreshortened and simply has become "a visit to the Bauhaus in Germany"). What both the Soviet avant-garde and the
Bauhaus had to different degrees projected was the gradual displacement of painting and sculpture by transitional design objects, aiming for practices that would generate a new collective
experience in public space, and an opposition of use value to the presumed autonomy of the work of art.
In the otherwise breathtaking galleries of Cubism, reminding us of how much we all owe to Rubin for his acquisitions as much as for his scholarship on the subjects of Cubism, even the first and
arguably the greatest object to cross the medium boundaries, Picasso's monumental Guitar, 1912-13, apparently no longer merits its own wall, in the curators' estimation. Guitar's exemplary
hybridity (between painting and object, between relief and readymade, between virtual and architectural space) seemingly has to be tamed and repictorialized, placed beside a large, framed collage
that reinforces rectangularity. The same principle of domestication is applied to another epistemic and epochal object, Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column, version I, 1918: Lumped together in a
more or less arbitrary cluster of Brancusi sculptures, the Column is stripped of the extraordinary egalitarian radicality (of seriality, of repetition, of sculptural abstraction) that would, forty years
later, serve as the beacon of Minimalism. Had the sculpture been positioned in a space of isolated singularity--as was the good fortune of Brancusi's infinitely more seductive and decorative Fish,
1930--it would have confronted bewildered viewers with the task of unraveling its intricately difficult agenda, in which perceptual and social transformation are fused together. And the furtive
appearance of Gustav Klucis's Maquette for "Radio-Announcer," 1922, in a room reserved for MOMA's treasures of Russian and Soviet abstract painting makes the principle of medium even more
painfully obvious. As does the almost embarrassed display there of Aleksandr Rodchenko's oval Spatial Hanging Construction no. 12, 1920, one of the collection's prime historical objects, brought
into the museum in one of Rubin's many heroic acquisitive intuitions and the sole survivor of that seminal group of kinetic sculptures. Suspended in a poorly lit corner of that very same room, the
piece attests to the utter failure of any order enforced by medium. The medium game equally fails when it comes to the display of Surrealism. Instead of releasing their radical powers of
defetishization, these objects and photographs by Man Ray and Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim and Joan Miro, presented in an accumulation of boxes of bric-a-brac, now generate the misreading
that their apparent fetish character should be foregrounded. Finally, the eternally continued absence of John Heartfield from MOMA's account of German Dada--in spite of his brief undercover
appearance in the architecture and design section--and the consequential absence of anybody who might have taken him as a point of historical departure (from Hans Haacke to Martha Rosler, who
once called the museum the "Kremlin of Modernism") is the true scandal of the policy of medium quarantine.
What is at stake, clearly, is a recognition--after seventy-five years of disavowal on the administrative level--that a history of modernism cannot be written without taking the radical transformation
of the distribution form of the work of art into account (a development that will never be understood when being presented as a problem of mediums). As the museum's own recent exhibition
history has amply proven (consider the outstanding 1998 Rodchenko retrospective curated by Peter Galassi, Leah Dickerman, and Magdalena Dabrowski, or the extraordinary 2002 exhibition "The
Russian Avant-Garde Book: 1910-1934," curated by Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye, to name but two instances), the progressive avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s in Weimar Germany, the
Netherlands, and the Soviet Union had been programmatically engaged in the deconstruction of the hierarchical laws of traditional mediums. One of their primary projects was the systematic
transformation of the work of art from a singular auratic object into an agenda or archive for the new mass-cultural public sphere (e.g., the printed photograph in newspapers, magazines, and
books). A departmental division that reestablishes the hierarchical order of the mediums, enforces--if nothing else--a manifest historical falsification, whose American version originated with the
Greenbergian repression of the sociocultural projects of the agents of that avant-garde, from Mondrian to Lissitzky, from Rodchenko to Heartfield. Of course, we anticipate the adage that oil is
eternal but photographs and paper are sensitive to light. Considering such instances in the installation, one confronts the question whether a curator can actually still be primarily committed to the
history of art, or whether other regimes of vision inevitably interfere with curatorial identity today. One should note the fact that a tremendous amount of work has been done by younger scholars
over the past twenty years on these questions, necessitating a revision of the law and order of the medium and the hierarchical structure that it enforces (needless to say, strictly along the lines of
history and art history, not those of politics and ideology). And this change warrants a more extended consideration of audiences' expectations and object-relations in the present.
In a deliberately misleading commonplace, the late Pierre Bourdieu, a great sociological analyst of spectatorial desire and behavior, once named the unfathomable phenomenon of our collective
aesthetic passions "l'amour de l'art." This love of art, like all other loves and other proto- or postreligious practices, is marred by more projections and problems than the eye can see. At the onset of
the twenty-first century, we can assume without hyperbole that the aesthetic and emotional investment of one class of spectators shares next to nothing with that of another class, even while
looking at the same object from the twentieth century in the same overcrowded spaces of the new Modern. In spite of the self-conscious claims that the institution of the Modern is integral to a
liberal-democratic culture, internal and external factors inevitably overdetermine both the institution and collective spectatorial behavior in the present and challenge those claims. If one had seen
the trustees at the gala preview (which I did not), and if one had seen "the masses" during the holiday season (which I did while preparing this review), one would presumably have had more
evidence than necessary to recognize that the museum's architecture and the museum's pedagogical mission now confront extreme contradictions: to be liberal-democratic on the facade and
plutocratic in the center. It is this schism between the museum's pretense to function like an institution within the bourgeois public sphere and the actual governing principles of late-capitalist
corporate spectacle culture that MOMA's new building and any new installation of its classic collection would have to reflect, and reflect upon, if the institution itself does not want to become the
blinded subject of these historical determinations.
This duress does not even result primarily from the drastic differences in social status of MOMA's audiences (a trivial fact, by comparison) but rather from the dramatic transformations of
perceptual behavior and object relationships that spectators have undergone in the last twenty years alone. The magnetism radiating from, say, a Jasper Johns painting all the way to New Jersey is
first of all on the order of the economic mirage. Contemporary paintings that fetch unimagined sums in auctions operating as contemporary orgies of the public destruction of (private?) surplus
value have surpassed the status of the trophy and now border on that of the miracle. Accordingly, they instigate mass pilgrimages to the museum's house of wonders. Under those circumstances it
has become more difficult to identify what, in that moment of sublime distinction that the encounter with a work of art supposedly provides, our "love of art" actually loves most. Nevertheless,
even if we still wish to assume that the spectrum of spectatorial motivations and responses is one of almost infinite subjective and social difference, this is the field where the collection, the
installation, and the architecture, as inherently pedagogical projects, would have to find their proper theater of operations.
If works in the Contemporary Galleries have not yet acquired this cult status of the multimillion-dollar object, pity is the appropriate term for them: They generate it partially because they reflect
the naive confidence of their makers in an art-world apparatus and museum institution that they apparently plan to inhabit as though times had not changed, and as though their privileged status as
makers of "modern" art remains unconditionally guaranteed. It is also appropriate in response to the attempts of these artists to prolong the agony, to extend the lineage of painting and sculpture at
least by an inch in endless epigonal maneuvers. In fact, the contemporary collection makes it painfully evident that not only the social character of the artist seems to suffer from a failure of
historical nerves, but curators, collectors, and spectators alike appear equally desperate (for very different reasons, obviously) to hold on to a kind of object production whose time has come and
gone long ago. What makes these objects so attractive to us in the museum (and at the same time so desperate) is their simulacral tangibility and fraudulent individuality (their lure of the subject's
intact autonomous vision, corporeal plenitude, and communicative capacities). They promise protection from the ever-intensifying incursions of a new technological imaginary, which not only
enters and expands into every recess of our unconscious and conscious daily experience but also has captured and restructured the most intricate and intimate spaces of communication and social
exchange. As long as artists (and the cultural institutions that represent them) fail or refuse to confront these conditions governing present experience, and in unforeseeably totalizing intensities in
the future, neither the notion of artistic production nor the institution of the museum will escape the haut gout of obsolete forms of production and communication presenting themselves as the
latest horizon of hope.
One response to these new historical conditions governing the art world--and this applies to its artistic authors as much as its administrators--has been to embrace the principle of a totally
noncommitted pluralism. It is not even clear whether that principle originated in political conviction or whether this default position simply resulted from both indifference and de-differentiation
(of criteria, of judgment, of a commitment to history or anything whatsoever). However, it was bound to become increasingly difficult to maintain aesthetic judgment on the grounds of a principled
indifference toward all criteria. Nothing could be more pernicious to the task of the historian and curator than a socially enforced attitude of pluralism, confounding the institutional requirement of
political neutrality with the comfort to forfeit judgment altogether.
The first symptoms of this historically formed deficiency appear already in the for-the-most-part amazing spaces and installation of the collection's postwar segments. Forcing Lucio Fontana's
Spatial Concept, 1957, by juxtaposition and proximity onto Frank Stella's black painting The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II, 1959, for example, is either a failure of curatorial competence
when it comes to postwar European work at the Modern or an ill-informed impulse to rewrite an already convincingly established, even indisputable history--in this case the fact that Stella initiated
American Minimalism from a dialogue with Johns and Ad Reinhardt. Similarly, forcing Hans Hofmann onto Ellsworth Kelly simply imposes a mad art-historical and theoretical scheme onto
Kelly's astonishing work, vandalizing the extreme subtlety of the artist's project, which should, of course, accompany the work of his actual peers such as Johns and Twombly, whose projects were
similarly opposed to the mythical virility of the Abstract Expressionist painters and their claims for unfettered originality.
This catastrophic loss of criteria plays itself out manifestly in MOMA's curatorial choices when it comes to the acquisitions of contemporary work. The new installation of these acquisitions makes
it painfully evident how difficult a task it must be to judge without discerning, to discern without criteria, to love art without a larger comprehension of cultural practice--to name but a few of the
inevitable contradictions of the liberalist-pluralist model. (Or, if are we mistaken to assume that such a model is indeed operative, should we regress instead into the more paranoid, conspiratorial
explanation that the hotchpotch quality and mediocrity of many of these contemporary acquisitions are mainly the result of hurried curators and desirous trustees, driven by their own forms of the
love of art, to try out this, that, or the other and see whether and how it will fly?) The total lack of any cohesion in the Contemporary Galleries--from the abject banalities of Chris Ofili to those of
Charles LeDray, from Josiah McElheny to Luc Tuymans, from Elizabeth Murray to Rachel Whiteread--proves not only that pluralism fails miserably when it comes to the judgment of artistic
production, but also makes it clear that a culture without commitment to any criteria other than those of the rapid increase in exchange value cannot generate a sense of communication between
artwork and audience.
This claim for the value-free neutrality of pluralism is, of course, also the standard of the Modern's new architecture. We would be the first to felicitate the choice of Taniguchi as the architect of an
epochal building. This commission could have easily turned into another nightmare of a postmodern architectural monomania that generally sees contemporary art not only as the inexhaustible
source of its "inspirations" but also as the perfect object to be emulated and eventually extinguished within its own ambitious embrace. And yet, the hailed neutrality of Taniguchi cannot but
provoke suspicion: Given the social circumstances of the present, what type of "publicness" and what kind of simultaneous collective perception could this neo-modernist architecture actually
generate and sustain?
Three elements rupture Taniguchi's vaunted neutrality and sacrifice of the megalomaniacal architectural self: the lobby in the manner of a corporate cathedral; the architectural reveals that make
the walls appear as though they were floating (one wonders whether Taniguchi saw a 1973 work by Michael Asher at the Lisson Gallery in London, which programmatically dismantled and
decontextualized the gallery's architecture precisely to transform it into a set of floating display surfaces); and the windows opening onto the sudden vertiginous shafts of a negative sublime. Each
of these aspects brings to the foreground the latent contradiction resulting from the crisis of subjectivity and the crisis of MOMA as an institution, which architecture could never possibly solve on
its own: the tension between modernism's traditional claim to constitute a self-critical subject determining itself within the spaces of the public sphere, and the actually governing conditions of an
oligarchic spectacle-and-entertainment culture within which the viewer's subjectivity has to position itself. Spectators may attempt to resolve this tension by turning into customers (at the museum's
opulent cafes or its impoverished bookstores) or by losing themselves in the vertigo of the cultural and architectural spectacle that will anaesthetize any remaining desire for the autonomy of the
subject that modernist works had once universally promised. The sudden vistas from high elevations down into the Modern's chasms--one side of the abyss inhabited by the Bell 47 D1 Helicopter,
1945, and the other by Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, 1963-69, as though they were causally connected--are exacerbated by the intensely vertiginous (and barely gated) visions down into the
streets of Manhattan. These might remind visitors that it is no longer utopian progress and the subject's emancipation that are at the center of our experience in the museum, but that spectacle and
warfare have become the foundational elements of vision at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
BENJAMIN H.D. BUCHLOH
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh is an art historian and critic based in New York. (See Contributors.)
Wigley, Mark^Davidson, Cynthia^Bois, Yve-Alain^Buchlon, Benjamin H.D.
Citao da fonte (MLA 7a edio)
Bois, Yve-Alain, et al. "The new MoMA." Artforum International 43.6 (2005): 130+. Academic OneFile. Web. 14 July 2015.
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Ttulo: The new MoMA

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