What’s in a name? Throughout the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art on Fifty-third Street, off Fifth Avenue, a project that will be completed by 2005, there may be no construction more deserving of our admiration than the simple combination of “museum” and “modern” and “art.” In this name one finds no “Morgan” or “Guggenheim” or “Frick;” no “Metropolitan” or “county” or “New York;” no “contemporary” or “non-objective” or “American.” The Museum of Modern Art has benefited through its seventy-two year history by staking out only the bare minimums and by interpreting these minimums in the broadest possible terms. Modern art, at MOMA, may mean twentieth-century art; it may mean the art of a movement called modernism; it may mean the art of our times. Through MOMA’s various departments, modern art may mean alternatively painting and sculpture, architecture and design, photography, prints and illustrated books, drawings, or film and media.

These definitions are so broad, and the categories and departments at times so conflicting and contentious, that the only sure bet of what is “modern art” is what you tend to find, simply, at the Museum of Modern Art. That the very definition of “modern” has been fought in the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art goes to the core of this institution’s historical strength and reminds us of its future responsibilities. And what has emerged over this history is a set of divisions that has been keenly tied to the architecture of the 53rd street site: media in the basement, design in the attic, and so forth.

There is a lot in this name, and a MOMA by any other name may not be as sweet. When the Modern determined to maintain a schedule of exhibitions and to continue displaying works from its world-renowned permanent collection during the three-year reconstruction, it settled on a converted Swingline staple factory in the borough of Queens as its temporary headquarters. In order to reflect this move, the Modern chose to add the suffix “QNS” to its famous acronym MOMA. How “QNS” weighs against the precarious balance of “MOMA,” and to what extent the architecture of “MOMA QNS” tells us about the future of the Museum of Modern Art in New York are questions that may slowly be answered in the next three years. The press’s first look at MOMA QNS came June 24, and the public’s four days later on Saturday, June 28, concluding a busy week of events. What follows are some impressions:

• The distance from midtown MOMA to MOMA QNS is under three miles. Yet the psychological separation between the real estate of midtown and the low industrial terrain of Long Island City could not be greater. Much has been made of the Queens Boulevard location of the museum—its ethnic makeup, the plantain fruit stands, its access by way of the Number 7 subway line. Yet the cobalt-blue shell of the museum, tucked half a block back from the Boulevard, interacts as little as possible with the surrounding landscape: no windowed exhibition spaces, no sculpture gardens. The only indication of the museum’s new presence in Queens is a smart roof construction that, when viewed a certain way, spells out “MOMA” to approaching 7 trains.

  MOMA QNS looks nothing like, and behaves nothing like, the MOMA of 53rd street. Gone is the vertical arrangement of that building, crystallized in the 1980–84 reconstruction by the architect Cesar Pelli under the guidance of Alfred Barr’s successor William S. Rubin, then Director of Painting and Sculpture. The Queens site, constructed on a large singular ground floor plan designed by Cooper, Robertson & Partners (exhibition space, offices, storage space) and the more fussy Michael Maltzan Architecture (lobby), resembles a suburban Home Depot—a “big box” architecture with twenty-one foot high ceilings and moveable cubicle-style walls that may be relocated and repositioned into different warrens and rat-mazes as the permanent collection rotates and new exhibitions come and go (including “Matisse Picasso” in February 2003).

  There is a sensation upon entering MOMA QNS, through a series of cantilevered passages and fenced off views and do-nothing stairs, that the Maltzan lobby design is meant to disorient and throw the viewer off axis with each turn. The gift shop and coat check wind around you. Care to walk directly to the ticket booth and into the museum? No such luck. A series of videos play on the curved walls of this space in an attempt to distract and perhaps entertain, but the feeling most resembles that of waiting in line for a theme-park amusement.

  The Cooper, Robertson & Partners designed exhibition space, bordering the lobby, is more practical for the needs of the museum and also more in line with the nature of the Swingline building: a big box is not interesting space, and there should be no need to conceal this fact with architectural razzle dazzle. The preeminence of MOMA’s permanent collection should, moreover, be more than enough to “brighten up” a space, which it attempts to do—when you can find it.

  It is not altogether clear where to find the permanent collection at MOMA QNS (it is, incidentally, in the far corner of the building from the lobby). The visitor is at present more inclined to stagger into the “Autobodies” show of the museum’s automobile collection, and backwards through a large contemporary art show called “Tempo”, devoted to such themes as “Transgressive Bodies,” “Mobility/Immobility,” “Liquid Time,” and “Trans-Histories.” “Tempo” is one of the most lugubrious exhibitions in recent memory at MOMA, resembling more a show at PS1, MOMA’s tragically hip contemporary-art space, also in Long Island City. To anoint such art with the ecumenical powers of MOMA, even MOMA QNS, erodes the value of MOMA as a museum of canonization. Such art speculation may be best left to galleries, auction houses, Thomas Krens, and The Brooklyn Museum.

  It is only upon weaving one’s way backwards around “Tempo,” through a room of incessant metronomes and miscalibrated clocks called “Time Collapsed”, that one returns to a hallway with the painted title “To Be Looked At” and the subtitle “Painting and Sculpture from the Collection.” This is Acting Chief Curator Kynaston McShine’s installation for the permanent collection. The coy title comes by way of Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture To Be Looked At (From the Other Side of the Glass), with One Eye, Close To, for Almost and Hour (1918). It bears mention that in 1984, when the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors after its last renovation, an anxious four years without a MOMA QNS, the only show that caught the full ire of The New Criterion was Kynaston McShine’s “International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture”. As Hilton Kramer wrote in the special Summer 1984 issue of The New Criterion devoted to the reopening of MOMA:  

  All we can be certain of is that the show itself is the most incredible mess the museum has ever given us, and a show that is different in kind from anything the museum has done in the past.

  Reading this statement in “MOMA reopened: The Museum of Modern Art in the postmodern era,” an indispensible resource for anyone interested in the history of MOMA, we are reminded of the halcyon days of 1984, when a show like “International Survey” had the ability to alarm.

  One gets the sense from “To be Looked At” that McShine seeks to undermine the Barr/Rubin orthodoxy of the permanent collection—one might call it even the “MOMA history of art”—through mockery. The Duchamp title is a part of this. The ahistorical arrangement of this present exhibition, somewhat akin to the millennial exhibition “MOMA Starts,” has its moments of near sadistic mania: the fuzzy paintings go on one wall, the polka-dots go on the other. Even as Acting Director, McShine can be dangerous. His predecessor Robert Storr at least thought he was working in the legacy of Barr. McShine acts purposefully against it. The rehanging and arrangement of iconic paintings by Picasso, Van Gogh, et al., is already unappealing and awkward in this warehouse space, the least that could have been done was to preserve a semblance of the permanent collection as it has been presented at the 53rd street site. This alone has historical value, and McShine does a disservice to the newcomer to MOMA in not presenting it.

Some will say that the direction of McShine’s “To be Looked At” at MOMA QNS is merely an extension of Alfred Barr’s wide definition of “Modern.” There is an alternate concern, however, that MOMA’s historical crisis between its own formalist canonization of twentieth-century art, under Barr and Rubin, and its interests in contemporary art, for example, may finally come to a head and dramatically alter the former balance of the future museum. One ill-conceived publicity stunt called “Projects 76” by the performance/video artist Francis Alys, which was recorded a week before the opening of MOMA QNS, included a mock procession across the 59th street bridge that paraded not only reproductions of works by Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti but also the artist manqué Kiki Smith—the manqué herself—hoisted through the middle of it in a sedan chair as, one supposes, the queen of Queens. What role the permanent collection of twentieth-century art may play in the new museum, and how it might compliment, contend with, outshine, background, or be held hostage by new exhibtions, rehangings, bogus curators, bad artists, or the minor arts (design and media) will determine how the future art histories are written. MOMA QNS is a kind of horizontal drafting sheet for the new permanent museum, and this first draft can be chilling at times.