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.