Ongoing
www.moma.org
We all want to love the new MoMA – not just
love it, but fall in love with it all over again, celebrate its return and
overlook whatever flaws could possibly remain after a $450 million-plus
reconstruction and years of hard work and anticipation. With the greatest
collection of modern art in the world, love at second sight is in some
measure guaranteed. I’ll just have to get used to the fact that it’s less
fulfilling and true than I would have wished.
First, the building (twice the size of the previous one). Japanese architect
Yoshio Taniguchi’s ‘disappearing’ design and minimalist, anti-sculptural
aesthetics have been much celebrated, but it’s hard to hide that much
architecture. While the Cartesian grid of Taniguchi’s six-floor complex is
formally sensitive to the museum’s own architectural heritage and meant to
be subservient to the artworks that are its raison d’être, the disappearing
act remains centre stage.
That’s not to say the building is not extraordinary. Indeed, given the
variety of competing interests (public circulation, retail spaces, gallery
spaces, etc.) and the complexity of the site (with Cesar Pelli’s 1984 Museum
Tower at the core of the composition and adjacent to the sculpture garden,
now beautifully expanded), Taniguchi’s achievement could be the best of all
possible worlds. There is a transparency and permeability to the design that
powerfully articulates the museum’s position at the centre of the city. With
entrances on 53rd and 54th Streets and an over-sized ground floor dedicated
to circulation and visitor amenities, the new museum joins the Midtown
fabric of buildings with mid-street public thoroughfares. Walking west from
5th Avenue down 54th Street, one can peer into the glass façade that fronts
the sculpture garden, and there’s ample opportunity from within to view
vignettes of the Manhattan skyline beyond.
The delight of the fleeting glimpse continues inside, where cutaways in the
atrium provide teaser views of Matisse’s Dance (1909) and a punchy 1965
Campari billboard by Bruno Munari housed in the Design Collection. Interior
staircases and flying walkways are also framed for viewing, making a
spectacle of pedestrian circulation itself. The building is in fact
spectacular, despite its would-be modesty.
The central atrium, which begins on the second floor and rises to the sixth,
is the most imposing feature: a vast square box offering entrance to
double-height contemporary galleries at two corners and to the more intimate
Prints and Illustrated Books and a grand staircase from the ground floor
lobby at the other corners. Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk (1967) is
dramatically spotlit at the centre of the atrium, its impressive scale in
keeping with the architecture. But nothing else can compete. Large single
paintings by Willem de Kooning, Brice Marden and Jasper Johns are marooned
on the vast white walls that extend above them, and Monet’s Reflections of
Clouds on the Water Lily Pond (c. 1920), one of the collection’s treasures,
hangs lifeless on the expanse between the contemporary gallery entrances.
One remembers nostalgically the work’s previous intimate setting and chalks
up the loss of a quiet moment in Giverny to the necessities of institutional
grandeur and corporate urbanity in contemporary Manhattan.
A similar experience awaits in the special exhibitions gallery on the sixth
floor, where all 86 feet of James Rosenquist’s F-111 (1965) are hung on a
single wall which the Pop monument doesn’t fill. The extraordinary volume of
the exhibition space is breathtakingly obscene for those accustomed to New
York apartments – and even to Upper East Side townhouses like Leo Castelli’s,
where F-111 was originally installed as a wrap-around environment.
Rosenquist currently faces off against Ellsworth Kelly’s aptly positioned
Sculpture for a Large Wall (1957) at the other end of the space. ‘Gee whiz,
this room is big,’ one thinks, but we’ll have to wait for the first
temporary exhibition to see how the space functions.
Between the cavernous atrium on the second floor and the temporary
exhibition hall on the sixth, one finds the museum’s soul – the permanent
collection. After four viewings I can’t help but feel disappointed, as
though an extraordinary opportunity has been missed. At this point,
disclosure of my short stint in Paintings and Sculpture under the direction
of former Chief Curator Kirk Varnedoe is probably warranted. The
much-maligned linear hang of the chronology of modern art in the old MoMA
may have left much to be desired for those who know the complexity of the
story well – and the works that didn’t make the cut (and there are
regrettably many). But for those seeking an introduction to the territory,
the relationships between individual works, the intelligent links between
periods and styles, the signposting of breakthrough achievements and
exclamation points in the narrative
were clear. They are less so now.
Long-view glimpses from one gallery to the next and beyond, so sensitively
constructed in the past, now often end at half a wall, part of a sculpture
or a full view of a work that seems little related to what’s immediately
before one’s eyes. True, those ‘aha’ moments characteristic of the previous
hang are still to be had, but the arrogant clarity of the previous narrative
has given way to self-directed itineraries afforded by multi-entrance
galleries that lack clear curatorial cues to match. This is perhaps
unavoidable in galleries that have views into so many others. What seems a
virtue, though, can easily become a vice, and here the embarrassment of
riches in one’s view is both spell-binding and frustrating. A pass-through
room full of masterpiece Matisses cancel one another out by their proximity
and uniform hang (a fate that Picasso suffers, too). So many competing
stimuli invite distracted browsing rather than engaged contemplation.
How, one asks, given the voluminous space, can the historical collection
seem cramped to the point that vibrant pictures seem flat and fatigued? Is
it the desire to play all the cards (including many new ones) at once? Is it
that the more porous narrative, expressed architecturally, still remains
rather traditional, particularly given the monotonous, standard-height
installation? Is it the architectural balance itself, where one wishes some
of the atrium’s vacuum could be siphoned into the severely overhung Drawings
Department?
Or is it, despite the building’s modernist overtones, the institutional
longing to be current, with all that implies, from the cultural tourism
mandate to short visitor attention spans and wow cravings, to sprawling
double-height galleries for contemporary works accessed directly from the
atrium? There is something perverse in finally finding Matisse’s Dance in a
stairwell, given the breathing room afforded to contemporary artists –
regardless of the fact that the second version of Dance once hung at the top
of Shchukin’s Moscow stairwell (an inside witticism) or whether Peter Doig,
Chris Ofili, Luc Tuymans and Julie Mehretu will one day prove equal in
stature (they needn’t, but their prominence here suggests they will). Such
imbalances are repeated in the photography galleries, where the abundance of
recent larger-scale stars is at the expense of smaller scale modern masters.
And if one were to genuinely embrace the last 30 years and give contemporary
practice its historical due, a single room for seven video-based works –
ranging from three mid-1960s Warhol Screen Tests to Eve Sussman’s
magisterial 89 Seconds at Alcazar (2004) – with a few others installed in
circulation spaces, hardly does the trick.
The new MoMA mystifies. One can only hope future curatorial choices will
rectify the disappointments and imbalances of the present, and that the new,
improved quarters are flexible enough to allow the enchanting, edgy soul of
modern art back in.
Joe Hill