THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, November 16, 2020 |A
MOMA, N.Y. (4)
New York‘M
useum” and “mod-
ern” are somewhat
at cross purposes.
The former connotes
a treasure house of
the historically tried and true, while
the latter implies the up-to-date.
The Museum of Modern Art in New
York, however, is close to sui gen-
eris; with its art-world power, pub-
lic reputation, and big-time money
it has the freedom to tell the con-
tinuing story of modern art in any
way it sees fit.
Ah, but “continuing” is the tricky
part. MoMA can do anything it
wants except stand still. Art styles
(Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual
Art, Installation Art), social cur-
rents (feminism, multiculturalism,
Black Lives Matter), and globalism
(consciously modern art is no lon-
ger a strictly Western phenomenon)
have overtaken MoMA’s residual
implication that Paris and New York
are the predominant centers of
modern-art gravity. Then there’s the
physical problem of exhibition
space: How can MoMA go on and
on collecting without relegating re-
cent acquisitions either to tempo-
rary shows or deep storage?
The solution, according to
MoMA’s press materials for its
long-planned but just-opened “Fall
Reveal”—a fluffy title that sounds
purloined from the fashion indus-
try—is a reinstallation of 20 of its
60 galleries on three of its six
floors that gives its viewers “a
deeper experience of art through
all mediums and by artists from
more diverse geographies and
backgrounds than ever before.”
(This “Reveal” is the latest layer of
a display overhaul that opened in
October 2019.) The museum, ham-
pered by the Covid-19 pandemic—
which, among other things, limited
the number of workers who could
be reinstalling a given gallery at
any time—succeeds in this lofty
ambition in some cases, comes up
short in others, and lands mostly
in between.
Just as truth is said to be the
first casualty of war, the first sac-
rifice of MoMA’s more inclusive
approach is chronology—which, to
be sure, MoMA has been softening
for a while. This is understandable,
given the overlap of art styles and
movements and their popping up
at different times in different
places. A second major shift is a
heightened internationalism that
pays more attention to art from,
among other places, Eastern Eu-
rope. “Personal Cuts” (1982) by
Croatian artist Sanja Iveković, a
short video of a woman slicing
away a mask of political indoctri-
nation, is a welcome example. A
third strategy is to devote specific
galleries to individual artists, with
a de-emphasis on white men of
European descent. These spaces
focus on such works as Carrie Mae
Weems’s withering sequence of
blood-red-tinted photographs
about slavery, “From Here I Saw
What Happened and I Cried”
(1995-96); Gordon Parks’s historic
and bluntly corrective collection of
reportage “The Atmosphere of
Crime” (1957), which comes with
its own hardbound catalog; and
“Instant Zen,” a peppy gallery of
three decades of everything fromBYPETERPLAGENSART REVIEW
At MoMA, a Less Than Revealing Reshuffle
The museum’s latest rotation of works highlights important artists, but will be less than illuminating for the average visitor
winged clocks to an antique toy
truck “with paint additions” by
Nam June Paik.
A definite thumbs up goes to
the minimalist gallery “Touching
the Void,” which includes a subtly
astonishing small tan-and-black
geometric abstraction, “Meander
No. 5” (1960), by the Yugoslav
painter Julije Knifer. Another yes
vote for the section called “New
York City 1920s,” with Niles Spen-
cer’s poignant painting “Near
Washington Square” (c. 1928).
MoMA’s desire to have viewers
see familiar sorts of work afresh
pays off especially with the display
of Marisol’s 1962 high-relief “The
Family” standing right at the en-
trance to the “Domestic Disrup-
tions” chamber. If there’s a bona
fide masterpiece in the museum’s
monumental revisionism, it’s
“Whose Utopia,” a 2006 three-
part, 20-minute film by Cao Fei
about workers in a lightbulb fac-
tory. At first, I wondered how the
Chinese government could allow
the release of this product of a
Siemens residency, with overtones
of Fritz Lang’s dystopian film “Me-
tropolis.” Then, as the calmly po-
etic documentary proceeded, I be-
gan to see the quiet well-being—
even satisfaction—of the very
varied workers at the factory.
Some downsides: There are
such awful section titles as “The
Sum of All Parts” (what doesn’t
that mean?), “Everyday Encoun-
ters” (rather surprisingly includ-
ing a photograph of pioneer per-
formance artist Carolee
Schneemann supine, naked, and
covered with snakes), and the
middle-school textbookish “A
Modern Media World.” “After theWall” comprises a few galleries
filled with works that are more
political memorabilia than art;
and there’s a perfunctory nod to
youth with Petra Cortright’s self-
indulgent 2007 video, ““VVEB-
CAM.” Finally, a puzzling oddity:
The “According to the Laws of
Chance” gallery, with a lot of Mar-
cel Duchamp, was installed by as-
signing numbers to the works,right mystifying for the casual
viewer to make sense of it all.
Heaven help the teacher on a field
trip with students being intro-
duced to modern art. Timelines
and silos are inherently restrictive,
yes, but they’re also helpful to
people whose lives don’t revolve
around modern art.
MoMA plans such reshuffles
about every six months, so viewers
will have to come back to catch up
with the museum’s evolving narra-
tive. It turns out there’s institu-
tional method to MoMA’s mixolog-
ical arbitrariness after all.Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer
in New York.‘Touching the Void’ gallery, top; Carrie Mae Weems’s ‘You
Became Mammie, Mama, Mother & Then, Yes, Confidant-Ha,’
from ‘From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried’ (1995-96),
above; Marisol’s ‘The Family’ (1962), left; installation view of Cao
Fei’s ‘Whose Utopia’ (2006), belowARTS IN REVIEW
then drawing their
placements out of a hat.
If the result doesn’t
work, then it was a bad
idea. But if it does (and
it seems to, more or
less), then why should
MoMA bother with pro-
fessional exhibition designers?
The primary negative of “Fall
Reveal,” though, is this: While it’s
refreshing for art-world profes-
sionals like me—who’ve been to
MoMA any number of times and
are grounded in how, so to speak,
jazz came up the river from New
Orleans—to see unfamiliar art
freed from what museum-speak
calls “silos,” it’s going to be down-wsj_ 20201116 _a 013 _p 2 jw 321000 _ 0 _a 01300 _ 1 ________xa 2020 .crop.pdf 1 16 - Nov- 20 07 : 14 : 53