MOMA INSTALLS MONUMENTAL WORKS BY CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS AS PART OF MODERNSTARTS
Three monumental works by contemporary artists--Sol LeWitt, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, and Michael Craig-Martin--will be installed at The Museum of Modern Art this fall as part of the exhibitions ModernStarts: People, Places, Things. While ModernStarts focuses on the years 1880 to 1920, works from more recent periods, including these site-specific projects, will be incorporated into the exhibitions to show how later artists have treated the traditions, themes, and subject matter of the period. The works will be installed sequentially beginning October 7.
Sol LeWitt’s On black walls, all two-part combinations of white arcs from corners and sides, and white straight, not straight, and broken lines (1975) will be re-created for the entrance to People, on display on the Museum’s second floor from October 7, 1999, through February 1, 2000. This large-scale drawing from MoMA’s permanent collection, which must be re-created from the artist’s instructions for each subsequent showing, was last on view in a 1985 re-installation of the Museum’s Painting and Sculpture collection.
Executed in white crayon over a black grid on black walls close to 12 feet high and 154 feet wide, the drawing is composed of 190 combinations of four types of lines that distantly suggest the forms of Cubist figurative works. LeWitt’s work shows the ultimate, fully abstract consequence of the modern development in which pictorial compositions, traditionally designed to represent figural gestures or postures, evolved to depict these gestures and postures in abstract lines and planes. A diagram showing each line type and all possible combinations used in the work accompanies the drawing, enabling viewers to understand the underlying structure of the work.
Inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photographs of a man running, LeWitt first explored serial concepts in three-dimensional structures, examining various ways to order lines as a kind of narrative space. Attracted to the wall’s potential as a two-dimensional surface, he adapted the basic geometric vocabulary of his sculpture, based on open, linear volumes, to drawing. Of the wall drawings, LeWitt has said, “I think of them as a musical score that could be redone by any or some people. I like the idea that the same work can exist in two or more places at the same time.”
Maria Fernanda Cardoso will compose Cementerio—Vertical Garden (1992), an installation of 6,000 plastic white lilies, for the entrance to Places, on view on the Museum’s third floor from October 28, 1999, through March 14, 2000. This is the first time that her work will be on display at The Museum of Modern Art. In Cardoso’s installation, which is inspired by Minimalist art of the 1960s and 1970s, nature is decontextualized and transformed. Cementerio—Vertical Garden evokes a sense of a garden that never decays and in which nature, although in this case artificial, is perfect and idealized.
Clusters of the flowers jut out from a wall approximately twelve feet high and 112 feet long. Subtle pencil drawings of arches, two by two feet in size, mark the surface of the wall. These drawings refer to the necropolis, where mausoleums are packed tightly together and niches with flower vases line some of the walls. Many of these traditional Latin American and Southern European cemeteries lend context to Cardoso’s work, in particular Bogotá’s Cementerio Central, which is located close to a studio she once worked in. The Cementerio Central, which became infamous in the 1950s as the site where victims of urban violence were laid out for identification, provides a symbolic connection between this period of violence and terrorism in Colombia’s history and Cardoso’s Cementerio—Vertical Garden.
Michael Craig-Martin will install Objects, Ready or Not, a monumental wall drawing that acts as a visual dictionary to define the essential look of objects, for the entrance to Things, on view from November 21, 1999, through March 14, 2000, on the Museum’s ground floor. An array of vividly colored and often oversized objects, Objects, Ready or Not is approximately 11 1/2 feet high and 442 feet wide, and extends from the Museum’s lobby ticket booths to the exhibition entrance, and ends at The Garden Café.
Since the late 1970s, Craig-Martin has been compiling a pictorial dictionary of man-made, usually domestic objects. Each object represents the essential object of its type. With only one exception, Craig-Martin creates a single picture of each type of object for the dictionary. The chair, however, is represented by a variety of pictures in the work, as no one chair typifies “the chair” in the same way that there is one typical grand piano, stepladder, flashlight, or umbrella. Referencing works by other artists included in Things, Craig-Martin’s work includes drawings of Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel and Gerrit Rietveld’s Red Blue Chair.
ModernStarts is part of MoMA2000, which is made possible by The Starr Foundation. Generous support is provided by Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro in memory of Louise Reinhardt Smith. The Museum gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Contemporary Exhibition Fund of The Museum of Modern Art, established with gifts from Lily Auchincloss, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, and Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder. Additional funding is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and by The Contemporary Arts Council and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art. Education programs accompanying MoMA2000 are made possible by Paribas. The publication ModernStarts: People, Places, Things is made possible by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.
