WEB SITE FEATURING TWO ONLINE PROJECTS ACCOMPANIES THE MUSEUM AS MUSE: ARTISTS REFLECT AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
A comprehensive Web subsite produced by The Museum of Modern Art accompanies the exhibition The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect. The subsite will include introductory text, a checklist of works in the exhibition, a selection of 25 images of works from the show with commentary, and links to information about the exhibition's public programs.
The subsite for The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect will include online works created by two artists featured in the show. Allan McCollum's online project, Registration of an Artwork (1999), consists of a compilation of the many layers of catalogue information surrounding his work Collection of Four Hundred and Eighty Plaster Surrogates (1982/89), which will be on view in the exhibition. This data includes information on the people who assisted on the work's production, suppliers, condition reports, and links to related subjects. This exhaustive project speaks to the museum's disposition to fastidious record keeping and meticulous research through its registrar's methods, suggesting "the museum registration process as a metaphor for the registration of an artwork into history."
"This Web project concerns the making of meaning," says McCollum. "An artwork often enters the register of history by way of 'supplemental' information that conditions the art object itself: its provenance, its condition, its critical reception, the artist's other works, the storage costs, and so on. I am amplifying all these supplements to include so many references and cross-references that the whole conventional process of making meaning is problematized, brought into view, made visible."
Fred Wilson's online project, Road to Victory (1999)--titled after the Museum's 1942 exhibition that included photographs of the United States at war--explores The Museum of Modern Art's memory of itself: namely, the institution's photographic archive. Constructing narratives through juxtapositions and connections between documentary images and text borrowed from the archive, Wilson reveals much of what, though visible, is not on display: the Museum's visitors, staff, exhibition graphics, and wall texts.
Wilson says Road to Victory is "about the Museum's lost social agenda. These archival photographs expose the Museum's use of didactic material to persuade the public of its liberal point of view as well as its aesthetic ideas." Wilson further explores this image bank in a wall installation created for The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, Art in Our Time, named after the exhibition celebrating the Museum's tenth anniversary in 1939.
The address of the subsite for The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect is www.moma.org/exhibitions/muse/. The projects by Alan McCollum and Fred Wilson will be linked from this page.
The Web site and online artists' projects are made possible by The Contemporary Arts Council and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art. The Registration of an Artwork is co-produced by The Museum of Modern Art and Stadium.
The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect is made possible by 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. The artists' commissions are made possible by The Bohen Foundation. Additional support is provided by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art. The accompanying publication is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
