MoMA | Author: Gretchen Wagner

Posts by Gretchen Wagner

January 13, 2012 | Artists, Collection & Exhibitions, Fluxus

Case Study: William Pope.L Interprets Fluxkit

Posted by Gretchen Wagner, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books

Last month, artist William Pope.L spent a day at MoMA, exploring the collections of artists’ multiples on view in Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962–1978. While he was here, he produced the above performance video, which incorporates the Fluxkit to incredibly humorous effect.

Unpacking Fluxus

Posted by Gretchen Wagner, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books

Various artists. Fluxkit. c. 1965. Vinyl-covered attaché case with screenprint, containing objects in various media. The Museum of Modern Art. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008

“Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order,” philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin observed in his 1931 lecture Unpacking My Library. In the museum’s tidy spaces, where a predominant curatorial objective is to make sense out of the jumbled reality of things, this opposition between organization and chaos captures the imagination. As my colleagues and I begin to work with the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift recently acquired by the MoMA—highlights of which are currently on view in the Fluxus Preview exhibition on the fourth floor—Benjamin’s proposal repeatedly comes to mind.

Bottoms Up! Fluxus Wallpaper

Posted by Gretchen Wagner, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books

Yoko Ono. George Maciunas. Fluxus Wallpaper. c. 1973. Offset. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift

During recent months, Fluxus has begun making waves in MoMA galleries. This past October, Fluxus Preview opened on the fourth floor and continues to provide a sampling of the diverse activities carried out by artists engaged with a rebellious approach in the 1960s and 1970s. Most recently, true to Fluxus’s irreverent sensibility, derrières—hundreds of female asses—have taken over a space on the third floor of the Museum. The work is Yoko Ono and George Maciunas’s Fluxus Wallpaper, which repeats black-and-white close-ups of a human behind from floor to ceiling.

A still from Ono’s Film Number 4 (Bottoms), this wallpapered image is of one of the (allegedly) 365 individuals who walked for the artist’s camera in London during the early 1960s. As Ono once described Film Number 4, it is “like an aimless petition signed by people with their anuses”—a collective mooning in support of the absurd. Maciunas took one of these signature back ends, possibly Ono’s own, and printed it in fashion that enabled the provocation to occupy any receptive surface.

The wallpaper is part of The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, acquired in 2008. It is currently on display in conjunction with the exhibition Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography.