Here is a slideshow of photos from our hit Counter Space public program, Kitchen Culture. Over 100 people joined us for an incredible dinner in October, inspired by a 1925 German cookbook and prepared by Executive Chef Lynn Bound and the Cafe 2 team.
In recent years, with the increasing turn toward the digital, photography has become more complex and varied in its range of possible representational renderings. Photography is at a point of transformation, and in organizing the New Photography 2010 exhibition, I wanted to be responsive to these changes and bring together a group of artists who have expanded the conventional definitions of the medium.
An installation view of Compass in Hand at IVAM, October 2010. Photo: Maura Lynch
On October 28 the exhibition Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift opened at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM) in Spain. If this exhibition sounds familiar to our frequent visitors and blog subscribers, that’s hardly a coincidence—from April 21, 2009, through January 4, 2010, this exhibition was on view in MoMA’s Contemporary Galleries.
One of a series of WWII propaganda posters in MoMA's collection encouraging the British home front to raise rabbits at home on a diet of kitchen scraps...and then eat them. Poster designed by Frederick H. K. Henrion (British, 1914–1990), c. 1941
Everyone likes rabbits. Their fluffy tails. Their twitchy noses. From Peter Rabbit to Roger Rabbit, Bugs Bunny to the Easter Bunny, Watership Down to David Lynch’s surreal 2002 series Rabbits, the creatures have been anthropomorphized constantly in literature, film, and popular culture. Because they are so widely appealing, we feel extremely uncomfortable when we see rabbits encounter cooking pots, like in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, or at the hands of Glenn Close as manic bunny boiler in Fatal Attraction. Small wonder then that during World War II the British Government had to persuade reluctant consumers about the nutritional and money-saving benefits of raising rabbits for food.
Paula Hayes's assistant, John Gray, installs the plantings for the installation Nocturne of the Limax maximus
When Hermes and Aphrodite had a son, Hermaphroditus, who was fused with a nymph, Salmacis, the resulting person possessed the physical traits of both male and female—hence the term “hermaphrodite,” used in biology as a description of similarly dual reproductive traits in both plants and animals.
MoMA’s lobby is a site of perpetual flux and frenzy, a public passageway for people to meet, greet, rest, or chat before embarking on their next experience, either inside or outside the Museum’s walls. When asked by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, to think of forms that would visually complement and invigorate the rectangular and column-filled lobby space, Paula Hayes, a New York-based sculptor and landscape designer, who enjoys “knocking something off kilter a bit,” was ready to take up the challenge.
Hungarian embroidered wall hanging. Translation from Hungarian: “You must do everything at the right time.” Collection Juliet Kinchin. Photograph: Roger Griffith
There’s always been a clock in my kitchen. I can’t imagine otherwise. I bet there’s been one in yours too. I’m not talking about the digital ones on the coffee maker, stove, microwave, etc. that I don’t even bother to set—I’m talking about the clock that’s been in charge of keeping time everywhere I’ve ever lived—my kitchen clock.
If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you may already have the sense that a lot of people are involved in putting together an exhibition. Curators, preparators, conservators, exhibition designers, registrars, security, and others all have critical roles to play in what you see at the Museum. But what happens when you take the same approach when putting together an exhibition app?
Slug, from Paula Hayes, Nocturne of the Limax maximus. Installation view in the MoMA lobby, 2010
Joseph Paxton (1803–1865, head gardener at Chatsworth House, the Duke of Devonshire’s large country estate in Derbyshire, England, was also the creator of the prefabricated cast-iron-and-glass Crystal Palace, which was originally erected in London’s Hyde Park to contain the Great Exhibition of 1851, a showcase of the technological wonders of the industrial revolution.
Taking her cues from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Douglas Sirk, as well as from the staged photographs of Cindy Sherman and Guy Bourdin, Alex Prager’s pictures focus on cinematic images and mise-en-scène. Sharing personal anecdotes about her life and work, Prager tells us in the video interview above how she came to take her first photographs and make her debut film Despair (2010), which has its U.S. premiere in the New Photography 2010 exhibition.
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