Nan Goldin. The Hug, New York City. 1980. Silver dye bleach print, printed 2008. The Museum of Modern Art. Purchase. © 2010 Nan Goldin
Sometimes, after I encounter a great work of art, I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut. And that’s a good thing—the work touches and evokes something deep inside that lingers for months, even years. I had this experience when I first saw Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a 45-minute slide show of some 700 color pictures set to a soundtrack.
Marina Abramović takes her final bow. Photograph © 2010 Marco Anelli
Last week, we asked our Facebook and Twitter fans to submit questions to ask Marina Abramović on the occasion of the end of her epic performance piece, The Artist Is Present, on Monday, May 31. We got an amazing response! Special thanks to our Facebook fans Tal Brog, Sean Capone, Nicolette Brink, and Linda Wachtel, and our Twitter followers samtlam, ArtInitiative, and scriptophobe, for the questions they submitted. On Tuesday morning, we were the first to interview the artist. Here are her answers:
VALIE EXPORT. Action Pants: Genital Panic. 1969. Screenprints. Photographed by Peter Hassmann. The Museum of Modern Art. Acquired through the generosity of Sarah Peter. © 2010 VALIE EXPORT
I met with VALIE EXPORT about three months ago at MoMA when she came to New York to preview her friend Marina Abramović’s exhibition. It was a sunny morning in March, and we sat down outside the staff cafe sipping glasses of grapefruit juice and talking about her signature work, Action Pants: Genital Panic.
Installation view of the exhibition Sculpture in Color (May 18, 2009–January 11, 2010), featuring three 2006 polyester sculptures by Franz West—Maya’s Dream, Lotus, and Untitled (Orange). Photo by Jason Mandella
Long before I began working at MoMA, I happened to sit next to the former wife of a renowned artist at a dinner marking his posthumous retrospective. I asked her awkwardly about how she had met him, and with tenderness she painted a memorable picture of their first encounter, which centered around MoMA. The year was 1959, and she, a young woman working at the membership desk, was nudged on by a coworker to introduce herself to a security officer who was in the Sculpture Garden, guarding a geodesic dome installation by Buckminster Fuller.
From left: Claude Cahun. Untitled. c. 1921. Gelatin silver print. Thomas Walther Collection. Purchase; Ilse Bing. Self Portrait in Mirrors. 1931. Gelatin silver print. Joseph G. Mayer Fund. © 2010 The Ilse Bing Estate/Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery; Berenice Abbott. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. Negative c. 1930/Distortion c. 1950. Gelatin silver print. Frances Keech Fund in honor of Monroe Wheeler. © 2010 Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics, Ltd., New York. All works in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art
In each gallery of the recently opened Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, you will encounter a wall of photographs (sometimes two) with only pictures of women. This is not because women focused their cameras primarily on their female peers—there are plenty of exceptional landscapes and photographs of other subjects in the Museum’s collection, and a select smattering of these are now on view—but rather because I, along with my colleagues and co-curators Eva Respini and Roxana Marcoci, were fascinated by how these groups of pictures of women and by women suggest, in their diversity, the plasticity of both photography and female identity.
The nine screens in the Museum lobby are the initial entry points to the transitional experience produced by the Museum, which one could call a “non-event”—a preamble to the main visual consumption. This liminal trajectory incorporates the programmed infographics, the public architectural spaces, and the anticipating visitors in our sight lines. The “non-event” sets up an atmosphere of expectation in transit, through which our screen-conditioned, lifestyle-oriented, transient gazes turns us into unmitigated imitations of each other, not unlike the walk on airport walkways or the movement through vertical mall escalators.
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.
On Thursday, April 22, the MoMA Library and Esopus Foundation Ltd. co-hosted an evening celebrating the life and work of physicist-artist Bern Porter (1911–2004). I organized the event to breathe life into the books and other ephemera on display in the exhibition Lost and Found: The Work of Bern Porter from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art Library and to call more attention to this fascinating and under-recognized artist.
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Those of you who have clicked through the visitor portraits in our Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present Flickr gallery, taken by Marco Anelli, probably noticed some familiar faces. Apart from a few celebrities in the mix (Sharon Stone, Rufus Wainwright, Isabella Rossellini, to name a few), there are a number of less famous faces that repeat day in and day out, almost as often as Marina herself. These Marina devotees have become micro-celebrities in their own right, at least around the Museum; the guards know them by name, and fellow visitors waiting their turn to sit with Marina regard them with an air of what may best be described as reverence.
Paco Blancas, a NYC-based make-up artist, is one such visitor. After seeing his portrait a number of times on Flickr, I found myself wondering, “Who is this mystery man? Why does he keep coming back? Why is he crying in so many of these photos?” I wanted to know his story. As luck would have it, last week I spotted him seated in the Marron Atrium, back for his fourteenth sitting with Marina. He shared a few words about his experiences with the piece and what compels him to keep coming back.
Atsuko Tanaka. Untitled. 1956. Watercolor and felt-tip pen on paper, 42 7/8 x 30 3/8" (108.9 x 77.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art. Purchased with funds provided by the Edward John Noble Foundation, Frances Keech Fund, and Committee on Drawings Funds. © 2010 Ryoji Ito
One could say that Atsuko Tanaka is having a moment here at MoMA. Her untitled painting from 1964 is currently one of the most visible works on view at the Museum (situated above the information desk in the main lobby), and a recently acquired drawing just went on view this week for the first time at MoMA in the exhibition Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940s to Now.
Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1932, Tanaka was a member of the Gutai Art Association, the major experimental postwar Japanese art movement founded by a group of young artists in Ashiya in 1954. She was best known for sculptural installations made from non-art materials, such as Electric Dress (1956), a wearable sculpture made of flickering light bulbs painted red, blue, green, and yellow. When originally worn, the sculpture both made the body the center of artistic activity and masked it in a mass of light and color. This work, along with Work (Bell) (1955)—made of twenty electric bells connected by one hundred feet of electrical cord and a switch that viewers can press to activate a line of ringing sound—are prime illustrations of Tanaka’s interest in the application of intangible materials in art, namely electricity, and Gutai’s overall reaction to a modernizing Japan.
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