Photo: Jason Brownrigg

With the recent launch of the MoMA AB EX NY app for the iPad, and the new update just released with additional content, we thought we’d take a moment to talk with various members of the team involved. First up, we have Deep Focus, who designed and programmed the app. We spoke with CEO Ian Schafer; lead developer Jason Garrett; group creative director Ken Kraemer; associate art director Dave Kroner; and senior interaction designer Dave Irons.

In the video interview above, artists Allora & Calzadilla (Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla) talk about their piece Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on “Ode to Joy” for a Prepared Piano, which is being performed at MoMA through January 11 as part of the Performance Exhibition Series. The duo have the remarkable talent for being playful and political at the same time. In their work they often juxtapose two contradicting elements, creating something new and unexpected. For Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano, the artists cut a hole in the middle of a grand piano and hired professional pianists to stand in it and play Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” upside down and in reverse, while walking the piano around the exhibition space. The result is a marvelous performance piece that is at first startling, then hilarious, and lastly, thought-provoking.

Installation view of Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures at The Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Left to right, Screen Test: Susan Sontag (1964), Screen Test: Dennis Hopper (1964), Screen Test: Kathe Dees (1964), Screen Test: Edie Sedgwick (1965), Kiss (1963–64), Screen Test: Lou Reed (1966), Screen Test: Kyoko Kishida (1964), Screen Test: Baby Jane Holzer (1964), and Screen Test: Donyale Luna (1964). © 2010 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Photo: Jason Mandella

The exhibition Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures marks the continuation of the long-term effort to preserve one of the artist’s most important bodies of work. Before his death in 1987, Warhol stipulated that his works should be cared for by The Museum of Modern Art, and in 1997 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts completed the donation of the surviving 4,000 reels of original footage and print materials.  

How well do you know your MoMA? If you think you can identify the artist and title of each of these works—all currently on view in the Abstract Expressionist New York</i> installations Ideas Not Theories and Rock Paper Scissors (on the third and second floors, respectively)—please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—in two weeks (on Friday, December 31), along with the next Do You Know Your MoMA? challenge.</p>

ANSWERS TO THE DECEMBER 3 CHALLENGE:

Kathy King. Interior Monologue. 2010

When I began teaching at MoMA several years ago, I realized that it was the perfect place to use my background as a conservator, artist, and art historian, since the collection already provided the best learning resource: the artworks themselves.

Film poster for Born into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids

When you hear teens open a question with “I want to know, ’cause I want to be a director,” you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing—why you choose to stay at work late on Friday evenings, why you spend your time off screening films, why you pour over the DVD extras to learn as much as you can about a film’s context. For years now, artist and educator Alejandro Duran and Anne Morra, an associate curator in MoMA’s Department of Film, have been doing just that to guide young artists in the dissection and interpretation of some of the world’s great films.

Triumph of the Will. 1935. Germany. Produced, directed, and edited by Leni Riefenstahl

These notes accompany the Fascism on the March program on December 15, 16, and 17 in Theater 3.

It was inevitable that the movies, as the most popular and influential medium of propaganda in history, would respond on many levels as the relative calm produced by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles gave way to the madness that arose out of the worldwide Depression. The Hollywood studios, which were somewhat dependent on the European market, approached the political and economic issues very gingerly. Even Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), released only four months before the invasion of Poland, tiptoed around anti-Semitism. By then the handwriting on the wall should have been evident to everyone, but 18 months later, Charles Chaplin was under pressure not to release The Great Dictator.

In the Making On the Line workshop

Teaching artist Mark Epstein has been running our In the Making—On the Line workshops this fall. Through studio activities and in-gallery discussions, he and the teens have been exploring the different definitions of what a line can be, while looking at the various ways in which the artists in the Abstract Expressionist New York and On Line shows have tried to express themselves through this most basic of forms. For this journal, Mark gets in-depth about a very unconventional drawing activity that he created with his students.

Five for Friday, written by a variety of MoMA staff members, is our attempt to spotlight some of the compelling, charming, and downright curious works in the Museum’s rich collection.

I was out enjoying a few drinks recently when a friend informed me a sitcom had stolen my running gag. “[Popular network show],” he said, “had an episode where all the characters competed to see how many things they could touch at [uptown museum]…that’s totally your bag!”