How well do you know your MoMA? Above are images of works from the MoMA collection that are currently on view in the Architecture and Design Galleries—last week was so tough, we’re giving you another shot. If you think you can identify the artist and title of each work, please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—next Friday, along with the next Do You Know Your MoMA? challenge.

ANSWERS TO LAST WEEK’S CHALLENGE:

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.

As Dedalus Fellow in the Museum Archives, I received a travel grant to broaden my understanding of modern art. Last summer, I chose to journey to the American Southwest to view Earth art, Minimalism, and other forms of post-war abstraction in Texas and New Mexico. My goal was to examine the “art pilgrimage” from a critical perspective, while trying to achieve that spiritual experience associated with it: to turn myself into a pilgrim, while remaining grounded in art history.

My first destination was Lightning Field, Walter de Maria’s 1977 work near Quemado, New Mexico. The artwork, which comprises a grid of four hundred stainless steel poles, is located miles from civilization in a flat basin surrounded by mountains. Off to one edge is a cabin where visitors stay overnight. No photographs are allowed; de Maria insists on the primacy of one’s own, subjective experience of the work. Walking among the poles, my feet sank into soft clay. I watched the gleaming metal poles grow brilliant in the sunset, then fade. I listened to birds’ wings. I was rained upon. At night, I walked outside to deafening quiet and a Milky Way sky of exquisite clarity. It became clear why de Maria forbids photography: photographs would document only the New Mexico landscape, not the actual sensation of being here.

Marina Abramović and Ulay in Imponderabilia, 1977. © 2010 Marina Abramović. Courtesy Marina Abramović and Sean Kelly Gallery/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Friends and family keep asking me recently, “What do you think of the Marina Abramović show?” The exhibition has sparked a lot of conversation, especially one aspect of it—yes, the “naked people.”

Some viewers have been shocked by the bodies in our galleries, but I didn’t expect to be one of them. Beyond the occasional cartwheel, there hasn’t been much call at MoMA for my performing skills… but before I was a MoMA wordsmith, I was a modern dancer, performing for several years mostly with the Regina Nejman Dance Company.

Dancers become comfortable with the body to an unusual degree. There’s the co-ed quick costume-changing backstage, the impolite contact of dance partnering, not to mention you spend a lot of your life wearing spandex. And yet I discovered that Abramović’s reperformers—clothed and unclothed—ruffled my composure, too.

Imponderabilia (1977), the Abramović piece in which two nude performers flank a doorway, has gotten a lot of press. Brushing past the genitalia of strangers in a crowded, public place—could anything be more nightmarish for a New Yorker? Recently, playing hooky from my desk, I breathed in, to be thinner, and slipped between the man and woman performing that afternoon. Safely through, I realized my heart was pounding. Other visitors hurried through nonchalantly, pretending they were going that way anyway; the performers, standing with knees slightly bent, never broke their bubble of concentration. (A good trick for the endurance stander, to avoid wobbling or fainting: don’t lock your knees.)

These notes accompany the screening of Pandora’s Box, May 5, 6, and 7 in Theater 3.

“What counts is the image. So I would still claim that the creator of the film is much more the director than the author of the scenario or the actors.” – G. W. Pabst

Georg Wilhelm Pabst (1885–1967) was the third member of the great Weimar directorial triumvirate, along with Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. In some ways he was the most elusive and mysterious of the three. Murnau was haunted by whatever demons went along with being homosexual in an uncongenial era. Pabst’s fellow Austrian, Lang, seemed to flirt with Fascism—his intellectual instincts were Teutonic, his wife was a Nazi, and he was offered control of the Reich’s film industry—before deciding to go west and ultimately winding up in Hollywood (where he became a practicing democrat, although reports of his tyrannical relations with coworkers probably would disqualify him from canonization). Pabst was a horse of a different color altogether, or, perhaps more correctly, several different colors. While Lang could only imagine New York for Metropolis, Pabst spent a few youthful years here. He came to film directing rather late, in 1923, but he had made several successful movies (Der Schatz, Die Freudlose Gasse, Geheimnisse Einer Seele, Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney) by the time of Die Buchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box) in 1928.

Henri Cartier-Bresson. Shanghai. 1948. Gelatin silver print, printed 1971. The Museum of Modern Art. Acquired through the generosity of Robert B. Menschel. © 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

I tracked Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) from England to India to Indonesia and back. He was in England for the coronation of King George VI; he was in India when Gandhi was assassinated; he was in Indonesia as the nation gained independence from the Dutch. He was seemingly everywhere.

I know because it was my job to compile all of Cartier-Bresson’s photo captions, notes, datebooks, and correspondence from his travels, which covered the better part of the 50 years he was actively working as a photographer. I then had to transform this into a comprehensive yet comprehensible chronology that would appear in the catalogue of the exhibition Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century.

How well do you know your MoMA? Above are images of works from the MoMA collection that are currently on view in the Architecture and Design Galleries. If you think you can identify the artist and title of each work, please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—next Friday, along with the next Do You Know Your MoMA? challenge.

ANSWERS TO LAST WEEK’S CHALLENGE:

Well, I said I’d try to stump you last week, and stump you I did. Many of you were able to correctly identify the first two works, but the third proved to be the most challenging, and we don’t have a winner this week. Honorable mention to Candice White for identifying Constantin Brancusi as the artist, but alas, it is Young Bird, not Blond Negress, II, in the photo clue.

Clues for the Do You Know Your MoMA? challenge, 4/23/10

1 . Pablo Picasso. Girl Before a Mirror. March 1932

2. Frida Kahlo. Fulang-Chang and I. 1937 (assembled after 1939)

3. Constantin Brancusi. Young Bird. 1933

If you happen to witness—or, for the intrepid, participate in—Marina Abramović‘s new work The Artist Is Present, you may notice a well-equipped photographer quietly documenting each daily performance. The artist has asked photographer Marco Anelli to take portraits of every visitor who participates in the piece. The results, as you can see below and on the exhibition website, are captivating.

Check back frequently, as the images are updated regularly. At this point there are over eight hundred portraits!

Chris Ofili. Prince amongst Thieves. 1999

Much of the dust—er, ash—has settled in Europe, and those marooned there by Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano are trickling back home. Nonetheless, when airspace was finally cleared mid–last week, there were reports of half-empty planes returning from some of the most afflicted cities, such as Zurich and London. I know a handful of people whose airlines will not honor tickets at their original prices until April 29 or later, so perhaps this in part explains the sparsely populated jets. But one must also consider the Europeans who may have canceled trips and vacations to the States completely. How many of those people will therefore miss a planned trip to MoMA, I wonder?!? It is with this concern in mind that I drafted this MoMA Offsite entry. Perhaps it’s too rash to predict for Europe the trend of the “stay-cation” (which swept our nation last year due to factors altogether different, of course), but nonetheless I’d like our members, friends, and supporters there to know that many MoMA works are on view in Europe at this time.