Screenshot of “@ at MoMA” post

Our recent acquisition of the @ symbol has challenged what most people think of as a typical object that a Museum acquires.  We thought it best to let you in on our process—how we think about shaping our collection here at MoMA.  As you know, museums are defined by their collections. Each collection has a unique point of view that is carefully shaped by its curators, who are always mindful of historical precedents as they look ahead to future developments. When it comes to contemporary design, MoMA’s collection seeks to remain on the cusp of innovation and to support the emerging talents, ideas, and concepts that will become tomorrow’s designed environment.

When artist Marina Abramović and curator Klaus Biesenbach first met with the Publications team to discuss the catalogue that would accompany her exhibition at MoMA, Marina knew she wanted to create a book that offered a different kind of reading experience. Hoping to address the eternal challenge of capturing the complexity of live performance on the printed page, she proposed the addition of an audio component, which she felt would allow for a more personal, intimate, and experiential understanding of the work. What you hear in this video is a track from the resulting CD, which comes with the book.

Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Home of Transmediale Festival. Photo by Julia Kaganskiy.

Berlin has been calling to me for quite a while—for years I’ve been hearing breathless accounts of the thriving arts scene there—and I’ve been searching for an opportunity to go. So when a friend of mine from San Francisco told me about Transmediale, a festival and conference dedicated to new media, digital art, and futurity, taking place in Berlin the first week of February, my mind was made up. I had to go. Even if it did mean Berlin in February.

Preliminary sketch for The Big Clock

In 1999, Bernadette Corporation (BC) adopted the catchphrase “Pedestrian Cinema” (or “Ped Cin”) as a way of describing a specific kind of fragmentation and dismantlement to be applied to the increasingly historicized role of moving imagery in the arts. Important to this approach is for something to lie stranded within a cine-conceptual framework, without technically being a video or a film.

“This slimy, slug-minded mystery thriller starts out dead on arrival and then, like three-day-old fish, gets really bad really fast. And it stays bad, ensnaring its star and every other cast member in its wretched net.”

A couple of clichéd sentences pulled from a bad film review are a reverse operation of the Ped Cin concept: their crude familiarity and redundancy, without context, produce an almost delicate emptiness.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. 1927. USA. Directed by F. W. Murnau. Acquired from Twentieth Century-Fox. Preserved with funding from Celeste Bartos

These notes accompany the screening of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, which screens on March 24, 25, and 26 in Theater 3.

After the international success of Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh), the film cognoscenti could legitimately argue that F. W. Murnau (1888–1931) deserved to be recognized as the most important filmmaker in the world; D. W. Griffith was coming off several interesting but unprofitable films and was about to lose his independence, Erich von Stroheim was fighting to salvage Greed, and Charles Chaplin had yet to make The Gold Rush. Sergei Eisenstein and Josef von Sternberg were still on the horizon. Murnau followed up with two additional Emil Jannings vehicles, adapted from Molière (Tartüff) and Goethe (Faust). Both films continued to utilize the vast resources of the Ufa studio, and the latter film was especially spectacular. The eminent film historian, Lotte Eisner, wrote “No other director…ever succeeded in conjuring up the supernatural as masterfully as this.” Hollywood took note.

Joan Jonas. Mirage (installation details). 1976/1994/2003. The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Richard Massey, Clarissa Alcock Bronfman, Agnes Gund, and Committee on Media Funds

Migrating media to accommodate rapidly evolving playback technology is a common occurrence. Our daily tendency to preserve images and sounds as we progress technologically means that we often discard old recording forms and playback equipment for digital replicas. Yet this drive to preserve content unexpectedly distorts the importance of technology as more than mere platform for content. When we disconnect media from its method of presentation we must consider the loss of contextualization for an object. Technology may seem disposable, but is it?

Ray Tomlinson. @. 1971. Here displayed in ITC American Typewriter Medium, the closest approximation to the character used by a Model 33 Teletype in the early 1970s

MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design has acquired the @ symbol into its collection. It is a momentous, elating acquisition that makes us all proud. But what does it mean, both in conceptual and in practical terms?

Contemporary art, architecture, and design can take on unexpected manifestations, from digital codes to Internet addresses and sets of instructions that can be transmitted only by the artist. The process by which such unconventional works are selected and acquired for our collection can take surprising turns as well, as can the mode in which they’re eventually appreciated by our audiences. While installations have for decades provided museums with interesting challenges involving acquisition, storage, reproducibility, authorship, maintenance, manufacture, context—even questions about the essence of a work of art in itself—MoMA curators have recently ventured further; a good example is the recent acquisition by the Department of Media and Performance Art of Tino Sehgal’s performance Kiss. 

Rajendra Roy. Photo: Scott Rudd

With preparations underway for New Directors/New Films—now less than a week away, the festival has been generating buzz since the lineup was announced earlier this month—and a nice write-up in yesterday’s New York Times piece about young curators making waves in New York City, Rajendra Roy, MoMA’s Chief Curator of Film, is having quite a week. That’s why we’re thrilled he’s agreed to answer some of our readers’ questions in what we hope will be an ongoing feature of our blog. Our curators are a varied and fascinating bunch, and from the looks of our comments, Facebook page, and Twitter feed, so are our online fans. Why not bring the two together and spark a conversation?

So, think about what you’ve always wanted to know about the New Directors/New Films festival or about MoMA’s film program, and submit your questions via comments to this blog post. We’ll select the five most intriguing questions, and Raj will answer them here next Friday, so stay tuned!

How well do you know your MoMA? Above are images of works from the MoMA collection that are currently on view in the galleries. If you think you can identify the artist, title, and location 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:

Six thousand pounds of cow bones after cleaning at Skulls Unlimited.

In late 2008, six thousand pounds of cow bones sat boxed in a Dutch warehouse. Marina Abramović, whose retrospective is on view at MoMA, had requested that we ship the bones, a major component of her installation Balkan Baroque, far in advance of the exhibition. We could not have anticipated that the next fifteen months would involve our learning about bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), incineration plants in New Jersey, the dearth of slaughterhouses in the western United States, or that a place called Skulls Unlimited existed.