A few days after visiting the five teams at their open studios at P.S.1, I went for a walk on Governors Island to view the zones from the island’s waterfront promenade. Governors Island sits in the heart of New York Harbor, and the promenade provides the perfect vantage point from which to take in the harbor as a singular force and view the zones as they are today. Climate change and rising sea levels no longer seem abstract when you look out from the island and contemplate the potential impact of the one-hundred-year flood on different locations, including the island itself. I walked around the island clockwise from Soissons Dock:

The Marriage Circle. 1924. USA. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

These notes accompany the program The Lubitsch Touch, which screens on February 3, 4, and 5 in Theater 3.

Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) was more responsible than anyone for bringing a continental flavor to the largely Anglo-Saxon American cinema. Although Erich von Stroheim preceded him, von Stroheim’s obsessions were too outré to be fully integrated into the American (Hollywood) sensibility. While Lubitsch remained fixated on European subjects and locales, his broadly humanistic humor did resonate with Americans in ways that von Stroheim’s esoteric naughtiness did not. Von Stroheim returned to Europe after World War II; Lubitsch died a Hollywood insider.

Lubitsch’s journey from Berlin took a few atypical turns. Starting in 1914 he directed himself in several crude comedies with an emphasis on a Jewish stereotype. Some of his more sophisticated satires (Die Austernprinzessin, Die Puppe, Romeo und Julia im Schnee) hold up well and reflect Lubitsch’s stage training with Max Reinhardt. He first gained notice in America with his ersatz D. W. Griffith spectacles (Madame DuBarry, Anna Boleyn), and Mary Pickford brought him to Hollywood to do the costume drama Rosita (1923), which she subsequently tried to destroy. Fortunately, Warner Brothers signed him to a contract, which resulted in a series of adult comedy/dramas, of which The Marriage Circle and So This Is Paris are representative.

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. Photos: Sydney Briggs

When the Department of Media and Performance Art collects and exhibits time-based media or performance, caring for and properly installing such work is a collaboration between the artist and the Museum. Time-based media commonly uses video, film, audio, and computer programs as platforms for creativity. Often such artwork is digitally based, and it depends upon technology that may become obsolete. In the case of performance art, the ability to re-perform the work mainly relies on the artist’s memory, with the aid of documentation. Both time-based media and performance are therefore mediums in which individual works are often replicated, migrated, or emulated in order to ensure their continued existence.

Located just blocks away from The Museum of Modern Art, the WISE program at the Midtown Community Courthouse (MCC) is the only comprehensive initiative in New York City for women over the age of 21 who have been arrested for prostitution-related offenses. As victims of physical and sexual violence, exploitation and human trafficking, many of these women lack both the fortitude and the support that they need to escape the cycle of re-arrest and re-victimization. WISE (the name is an acronym for Women’s Independence, Safety, and Empowerment) provides this support through individual and group counseling, as well as by teaching financial literacy to promote economic self-sufficiency.

An unusual approach is one of the key strategies that signal an ideological shift.

When approached by Francesca Rosenberg to design the Meet Me publication for MoMA’s Access Programs, we were given three criteria:

1. Must use hot-pink color. (I’m not kidding. If you know Francesca Rosenberg, MoMA’s Director of Access and Community Programs, you would know that this is a legitimate request.)

2. Don’t make it look like a guidebook (even though, in its essence, it is a guidebook).

3. Make the content accessible to three diverse audiences: museum professionals, care organizations, and individual families.

The unusual color request was just one sign of how MoMA’s Access Program educators were contributing to an ideological shift in the way both institutions and individuals think about Alzheimer’s disease. This was not going to be just another black-and-gray manual. The intention was to create a book that was uplifting in both function and form, focusing on the fact that life can still be meaningful and joyful for these families, a book that embodies the mission and focus of the Meet Me at MoMA program. This was going to be a book about inspiring meaningful interactive experiences, making connections between people and art, and making art accessible. It would be anything but a guidebook.

Left: Guy de Cointet. We must not think that cold… 1982. Ink and pencil on paper, 20 x 25 5/8" (50.8 x 65.1 cm). Committee on Drawings Funds. © 2010 Estate of Guy de Cointet. Right: Guy de Cointet. I can’t wait… 1982. Ink and pencil on paper, 21 x 14 3/4" (53.3 x 37.5 cm). Committee on Drawings Funds. © 2010 Estate of Guy de Cointet

The artist Guy de Cointet (French, 1934–1983) was fascinated with language, which he explored primarily through performance and drawing. His practice involved collecting random phrases, words, and even single letters from popular culture and literary sources—he often cited Raymond Roussel’s Surrealist novel Impressions of Africa as influential—and working these elements into non-linear narratives, which were presented as plays to his audience. Paintings and works on paper would then figure prominently within these performances. In his play At Sunrise . . . A Cry Was Heard (1976), a large painting depicting letters bisected by a white sash served as a main subject and prop, with the lead actress continuously referring to it and reading its jumble of letters as if it were an ordinary script. His drawings likewise are almost readable but just beyond comprehension.

Acquired for MoMA’s collection in May, these two drawings are strong examples of de Cointet’s scriptive compositions, which, alongside abstract forms, are reduced to algorithmic visual codes rather than narrative sentences. In these two particular works the artist meticulously reversed the direction of the inscriptions, a technique more commonly known as “mirror writing.” One must hold the drawing up to a mirror in order to read it—a performative act that was not lost on de Cointet. Building upon this mirroring technique, he further obscured the texts in these two works by altering their orientation as well: I can’t wait… has to be rotated once to the left for the text to be legible, and to read the text in We must not think that cold… one must turn the drawing upside down. Once deciphered, the texts read as snippets of mundane conversations, such as “I can’t wait! But first I’ve to wash my hands.” In other instances sentences are cut off mid-word, as in “work of their dis-,” only to have a new line of text begin below, leaving it up to the viewer to complete the sentence.

De Cointet is now recognized as one of the major figures in the Conceptual art movement that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1970s, having strongly influenced a number of prominent artists working in southern California today, including Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, for whom both drawing and performance figure significantly in their artistic practices.

Installation view including Sandworm Jaws prop from the feature film Beetlejuice (1988)

I like to compare the process of organizing a large-scale museum exhibition like Tim Burton to the process of producing a film. (What can I say, I’m a film person!) You start with an idea, and then research the subject as if you were writing a script—in the case of a gallery show, this means determining what art, objects, media, and documentation are available, and how they can most effectively be used to tell a “story.” Ideally, you want your interpretation of the materials to seem fresh and relevant to a contemporary audience. Typically you negotiate for the loan of materials to your show from various archives around the world—sort of like signing “stars” to a film—and then work with teams of exhibition designers, graphic artists, lighting technicians, A/V folks, carpenters, and so forth to bring your show to life in a gallery, just as the director and producers collaborate with a production department on the lot of a film studio during the making of a movie.

Left: Long cylindrical palisade cells, the primary site of light absorption and photosynthesis, are found just below the upper surface of a leaf. Image courtesy University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Life Sciences; Right: A merged GIS-based model of the New York-New Jersey Upper Bay, emphasizing the fluid continuity of topography and bathymetry. Deepest areas are indicated in dark blue, highest elevations in green. © Palisade Bay Team: Guy Nordenson and Associates, Catherine Seavitt Studio, and Architecture Research Office

Catherine Seavitt, AIA LEED AP, is the Principal of Catherine Seavitt Studio in New York and co-author, with Guy Nordenson and Adam Yarinsky, of the book On the Water: Palisade Bay.

As one of the authors of the 2007 Latrobe Prize study On the Water: Palisade Bay, the backstory project that led to the development of the MoMA Rising Currents workshop and exhibition, I often get asked the question, “How did you come up with the title Palisade Bay?”  It’s a three-part answer.

Sherlock, Jr. 1924. USA. Directed by Buster Keaton

These notes accompany the program Buster’s Planet, which screens on January 27, 28, and 29 in Theater 3.

Joseph Francis “Buster” Keaton (1895–1966) began appearing in his family’s vaudeville act at the age of three. Charles Chaplin made his first stage appearance at five. Psychologists can have—and have had—a field day tracing all kinds of problems to this lack of an ordinary childhood in the cinema’s two greatest comedy stars. The simple fact, perhaps, is that they loved to perform and make people laugh. Buster, whose nickname has been attributed to Harry Houdini, followed in Charlie’s footsteps, entering films in 1917 (four years later than Chaplin) under the tutelage of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.

Tobacco shop in Yokohama, Japan. Photo: Azby Brown

At the moment Joan Jonas is on a residency at Kita-Kyushu in western Japan. She has worked in Japan several times since her first visit in 1970, when she bought a portable video camera and began her exploration of media art. The immediacy and reality of video entranced Joan. It was so unlike the stark artificiality of traditional Japanese theater. There, the actors moved at a glacial, mesmerizing pace across a spare stage, and the productions, often stretching over an entire day, made time dissolve. The formality and ritual of Japanese performance became integral to Joan’s work, as can be seen in Mirage, the installation currently on view in the Media Gallery. She wrote that Noh and Kabuki, the two poles-apart forms of traditional Japanese theater, taken together contain every idea that has ever been realized on a stage.