Installation view of Tim Burton exhibition entrance with Monster Mouth

If I were to begin with a formal history of the Museum’s eighty or so gallery exhibitions on filmmakers, film studios, and international filmmaking since 1939, this might make for a dull start to our Burton blogs. Instead, here’s my personal story of how MoMA’s Tim Burton began.

In fact I can tell you the precise moment when the idea popped into my head. It happened on July 31, 2005 (my birthday by the way), at an 11:00 a.m. screening of Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the Kaufman Astoria Stadium 14 Cinema in Queens, NY. Today, now that all of the single-screen neighborhood movie theaters I spent my childhood in are gone, my favorite place and time to go to a movie is a large multiplex at the earliest morning screening when the melancholy of the deserted, over-sized spaces somehow speaks to my feelings of nostalgia for past movie-going experiences.

I think it’s a really vital moment for photography right now. Over the past few years, a number of artists have re-opened the discussion on the nature of photography, investigating the materials and processes of the medium itself. Of course, this recent examination is part of a long lineage of experimentation in photography, seen in the work of artistic giants such as László Moholy-Nagy (included in MoMA’s current Bauhaus exhibition) as well as in more recent experimentation by artists such as James Welling. Walead Beshty is active in many of these discussions, as both a writer on the subject and an artist addressing the basic processes of photography.

As of yesterday, the Rising Currents teams are now in residence at P.S.1. I’ve asked each of the team leaders to share some of their initial thoughts with you. Here are their reflections on their designated sites and the architects-in-residence program.

ZONE 1: David J. Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, Paul Lewis, LTL Architects

Team LTL hits the ground running or, to be precise, the ambiguous line between ground and water in a site mostly constructed by dredging and infill over the past hundred years. We are thrilled to be given the opportunity by MoMA to work collaboratively at P.S.1 through Rising Currents to investigate the challenges and opportunities that face the uncertain future of the harbor area. While the site given is local, primarily defined by Liberty State Park and the two historic islands, the challenge is global. We look forward to collaborating with our colleagues gathered at P.S.1.

View of Historic Ferry Slip

View of New Jersey Turnpike from LTL Architects site

These notes accompany the screening of D. W. Griffith’s</em> The Birth of a Nation</a> on November 18 and 19 in Theater 3, and on November 20 in Theater 2.</p>

The Birth of a Nation. 1915. USA. Directed by D. W. Griffith. Acquired from Progress Films. Restored with funding from The Lillian Gish Trust for Film Preservation and the Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Fund

In last week’s post, we discussed how Claes Oldenburg made his oversized soft sculpture Floor Cake, and we considered some of its current condition issues. This week we are conducting a more in-depth examination of the materials Oldenburg used to create the work. Material analysis will assist us in the development of a plan to treat the sculpture. Our treatment decisions may change as our understanding of Floor Cake increases through continued examination of both the object and its place in art history.

Oldenburg painting his first soft sculptures on the floor of the Green Gallery. Floor Cake can be seen in the background. Image courtesy of MoMA

When developing a treatment plan for a work of art, it is essential to understand as much as possible about the materials the artist used. At MoMA, we keep extensive files on the artists and objects in our collection—from curatorial files containing past articles, acquisition information, and correspondence, to Conservation Department records documenting previous treatments, condition history, and technical analysis, among other materials—so that’s where we usually start. After reviewing all those sources, we undertook a thorough examination of the object. We began by photographing Floor Cake using a variety of lighting techniques to attempt to tease out as much information as possible. Under normal light conditions we observed that the chocolate drop appeared significantly more saturated than the rest of the cake. The drop has that gloss and sheen we associate with an oil-based paint. We suspected that Oldenburg was using acrylic paint as well as an oil-based paint he may have had left over from The Store. (For The Store, as we discussed in our first post, he used an alkyd resin paint or an ester modified with drying oils.)

To help promote MoMA’s Tim Burton retrospective, we asked Burton himself to animate the MoMA logo for a thirty-second video that would be used to promote the exhibition on television, at the Museum, and online. Tim quickly came up with a concept utilizing stop-motion animation, and he asked Allison Abbate, his producer on Corpse Bride (2005) and the upcoming full-length version of Frankenweenie, if she could help pull things together.

Screenshot of the timeline section of the Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity website

Though the contributors from our department (Digital Media) might occasionally indulge in geek speak, we wanted to offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse into some of the projects and collaborations in which we are involved across the Museum and beyond.

We are particularly excited about the slew of exhibitions coming up, starting with Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, which opens this month. For the exhibition site, we worked with Hello Design in California. We hadn’t worked with them before, but we liked their approach to content and design for the subject matter. Because the Bauhaus has been such an inspiration to so many who came after, we asked Hello what inspired them. How did they create a simple, functional site that captures the spirit of the Bauhaus?

Vik Muniz. Action Photo, after Hans Namuth from Pictures of Chocolate. 1997. Chromogenic color print. The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in honor of Adriana Cisneros de Griffin through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund. © The Estate of Hans Namuth and Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Vik Muniz is one of the smartest and funniest artists that I have had the pleasure of working with. Last year, as part of the Artist’s Choice exhibition series, Muniz curated a show drawn from the Museum’s collection, and I worked closely with him to realize the project, titled Rebus. Muniz’s installation was one of the most memorable exhibitions from the series, and it gave me insight into the artist’s working process. This collaboration resulted from a long and ongoing relationship—since Muniz first exhibited his work at MoMA in 1997 in New Photography 13, the Museum has been showing and collecting his photographs. MoMA has recently added to the collection a key picture by Muniz, Action Photo, after Hans Namuth from Pictures of Chocolate, and we hope to continue our exploration and appreciation of this leading artist’s work.

Bauhaus Lounge, The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Center

Matching the artwork with the living room couch is one of the perennial concerns of any collector. But when it comes to the Bauhaus, which was as much about designing couches as it was about artworks, finding the right furniture piece shouldn’t be a problem. Or so it seemed to us at the Education Department. During the exhibition Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, we imagined turning the reading room space in MoMA’s Cullman building into a Bauhaus Lounge, equipped with Bauhaus furniture for visitors to relax on while they watch a video of a reconstruction of Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet or browse through Bauhaus literature. We thought we had enough original Bauhaus-designed chairs lying around MoMA’s buildings that it couldn’t be too hard to put such a lounge together. We do have a Wassily chair (no one remembers where it came from) that sits in the Education offices; we also snatched away a few other chairs from a conference room and two Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs from outside of Glenn Lowry’s office waiting area (his office wants them back after the show).

Leslie Hewitt has a way with space. When I first saw her work (the series Riffs on Real Time at the Studio Museum Harlem), I liked how the pictorial space in the pictures was flattened, calling my attention to the photograph’s surface. Of course, we all know that photographs are two-dimensional, but they can be pretty convincing windows into a seemingly real world. In her work, Leslie counters this illusion by creating pictures wherein space is collapsed, compressed, or disoriented. I was not surprised to learn that she is also a sculptor, which can be seen in her methodical approach to image-making.