The Rising Currents project zone map. Courtesy Palisade Bay Team: Guy Nordenson and Associates, Catherine Seavitt Studio, Architecture Research Office

We have four interdisciplinary teams that are set to start at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center as architects-in-residence for Rising Currents one week from today. They will each have a designated workshop space but they will also be in open dialogue with each other as they work. You’re invited to see their work-in-progress at a special open house they will host on Saturday, December 12, at P.S.1. I’d like to briefly introduce each of the team leaders and their team members, and describe which sites each team will be working on.

These notes accompany the screening of Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria on November 11, 12, and 13 in Theater 3.

H. G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895, simultaneous with the birth of the movies. By sending out their cadre of globetrotting cameramen, the Lumière brothers quickly opened up the world of the present (replete with all its regional oddities and exoticism) to film audiences. Wells mastered the speculative future in the tradition of Jules Verne, but perhaps even more intriguing for filmgoers was the possibility film offered to travel back in time and retrieve the distant past.

D. W. Griffith had dabbled in this (with his In Prehistoric Days, 1913, for example), but the real heavy lifting was done by the Italians. This is appropriate, since the thousand-year history of the Roman Republic and Empire was unrivaled in its impact on the contemporary world; Italy practically owned history. This was accentuated for visual artists by the poignant beauty of surviving ruins and statuary, both in Rome and spread over three continents. Italy’s heritage contributed mightily to the seeming authenticity of its celluloid spectacles.

Last Monday, we talked about the history of Claes Oldenburg’s iconic Floor Cake sculpture, which is currently in MoMA’s Conservation Department for study and treatment. In this post we’ll discuss how the sculpture was made and how Floor Cake’s condition has resulted from natural aging combined with a heavy exhibition schedule.

The filling inside Floor Cake consists of polyurethane foam and cardboard boxes.

For his seminal 1962 triptych Floor Cake, Floor Burger, and Floor Cone, Oldenburg enlisted the help of his first wife, Patti Mucha, who used a portable Singer sewing machine and heavyweight canvas to sew the covers of these large objects. Oldenburg then coated the objects’ surfaces with paint. These works might be described as sewn object-paintings. Floor Cake, for example, consists of five layers of sewn-and-painted canvas, with two chocolate-colored layers alternating with three thinner beige layers, topped by yellow-ocher drops of decorative “icing.”

Rendering of the title wall for Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity

In December 1938, hordes of visitors packed the opening of MoMA’s Bauhaus retrospective in the temporary galleries at 14 West Forty-ninth Street in Rockefeller Center. Guests followed painted footprints and abstract graphics on the floor guiding them through the show’s seven hundred items, while reading titles rendered in handsome pin-mounted condensed letterforms. The Bauhaus’s own graphic design and typography legend, Herbert Bayer came to New York to design the exhibition himself. And today, over seventy years later, it was both the Bauhaus and Bayer’s legacy that kept most of MoMA’s Department of Graphic Design awake at night, as we began to design the title wall for Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity.

MoMA member Bibi Saks inspires her friends to clear off their counter-tops.

Is this your first trip to MoMA?
I used to live in Forest Hills when I was young. I went to school at Pratt to study painting, so I used to come here all the time. I’ve been a member ever since I was a student. I live in Massachusetts now, but this is where I come the moment I get into NYC.

How often do you come down here?
We have a timeshare in NYC, so we come down pretty often. MoMA is my second skin. You can’t check in at the hotel until 4:00 p.m., so we always come here first. It’s like Thanksgiving, the holidays—it’s a homecoming. It’s a relative. Yet every time I come here it’s exciting because there’s always something new.

Has the Museum changed much since your first visit here?
There’s more to see and more to know—it was much smaller back then. The architecture too has really become part of the experience. It’s like a yin yang. There’s so much to look at. Yes, there’s the collection, but then you stop to look at the Museum itself. I was just sitting here staring at the windows and admiring the details—it’s just exquisite.

New Photography is one of my favorite shows to organize.  Generally, it means working with artists of my own generation, and introducing work that I really believe in to a larger audience.  New Photography is about new ideas and new ways of working, and this year’s installment of the exhibition series (which has been around since 1985) is no different.  While in previous years we have highlighted work of artists that are not artistically related, this year, I decided to take a thematic approach and bring together the works of artists that participate in the lively debate on the nature of photography in the twenty-first century.  This new approach to the exhibition series is an experiment, which is very much in the spirit of the work in the show.

Aerial view of Palisade Bay. Image courtesy of Palisade Bay Team: Guy Nordenson and Associates, Catherine Seavitt Studio, Architecture Research Office

When I joined the Museum two-and-a-half years ago, I wanted to find innovative ways for the Museum to engage with contemporary practice in architecture, landscape, and design-related engineering, techniques that could complement the reactive mode of an exhibition where we show what has been done already, what we admire and is deserving of contextualization and wider publicity. There seem to be many compelling and timely issues that MoMA should be able to respond to quickly, while they are still relevant topics of dialogue and debate, issues that may require that we take the risk of committing to works and outcomes that remain to be seen.

Now we are launching a research laboratory on immediate, pressing issues. This new project is an invitation to undertake original interdisciplinary design research on “glocal” problems: global in implication but local in application and design. With the joint Rising Currents workshop and exhibition, MoMA serves in an almost unprecedented way as the incubator—rather than the mirror—of new ideas.

Blanche Sweet in Judith of Bethulia. 1914. USA. Directed by D. W. Griffith. Acquired from the artist

These notes accompany the D. W. Griffith Leaves Biograph program, which screens on November 4, 5, and 6 in Theater 3 as part of the two-year </em>An Auteurist History of Film</a> exhibition.</span></p>

1915 marked the publication of poet Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture, the first serious attempt in English to come to grips with the medium that had outgrown penny arcades and nickelodeons and was now threatening to appear in venues that would rival cathedrals. In the preceding year, as extraordinary European films like Benjamin Christensen’s The Mysterious X (released as Sealed Orders in the U.S.) and Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria were arriving on American shores, D. W. Griffith had been tearing at the seams of his constraining Biograph contract. As with so many early commentaries on the movies, Lindsay struggled to find the language that would do justice to his thoughts. (One thinks of a young Eugene O’Neill groping for words, or of Griffith himself, trying to articulate something previously undefined and unrecognized.) In fact, in his enthusiasm for film, indicative of the heady atmosphere of the times, Lindsay waxed positively Biblical, informing filmmakers:

This is the first post by the Conservation Department at MoMA. We plan to give you a behind-the-scenes look at one of our current projects. In this project, Sculpture and Painting Conservation collaborate on an investigation into one of MoMA’s iconic Pop sculptures.

Claes Oldenburg. Floor Cake. 1962

Claes Oldenburg’s Floor Cake (1962) entered into the Painting and Sculpture Department at MoMA in 1975. Measuring five by nine feet, this popular piece of painted cake has been heavily exhibited in the Museum and across the United States, and has made three transatlantic voyages. The forty-seven-year old sculpture is now in the Conservation Department lab for study and treatment.

Charles Silver, a curator in MoMA’s Department of Film, presents a series of writings to supplement the film exhibition An Auteurist History of Film. The following post accompanies the “Two Danish Innovators” program, which screens on October 28, 29, and 30 in Theater 3.

Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) has been called “the first real auteur film.” Actually, it appears now to have been a collaborative effort between director Stellan Rye (1880–1914), cameraman Guido Seeber (1879–1940), and star Paul Wegener (1874–1948), whom the same critic (Klaus Kreimeier) dubbed “the first modern German film actor.” Although the Danish Rye died fighting for Germany early in the First World War I, Seeber went on to photograph the 1914 version of The Golem and G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street and Secrets of a Soul. Wegener, a Max Reinhardt protégé, acted in or directed (or both) The Golem and its more famous 1920 remake, along with several Ernst Lubitsch films, Rex Ingram’s The Magician, and numerous films for the Nazis. In 1926, Henrik Galeen took Hanns Heinz Ewers’s story for The Student of Prague and remade it with the great Conrad Veidt as Der Student. Ewers was later the chronicler of Nazi icon Horst Wessel, who was made famous by Wegener’s 1933 film performance.

Rye’s film was a clear forerunner of the German Expressionist style and psyche, making it all the more a pity that he died so young, a tragedy that perhaps rivals Jean Vigo’s death at twenty-nine. Although shot in naturalistic locations in Prague, Rye’s imaginative facility with the camera evoked the Faust legend, E. T. A. Hoffman, and Edgar Allan Poe. If Rye had lived a normal lifespan, he might have been confronted with the choice between his native Denmark and his proto-Nazi compatriots and collaborators.