MoMA’s celebration of the landmark year 1913 continues with the tenth in a series of videos highlighting important works from 1913 in the Museum’s collection.

According to Albert Einstein, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”

Maarten Baas. Sweeper’s Clock. 2009. Video, 720 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the designer

As much as I like that idea, and really I do, it seems to me that all too often time stops doing its job, and instead everything starts happening at once, or at least not happening in a timely fashion.

Over the past nine months, Inside/Out readers have been following MoMA’s Jackson Pollock Conservation Project, the study and restoration of three iconic Pollock paintings in the Museum’s collection.

Put a group of student artists in a room with five hours to complete three days’ worth of work—and then tell them they have to exhibit their work to the public at MoMA the following day.

These notes accompany the Non-California Dreaming: The American Avant-Garde, Program 2 (1948–60) screening program on May 1, 2, and 3.

After Maya Deren (with husband Alexander Hammid) directed Meshes of the Afternoon and moved back east, and Amos Vogel founded Cinema 16, California ceased to be the exclusive center of the independent film movement, and New York became a rival.

Installation view of Gallery 10 in MoMA’s second-floor Contemporary Galleries. Photo © 2013 Jonathan Muzikar

When I was in graduate school studying art history, we used to joke about the “this looks like this” problem that we perceived as running rampant in the field. Stated simply, the problem is that it’s very easy to find visual similarities between objects that really have nothing historically, contextually, or subjectively to do with each other.

MoMA’s celebration of the landmark year 1913 continues with the ninth in a series of videos highlighting important works from 1913 in the Museum’s collection.

A Trip from Here to There, a recently opened collection exhibition in the Paul J. Sachs Drawings Galleries organized by Jodi Hauptman, Curator, Department of Drawings, and Luis Pérez-Oramas, the Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art, explores how peripatetic artists represent the routes of their wanderings. Though the paths they trace are personal, many of these artists adopt printed maps as their starting points;

Meshes of the Afternoon. 1943. USA. Directed by Maya Deren

These notes accompany the California Dreaming: The American Avant-Garde, 1942–58 screening program on April 24, 25, and 26.

Although nothing quite comparable to the French Surrealist films of the 1920s came out of America, the occasional maverick production had appeared on the periphery of Hollywood over the years.