
Yoko Ono at The Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden. 2015. Photograph by Kishin Shinoyama. Courtesy Lenono Photo Archive, New York. © Yoko Ono 2015
Yoko Ono at The Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden. 2015. Photograph by Kishin Shinoyama. Courtesy Lenono Photo Archive, New York. © Yoko Ono 2015
When you visit a modern art museum it can be easy to find yourself looking at a blank white canvas or a pile of bricks and wonder, “How is this art? Shouldn’t art be about something?” The problem of appreciating art is not limited to casual viewers. As an artist and employee at MoMA, I too can find it tough to relate to certain artworks. But the good news is that we can do more than just throw up our hands and ask for our money back. With a bit of imagination, we can make up our own ideas about an artwork and those stories may end up having more meaning to us than any art historical analysis.
Through examining four pieces in The Museum of Modern Art’s collection, one can better understand how John Cage’s embrace of indeterminacy can be traced in the period following 4’33” (1952) and in more recent years, and how these later works play with the concepts of chance and the ephemeral in different ways.
Example of an “information packet,” comprised of various related items, that Seth Siegelaub stapled together
One of the challenging and fundamental responsibilities an archivist faces in his or her work is determining the “original order” of a person or organization’s records.
After spending the past six months processing the Art & Project/Depot VBVR Gift as Project Cataloger at the MoMA Library, it seems timely to report on the venerable cache of materials.
Dieter Roth. Hat. 1965. Screenprint over offset. Publisher and printer: the artist, New Haven. Edition: approx. 20 unique variants. The Museum of Modern Art. The Print Associates Fund, 2009. © 2010 Estate of Dieter Roth
Dieter Roth was a singularly important figure in postwar European art—an iconoclast, really—whose wide-ranging practice, including artist’s books, prints, drawings, sculpture, assemblages, sound recordings, film, music, and poetry, reverberated for decades to come. He was associated with kinetic art, Fluxus, Conceptual art, and concrete poetry, often blurring the boundaries between mediums and movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
As a printmaker, he totally pushed the envelope. He sent slices of greasy sausage and cheese through the printing press, stuck strips of licorice onto etchings, glued croissants onto the covers of the books he designed. He also worked with more traditional techniques like screenprint and etching, sometimes combining them to play with different experimental effects.
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