MoMA | Tag: Department of Media and Performance Art

Posts tagged ‘Department of Media and Performance Art’

January 27, 2016 | Artists, Collection & Exhibitions

MoMA Collects: Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions

Posted by Nancy Lim, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture

Before moving to New York in 1959, choreographer Simone Forti spent four heady, formative years in San Francisco. There, she trained with the postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin, who rejected the stylistic constraints of ballet and modern dance. On Halprin’s outdoor dance deck in wooded Marin County, Forti explored improvisation, her motions guided by a keen alertness to the body’s anatomy. She also organized open-work sessions with her then husband, the Minimalist artist Robert Morris, gathering artists for communal, multidisciplinary explorations of movement, objects, sound, and light.

Experiencing Andrea Geyer’s Insistence at MoMA

Posted by Danielle Jackson, Friends of Education 12-Month Intern, Department of Media and Performance Art

Andrea Geyer. Insistence. 2013. Video (color, sound), 15:21 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Modern Women’s Fund. © 2015 Andrea Geyer, courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne

A large video projection opens with a view of a finely stained wooden surface. The hand of an unidentified woman appears on the right and a postcard portrait of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller—who, along with Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, founded The Museum of Modern Art in 1929—is strategically placed in the center of the frame.

Collecting Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room

Posted by Martha Joseph, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance Art

In 1969 American composer Alvin Lucier first performed his landmark work I Am Sitting in a Room, conceived for voice and electromagnetic tape. Lucier read a text into a microphone. Attempting to smooth out his stutter, he began with the lines, “I am sitting in a room, the same one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice.” As described in the text, his voice was recorded, then played back into the room. This process was repeated, and with each iteration Lucier’s recorded speech grew muddled, sounding distant, and specific sonic frequencies started to dominate the recorded sound.