MoMA | Tag: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection

Posts tagged ‘Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection’

March 30, 2011 | Collection & Exhibitions, Fluxus

Off the Shelf: Vintage Fluxus

Posted by Emily Schlemowitz, Intern, Department of Publications

This is the first post in the new series Off the Shelf, which explores unique MoMA publications from the Museum Archives.

From left: Front Cover: Yoko Ono. Montage incorporating photographic images of Rolf Jährling, Iain Macmillan, Nancy Mee, and Nori Sato. 1988. © 1988 by Yoko Ono. Back Cover: Milan Knizak. Drawing for catalogue cover. 1988. © 1988 by Milan Knizak.

Endpapers: Ben Vautier. Assholes Wallpaper. c. 1974.

During our intern walkthrough of the exhibition Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960, we learned about Yoko Ono and George Maciunas‘s Fluxus Wallpaper</a>, which is displayed along the third-floor hallway at the entrance to Staging Action and Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography.

Unpacking Fluxus

Posted by Gretchen Wagner, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books

Various artists. Fluxkit. c. 1965. Vinyl-covered attaché case with screenprint, containing objects in various media. The Museum of Modern Art. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008

“Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order,” philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin observed in his 1931 lecture Unpacking My Library. In the museum’s tidy spaces, where a predominant curatorial objective is to make sense out of the jumbled reality of things, this opposition between organization and chaos captures the imagination. As my colleagues and I begin to work with the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift recently acquired by the MoMA—highlights of which are currently on view in the Fluxus Preview exhibition on the fourth floor—Benjamin’s proposal repeatedly comes to mind.