Sunday, December 12, 2004

Modern art notes

Thank you, Greg, for the MoMA passes you sent me. I initially intended to give them to recent immigrants who know nothing of modern art, and in fact I will do that eventually. But an opportunity came up, so last weekend I took Mr and Mrs N to MoMA. They're not immigrants; they're just visitors from abroad. And although they're not rich, they could afford the $20 admission, especially considering how weak the dollar is these days. But I wanted to see how relatively unsophisticated visitors would respond to the new MoMA.

When I wrote about the MoMA entrance fee last month, I basically attacked the priorities of MoMA's board: they clearly seemed much more interested in spending money on architecture than they were in bringing great art to the masses. So using my overseas visitors as representative of said masses, I tailed along behind them, looking to see what they liked, what they didn't, how they reacted to the new museum.

The Ns loved the Picassos. Picasso is pretty much the only modern artist they knew well, they'd seen the Picasso Matisse show, and they loved coming back to many of the same paintings again. The lesson here is that repeat visits are hugely important, even when there are gaps of a year or more between them. And the $20 entry fee certainly mitigates against repeat visits: once you've "been there and done that" you're less likely to shell out a second time, absent some special exhibition you haven't seen before. In fact, however, if and when you do return, it's more than likely that you'll have a much better time on your repeat visit.

MoMA's actually a prime example of this: by the time our visit was over, I was utterly exhausted. Many people have remarked upon the woeful paucity of seating at MoMA; when that is combined with visits which can take hours, lots of walking, and lots of intense focusing on art, you end up leaving the museum utterly drained. Familiar art is, well, a bit like Matisse's comfy armchair: it's just as rewarding, but less work, than unfamiliar art.

Yet the Ns were undaunted by the huge array of utterly unfamiliar art that they faced at MoMA. I was especially impressed with the time and effort that they put into the contemporary galleries, which are now undoubtedly the centerpiece of the new MoMA.

It's important to remember that there are two types of people in this world: the kind of people who would never dream of taking a freight elevator up to the 11th floor of a gallery building in West Chelsea in order to see a small Morandi show, and the kind of people who would never dream of not doing so. Pretty much all the visitors to the new MoMA fall into the former category, while pretty much all the people who've written about it so far fall into the latter.

Mr and Mrs N went straight for the contemporary galleries upon entering the building: it's only natural, the way it's laid out. For all the talk of the Signac starting off the exhibition, in fact it was pretty much the last painting we saw, more than three hours after we entered. The real start of the exhibition is the lobby, with the Newman sculpture and the late paintings from Monet, de Kooning and Johns; after that, it's right on into Matta-Clark and Twombly.

Neither of the Ns recognised a single work of art in the contemporary galleries. Art-world types look straight at the Twombly or the Koons and immediately it plops into its designated space in their mental filing cabinet. It's always good to see such works afresh, but it's very easy to forget how difficult they are the first time they're encountered. The Ns spent a lot of time in the contemporary galleries, not because they loved the art, but because they took care to really look at every work individually, read the (generally excellent) wall texts if there were any, and make a serious attempt to engage with the art and try to understand it.

The primary example of this, in my mind, came not in the contemporary galleries but upstairs, on the fourth floor. MoMA's collection of minimalists is nothing compared to Dia's, of course, but they still attempt a show, albeit with the idiotic decision to exhibit a Carl Andre floor piece while at the same time not allowing people to stand on it. Given that at least, oh, 60% of the power of an Andre comes when you stop onto it, the decision does seem to defeat the purpose of showing it in the first place. But not far from the Andre is a Sandback string piece. Mrs N looked at it briefly, and immediately asked an incredibly good question. The piece is illuminated by four or five spotlights, which mean that the string creates multiple shadows on the wall behind it. Mrs N wanted to know whether the illumination and the series of shadows was part of the artwork or not – a very astute comment, especially considering that the whole concept of a piece of string as art would probably have struck her as utterly ludicrous only an hour or two earlier.

In the contemporary galleries, wordy installations, especially the the Rem Koolhaas piece, received a lot of time just because there's a lot of text to read. But all the other pieces did too, from Felix Gonzales-Torres's paired clocks to Andy Warhol's Rorschach painting. And it struck me that thousands of people every week will view the content of the contemporary galleries at MoMA as being a snapshot of the very best contemporary art there is – just as MoMA has the very best post-impressionists or cubists or abstract expressionists.

MoMA, then does not have the same kind of freedom that other museums have, to put on interesting takes on marginal artists or a contrarian view of contemporary practice. The rest of the museum is so canonical – and the art in the contemporary galleries, with their super-high ceilings, is presented as so important – that MoMA is essentially forced to both play it safe and to seriously get to work improving its collection of art from the past 30 years. Let the Pompidou Center in Paris be the place to go for eye-opening exhibitions which change the way we look at contemporary art – or put those on in the gorgeous 6th-floor special exhibition galleries. The big contemporary galleries off the main atrium make an unambiguous architectural statement that they house great and important art.

Of course, there are two enormous problems with this. Firstly, no one can agree on which contemporary artists are the greatest and most important; and secondly, MoMA probably doesn't own the best work by those artists anyway. Maybe the solution is to mix things up a bit: rather than adhering to the strictly chronological segregation which MoMA has at the moment, bring some of the great paintings from upstairs down to the contemporary galleries, and start setting up shows where Picasso and Duchamp are seen alongside their heirs.

For the time being, though, the main result of my visit with the Ns was that I left with a newfound sense of awe for the responsibilities that MoMA's curators toil under. Visitors to MoMA, if the Ns are any indication, are not looking for easy art, and nor are they looking to be entertained. They're willing to put in a lot of work, if that's what modern art requires. In return, MoMA should do its utmost to repay the effort, by treating art – especially contemporary art – with the seriousness it deserves, and by making the development of a world-class contemporary art collection the museum's number one priority. They've got a great space, and they've got a great audience. Now all they need is great art.

Posted by Felix at 18:58 EST