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The new modern: itineraries: in which seven critics and art historians traverse the Museum of Modern Art's immense new complex, highlighting what they liked most and speculating on future directions for this perpetual work-in-progress
Art in America, March, 2005 by Linda Nochlin, Franz Schulze, Kenneth E. Silver, Charles Stuckey, Brooks Adams, Joseph Jacobs, Nancy Princethal
Going nearly three years without a visit to MOMA has been a challenge for countless art lovers in New York and around the country and the world. When the museum closed in 2002 for an unprecedented expansion and renovation, to the tune of some $425 million, it established a temporary outpost across the East River in Queens. Despite some engaging, ambitious shows there (Max Beckmann, Picasso-Matisse, retrospectives of Dieter Roth and Lee Boutecou) and the novelty of seeing Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in an informal warehouse-like setting, MOMA QNS was ultimately just a reminder of how much was missing from the museum landscape.
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Thus, when MOMA finally reopened on Nov. 20, there was a pent-up hunger to have the collection available again, along with a good deal of curiosity about Yoshio Taniguchi's grand new design. Always conscious of its own history, MOMA rushed to get the building finished by the museum's 75th anniversary (and, not incidentally, in time for the holiday crowds). Although the deadline was met in architectural terms, there were a few curatorial gaps, particularly in the sixth floor temporary-exhibition galleries. These lofty spaces were empty except for two giant works from the collection, James Rosenquist's F-111 (1964-65) and Ellsworth Kelly's Sculpture for a Large Wall (1957). The museum deliberately focused its inaugural efforts on the permanent collection, the only exception being several small temporary shows related to the building and its renovation. As this issue goes to press, the museum's first big temporary show is opening on the sixth floor, but it, too, is institutional in focus: MOMA curator Ann Temkin's installation of 74 postwar artworks from the collection of financial services giant UBS, 44 of which are being donated to MOMA. (MOMA trustee Donald B. Marron was instrumental in assembling the collection when he was CEO of PaineWebber, which was acquired by UBS in 2001.) As for the much anticipated contemporary programming, a show of photographer Thomas Demand opens on Mar. 1; Elizabeth Murray and Brice Marden surveys are reportedly in the works.
Now occupying the better part of an entire block, the museum is able to present a greater percentage o fits classic holdings as well as many of its recent acquisitions. Initially, some observers complained about the museum's steep $20 admission fee, but this doesn't appear to have deterred the thousands of visitors who have been thronging the museum since the reopening. While opinion about the architecture and the reinstallation varies widely (see the following pieces), there seems to be a consensus that it's a joyful occasion, especially in post-9/11 New York, to have the museum and its unequaled holdings of modern masterpieces once again open to the public on East 53rd Street.
Linda Nochlin
The moment I walked into the new Museum of Modern Art, I thought about power: how it is exercised, and how it is concealed within an institutional setting. Proceeding through the vast but stylistically understated new entrance hall, extending from 53rd Street to 54th, I was reminded of Foucault's assertion that symbolic power is invisible and can be exercised only with the complicity of those who fail to recognize that they submit to it. Power is tolerable, Foucault said, "only on the condition that it mask a considerable part of itself." Power's symbolic currency might be the theme song of the new, enlarged MOMA, and concealment of power the subtext of its mission. My suspicions about power and invisibility were confirmed when I read the forthright words of its creator, Yoshio Taniguchi: "Raise a lot of money for me, I'll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I'll make the architecture disappear" [John Updike, "Invisible Cathedral," New Yorker, Nov. 15, 2004, p. 106].
One place in the new MOMA where the hand of the architect is vividly present, however, and where power loses its symbolic currency in favor of overt display, is in the vast central atrium, the heart of the new building and the first stop on my inaugural visit. Here, Monet's Water Lilies, a work dependent upon intimate engagement with its painterly refinements, and Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, a classical ruin, modernist style, originally meant for outdoor display, are reduced to postage-stamp and matchstick size by the overwhelming scale of the setting. Even though the museum's program included a large central space, the architect surely carried the mandate to an extreme. It is as though the self-effacing Taniguchi, in a startling return of the repressed, had thought: "You think you're big stuff, you artists: well, I'll show you what big is."
There is no doubt this is a brilliant piece of institutional architecture, no doubt that the windowed insertions of bits of the New York cityscape are entrancing as they locate the museum in the Midtown environment and, not incidentally, orient the visitor in unfamiliar surroundings. But neutrality is in itself a forceful statement. So much neutrality, so much low-keyed denial--at times it made me long for the show-off assertiveness of a Gehry or a Koolhaas. And the modernist whiteness of the walls, a classic ploy for downplaying the surface, becomes painful after a while. The artist Sylvia Sleigh ran up to me at the opening saying: "Tell them not to make it so white. It makes my eyes ache!"
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