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

Nancy Princenthal

It is striking--in fact, it's a little odd--that the first contemporary work commissioned by MOMA on the occasion of its rebuilding is an antiquarian idyll. Buried in the deepest residual part of the original 1939 building, Mark Dion's Rescue Archaeology (82nd in the longstanding "Projects" series, whose future is murky) is an absorbing historical study of the museum's physical environs. In preparation for its most recent incarnation, MOMA excavated its sculpture garden to a depth of 15 feet, which hadn't been done for more than 70 years. Rooting around in the debris thus uncovered, Dion found fragments of architectural decoration and household fixtures from the two townhouses that once occupied the site, home to several generations of Rockefellers (including those associated with the museum's founding). Dion is presenting [through Mar. 14] the fruits of his labor in an awkward gallery adjacent to a basement auditorium [see review p. 143]. The reconstructed mantels; dusted-off doorknobs, bells and bottles; retrieved marble cornices and chunks of stenciled plaster are enlivened by the recollections of David Rockefeller, who lived in one of the townhouses as a boy and was interviewed by Dion and curator Roxana Marcoci for the exhibition brochure. But for all its rich social and cultural interest, Rescue Archaeology is, in its conception, fundamentally conservative.

In the new galleries devoted to contemporary art on the second floor, the interest in retrospection and in architecture--two emphases acknowledged by painting and sculpture curator Ann Temkin--is sustained. Temkin organized this first installation of the collection along with fellow painting and sculpture curator Anne Umland and that department's chief curator, John Elderfield. Other curators, including Peter Galassi from photography, Deborah Wye from prints and illustrated books, and Gary Garrels of drawings (whose departure for UCLA's Hammer Museum was announced on Jan. 21), were also involved, as was painting and sculpture curator Joachim Pissarro, until he was sidelined by another project.

The contemporary galleries' signature stroke, visible even before entering, is Gordon Matta-Clark's 1974 Bingo (a new acquisition), which is assembled from three sections cut out of a red-shingled house, reordered and set in a diagonal line across the floor. Especially with Dion's project in mind, Matta-Clark looks less like a freewheeling dismantler than a careful preservationist of vernacular style, a theme that is restated throughout. In the rooms devoted to the most recent art, thematically related works include Rachel Whiteread's cast-plaster sitting room, Doris Salcedo's cement-smothered wooden furniture and Toba Khedoori's meticulously drafted rows of traditional doors. Josiah McElheny's glamorous mirrored glass vessels seem (among other things) generically antique, as do Matthew Barney's props, in this case all black and white, and looking like a display in a Victorian haberdashery (albeit one of rather advanced eccentricity). Even David Hammons's High Falutin' (1990), provocative under other circumstances, here partakes of a trend toward shabby chic, with its dented basketball hoop and windowlike backboard, framed with chandelier sconces and flickering flame-shaped bulbs; its solidarity with nearby work in effect mutes the implicit sound of shattered glass.