"Modern Starts": Raising the Barr?

Art in America, May, 2000 by Charles Stuckey

In a provocative series of theme-based exhibitions drawn from its permanent collection, MOMA explores new museum display ideas for the 21st century and beyond.

The umbrella enterprise "MOMA2000," unfolding from October 1999 until February 2001, is probably the most ambitious project ever attempted at the Museum of Modern Art, at least judging from "Modern Starts," the initial cycle of three interrelated, chronologically sequential permanent collection displays, subdivided into "People," "Places" and "Things." "MOMA2000" is a way to let visitors see as much of the permanent collection as possible before the 53rd Street building closes for expansion until 2004. Indeed, "MOMA2000" demonstrates why, and how badly, architectural enlargement is needed at this time.

The aggregate capacity of the museum's existing galleries is sufficient for the presentation of only one cycle of "MOMA2000" at a time, with each cycle intended to survey a broad selection drawn from roughly 40 years' worth of the museum's art. Ergo, MOMA is only about one-third the ideal size for its collections, which, with the 21st century still to come, continue to grow. Anyone can foresee that just down the historical road there will be a need to expand the newly enlarged gallery spaces yet again, simply in order to keep up with the relentlessly sprawling future of art. Without expansion, museums like MOMA are already obliged to choose among problematic alternatives. Either curators must pare down the portion of the collection placed on view to essentials ("masterpieces," speaking rhetorically), and thus risk contempt from anti-elitists and pluralists of every stripe, or they must present the collection in repertory fashion, part by part, until every phase of art has had its turn. This latter option effectively transforms the permanent collection into a resource for an ongoing series of special exhibitions, with all the educational opportunities developed in recent years to accompany such events, and all the latest marketing options. In the future, "MOMA2000"-style permanent collection shows are likely to proliferate worldwide.

Programming options aside, the Museum of Modern Art has been a major force for change in museum attitudes ever since its founding in 1929. For example, MOMA's expanded definition of what should count as museum art has helped to foster the overcrowding that propels today's museum building boom. While respecting the standard categories of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints and decorative arts, MOMA extended full recognition to photography, film, architecture and commercial design.

The curators of "Modern Starts" were John Elderfield, Peter Reed, Mary Chan and Maria del Carmen Gonzalez, and their work embodied a trans-departmental approach. Indeed, as if to indicate that there is no end in sight to the museum's embrace of an ever-expanding variety of modern-art categories, this curatorial team chose to include video works (by Martha Rosler, Gary Hill and Bill Viola) as well as installation pieces (by Sol LeWitt, Maria Fernanda Cardoso and Michael Craig-Martin--his computer-generated). Of course, these post-1960s works, anachronisms with respect to the 1880-1920 chronological framework of "Modern Starts," should probably be understood as threads to tie this first cycle of the project into the final cycle, the way an overture to a Broadway musical often incorporates themes from the second or third acts.

Rather than creating new curatorial departments for each new category of art, with "Modern Starts" MOMA seems to signal a welcome decision to commingle its separate departments. In the past, MOMA, like other museums, assigned separate gallery spaces to each curatorial department, the lion's share going to the department of painting and sculpture. This segregation of works by category avoided the administrative challenges of coordinating the staffs and volunteer support groups for separate departments, but mostly it was predicated on the quite different display requirements of works in different mediums. Light-sensitive works on paper need to be mounted in less brightly illuminated galleries than paintings and sculpture; in addition, photographs, drawings and prints are usually small in size. For many viewers accustomed to traditional museum display, small images look awkward next to large ones, and galleries in which the light level shifts from wall to wall still seem odd.

For example, one of the galleries in the "Composing with the Figure" section of "People" featured late 19th-century paintings by Klimt, van Gogh, Signac and Vuillard, all incorporating boldly colored fabric and wallpaper patterns. In this same room the single less brightly lighted wall with stark black-and-white photographs of workers seemed out of place, in terms of scale, mood and lighting. As often as not in "Modern Starts," works on paper were grouped together, and many galleries with photographs and drawings held few if any paintings or sculptures. Integration was easier to arrange on a gallery-to-gallery basis, so that a viewer in a particular subsection might move from a gallery of paintings and sculpture to one of drawings and then through one of photographs before coming to another predominantly showing paintings and sculpture.