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(THE NEW YORK TIMES) Since reopening in its expanded building in 2004, the Museum of Modern Art has shaken itself up in numerous ways, some for better, others for worse. Worse includes a penchant for atrium-oriented spectacle, like Tilda Swinton sleeping in a vitrine; earsplitting music at seemingly every opening; and the debacle that was its halfhearted Björkretrospective.
Better, a larger category, encompasses adding dance and performance, approaching past and present art on global terms and also expanding the collection beyond the white-male-artist demographic.
Now change has provocatively shaken up the Modern’s relatively undisturbed sanctum sanctorum: the grand permanent collection galleries, on the fourth and fifth floors, which are typically devoted to the Modern’s unparalleled holdings in the painting-and-sculpture department.
The installation of these galleries has long been the closely guarded aegis of one or two top curators in the department. Now the fourth floor — devoted to works from 1940 to 1980 — has been reinstalled by a collective of 15 curators from across the museum. Another departure: MoMA’s movement-by-movement, Eurocentric vision of Modernism has been replaced with a wide-angle focus on a single decade.“From the Collection: 1960-1969,”a yearlong presentation, zeros in on the overfetishized 1960s, when art and politics were in turmoil and interacted with a new force, and tells its story with work by more than 200 artists from around 20 countries.
Most striking, the show evenhandedly mixes together about 370 works from all six of the museum’s curatorial departments, as well as its library and archives, on a scale that may be unprecedented in the museum’s history. Throughout a dozen often large spaces, prints, paintings, design objects and photographs vie for attention with drawings, sculpture, artists’ books and multiples, architecture, archival material, video and film. There are especially wonderful works acquired in the past 12 years by artists like Hélio Oiticica (Brazil), León Ferrari (Argentina), Jiro Takamatsu (Japan) and Sonia Svecova (the Czech Republic).
This mélange — with more expected throughout the museum — was led by two department heads: Martino Stierli, of architecture and design, and Ann Temkin, of painting and sculpture. The show is installed in strict chronology, with one or two spaces devoted to each year.
Treasures long secreted in departmental galleries have come to the center ring, like the Jaguar E-Type Roadster that dominates, perhaps a little too completely, the 1961 gallery. And oddities emerge from prolonged storage: The 1967 gallery includes the vibrant “Bus,” a life-size screen print of a Greyhound by Mason Williams, blown up from a photograph by Max Yavno and seemingly festooned with graffiti. The Modern hasn’t exhibited it since the “Word and Image”show in 1968, when artists in that exhibition were invited to add drawings and signatures.
In “1960-1969,” the area devoted to 1960 includes a seemingly digital work (but handmade) by the French painter François Morellet, hanging on an expanse of wall also covered by a wide swath of plastic Bubble Wrap, the invention of Marc A. Chavannes and Alfred W. Fielding. In a vitrine toward the end, a large phallic sculpture in rough bronze by Louise Bourgeois hangs almost threateningly above an exquisite Transcriptors hydraulic turntable in polished aluminum from 1964, designed by David Gammon.
The show is in many ways excellent, and it does, as the curators announce on the introductory wall, “shake up conventional practices within the museum.” And yet it should be excellent in different, livelier ways, more visually sustaining and stylistically diverse. The totality can create a kind of half-full and half-empty experience. It’s great to see these galleries turned into a giant laboratory for experiment, but putting everything in a blender also has a homogenizing effect.
With so many people involved in “1960-1969,” the show is especially useful as a snapshot of the curatorial hive mind at the museum. It exemplifies an admirable erudition, precision and devotion to the collection, but also a tendency toward the cerebral and austere, visible in many temporary exhibitions of recent art here. And despite the all-media embrace, there is often the sense that instead of a genuine expansion, one form of narrowness built on French Cubism has been replaced by another that is too exclusively involved with Conceptual Art.
The prevailing mood tends toward the puritanical, with the viewer’s pleasures carefully monitored. This is accomplished most strikingly by treating color as a controlled substance, limiting it primarily to three small galleries.
Shades of black, white, gray and beige abound, starting with a dour lineup of wall-pieces and reliefs by big names (Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Lee Bontecou, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol and Piero Manzoni) playing second fiddle to the Jaguar. This may have been intended to help the variety of media cohere, but it also dulls the proceedings. The Judd may be the only all-black work he ever made, although the Modern also owns a bright-blue painting of his from 1961; perhaps it clashed with the Jaguar.
Like a parched wanderer happening upon on a desert oasis, you gratefully discover the concentrations of color, like the 1964 gallery, devoted entirely to James Rosenquist’s fluorescent mural “F-111.” The other color explosions are two galleries from 1967, jammed with examples of design in high-octane hues that give the art form a new formal clarity. Opposite the “Bus” screen print is a wall plastered with gorgeous, pulsating rock posters — 75 by about 30 graphic designers, most plentifully Victor Moscoso. Next door, a stepped platform is mostly occupied by innovative seating, curvaceous forms in saturated colors by Pierre Paulin, Joe Colombo and the painter Matta, still bold after all these years.
In most galleries, one or two bright spots are tolerated. The 1965 gallery, among the best here, juxtaposes the saturated hues ofKenneth Anger’s discreetly homoerotic underground short “Kustom Kar Kommandos” (to the sound of the Paris Sisters’ “Dream Lover”), with a similar example of controlled flamboyance: Roger Tallon’s cast-aluminum “Helicoid Staircase,” a rippling spiral of cantilevered steps uncluttered by a railing. In the biggest gallery — 1968-69 — a jewel-colored abstract film by Nalini Malani, of India, faces one of Sam Gilliam’s idiosyncratic Color Field paintings, draped unstretched on the wall, splitting the difference between banner, curtain and tent.
The attempt to level the playing field among media and artists is further reflected in labels that tend toward prim and bland: They barely mention art movements or an individual artist’s significance — especially where American artists are concerned — and this makes things feel kind of random and textureless.
The leveling determination is more convincing when the curators select as a representative for the unmentioned Op Art movement not Bridget Riley but the overlooked innovator Julian Stanczak and his “This Duel” (1963), his jazzy star turn in undulating black and white lines. Instead of including Frank Stella as the avatar of Minimalist painting, the honor goes to Agnes Martin and Jo Baer.
In other gratifying departures, unfamiliar sides of a well-known artist are exposed, as with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images of the 1968 protests in Paris. Instead of signature paintings, there is a modest silk-screen of a potato by Roy Lichtenstein and small early photographs by the wizardly Sigmar Polke.
The show suffers from a poor use of space, a longtime problem at the museum. In the first three galleries, encompassing 1961-1963, crowding reduces nearly everything to the level of artifact. In contrast, the big space for 1968-1969 seems positively barren, which is also deadening. It makes perfect sense that the exhibition ends on a flat note, and a vast emptiness, with a tiny antechamber dominated by 14 black-and-white photographs taken from outer space during the Apollo missions.
MoMA describes “From the Collection: 1960-1969” as “a multifaceted look at a decade of artistic experimentation,” which may establish perimeters. Still, you can’t help but notice that nearly all the American art is from New York. And abstraction’s hegemony remains unquestioned. Except for a mostly gray, black and white self-portrait by Alex Katz and a small, steely study by Philip Guston, figurative painting is all but absent. Some of this is unavoidable. For example, the Modern owns nothing from the 1960s by the inestimable Alice Neel, but it does have a very nice portrait by Beauford Delaney and a strong little collage by Romare Bearden.
Fortunately, this presentation will see numerous rotations and switch-outs over the year, and I look forward to returning. Maybe there will be a loosening, a relinquishing of some of the Modern’s authority and control, and a greater openness to all kinds of art as well as all kinds of artists.
As with too many museums today, the Modern’s superb curatorial staff reminds me of a historical bon mot directed at graduates of elite French academies: “They know everything. Unfortunately they don’t know anything else.” For all its emphasis on diversity, the Modern’s own house is not quite in order. Surely its blinkered view of the present and recent past reflects in some degree that five of its six curatorial department heads are men.
I’m just saying.
