Park McArthur at MoMA

(link)

Imagine this space as an apartment. With a sort of Asherian bend to the institution as material, reflecting its navel for it to self assess. But whereas the historical genre had been content to hold up broad mirrors, McArthur's is a little more pointed if not necessarily legible. Like a monochrome, like a Robert Ryman the white constant pushed interest to the peripheral, attachments, names, edges and construct of its medium, context.

"Let’s begin with a description of the area where McArthur’s exhibition is located. The 4th floor space is rectangular and has 2 entrances connected by a spacious hallway. Depending on which way you enter, the sound of automated glass doors opening and closing arises to your left or to your right. These doors lead to other galleries. [...] As you face the windows, there is a long white wall to your right. Up high on the wall, close to the windows, grey letters in the same style as The David Geffen Galleries spell out: The Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Gallery. The Dannheissers gave most of their art collection to MoMA, and this 4th floor gallery bears their names. The Projects series, of of which this particular exhibition is a part, was re-named the Elaine Dannheisser Project Series in 2006 in honor of Ms. Dannheisser. 

The description of the almost terminally boring museum spaces (museological architecture an exercise in steroidal-elegance through omission) is either comedic for the dry descriptions of things  generally ignored or necessary for its recognition of things of what we have the ability to ignore. Leave the path and encounter "terrain." Suddenly the land, the hike, becomes difficult, experience nature differently depending on you ability to move through it. Would mountains have been still beautiful to the Donner party trapped within them?  We can mostly ignore things until they become a problem for us as a major theme of McArthur. Reading about all the elegant facilities of 53W53 feels like brambles.

Sturtevant at MoMA

(Sturtevant at MoMA)

It would make sense that Sturtevant’s culminating exhibition would be a bad one. Yet to call the show a disservice amongst an entire career of stop and starts and too-soon brilliance - what Hainley refers to as the artist’s tendency for prolepsis - makes this addendum of an exhibition all the more sadly apt; that to think the work capable of a finality of representation was of course misguided. An artist who in her 70’s began again with a whole new line of work capable of competing with 20’s Berliners in fresh faced zeal, the artist would have been better served outside this dullest of institutions. Yet curator Eleey, always the installation showman, and alongside the artist seems to have smuggled a few time-bombs of white-hot brilliance  into of the dim yellow tendencies of MoMA corporate-hood. An ecstatic video work placed within sight of Starry Night, an act of total historical vertigo, too soon.

Christopher Williams at MoMA



MoMA finally succumbing to its role mass incarcerating tourists - its expanding culture-industrial complex finally warranting destruction of neighborly competition to further house its prisoner-patrons - yet, MoMA, still desiring relevancy to the system, art, whose name it bears and not merely to the throngs from which it happily accepts 25$, delivers the academic-respectable retrospective of Kapital p Photography godhead, Christopher Williams.
Walking through the space it’s a nice gesture but hard to see the decades’ work or installation subtlety amongst the brambles of families asking themselves aloud, literally “When do we get to see Matisse?” the Frenchman whose tickets are timed before you can even get in line and so the Williams show acts as a sort of slumbering-area for the masses awaiting the carnivale nearby. The punchline to this whole joke, is that there is no punchline at all, the wall texts have been eliminated, and so people stumble through blind, somnambulist mass searching for their trip but nothing does and awake to find themselves in line for Matisse. Whether because they are completely acclimated to the lie of photography or too tired to care who knows, but MoMA needs to stop doing these shows here for anyone who wants to actually see.