By Maika Pollack 4/30 5:07pm

On View

5 Photos

Floor Burger, 1962

‘Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store 1960–1962’ and ‘Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing’ at the Museum of Modern Art

One tends to associate Claes Oldenburg with large public art sculptures: flaccid sausages, comical bicycles and tumescent lipstick tubes stuck into the landscape. But it’s the tiny and the provisional that stand out in the four projects currently on display at MoMA in the largest-ever presentation of his early work, an excerpt from a traveling Oldenburg survey. Little pieces like Fried Egg in Pan (1961) and Tartines (1964) show off a pleasing equivalence of paint and materiality. The plaster “egg” fills the pan. There are “real” glass display cases filled with pies made of burlap soaked in plaster and painted in brightly colored enamel (Assorted Pies in a Case, 1962), which presage both Wayne Thiebaud and, later, Gina Beavers. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 1/29 5:10pm

On View

Seth Siegelaub in front of 44 East 52nd Street, which housed one of his shows. (Courtesy Museum of Modern Art)

‘“This Is the Way Your Leverage Lies”: The Seth Siegelaub Papers as Institutional Critique’ at the Museum of Modern Art

“There is no art without you,” Seth Siegelaub wrote in a draft of a letter to artists in 1970. “There is no art world without you. You have given up rights you probably do not know exist.” The Bronx-born Mr. Siegelaub was not yet 30 at the time, but over the previous decade he had already established himself as a trailblazing dealer and curator of conceptual art, offering for sale as artworks things that sometimes barely qualified as objects, such as the transmission of a radio wave (by Robert Barry) and text on a page (Lawrence Weiner). He had also become a committed activist. In 1969, he joined the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), a group of New York artists that lobbied to improve conditions and rights for artists working with museums and dealers. In a letter to the Museum of Modern Art, they made 13 demands, including that a section of the museum be placed “under the direction of black artists” and that artists receive rental fees for artworks loaned to MoMA for exhibitions. That letter is now on view at MoMA, which acquired Mr. Siegelaub’s papers in 2011 with his cooperation and has put a number of them on display. (The museum has also launched an excellent website with images of many of the works in the show. It has also released a guide to its contents.) Read More

By Maika Pollack 1/01 3:55pm

On View

5 Photos

Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed and Sound, 1913-14

‘Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925’ at the Museum of Modern Art [Updated]

Abstract art just turned 100, MoMA tells us with a new exhibition, and the museum is throwing it a birthday party. Packed with some 350 artworks, the show, curated by Leah Dickerman and MoMA curatorial assistant Masha Chlenova, is busy and buzzing, a star-studded gala for historic experiments in color, form and even sound.

Visitors are greeted by Picasso’s Woman With Mandolin (1910), but abstract form quickly cedes the floor to immersive color. Wassily Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert), from 1911—not coincidentally, the same year he released his book On the Spiritual in Art—is a revelation: you probably know that his early paintings derive from listening to Schoenberg’s music, but you might be surprised to see how literally his preparatory sketches take a black grand piano and a concert audience and reduce them to the painting’s flat blocks of color and form. For a moment, abstraction’s mystery seems solved. Not so fast—it is difficult in the extreme to imagine an origin point for Kandinsky’s enormous, sweeping Composition V, 1911, also on view here. Read More

By Maika Pollack 1/01 3:54pm

On View

Installation view of Christian Marclay's The Clock, 2010

‘Christian Marclay: The Clock’ at the Museum of Modern Art

At this point, even my father, whose tends to skip contemporary art shows for ancient Chinese stone-carving exhibitions, has run into and enjoyed Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film, The Clock. To recap: each scene is sampled from a snippet of a movie or TV show and synchronized with real time such that the film itself can be used as a working clock. Made in 2010, it has already been shown at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, White Cube in London, the Venice Biennale, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art and, recently, in New York again, at Lincoln Center. It has screened in Glasgow, Ottawa and Yokohama. Several international museums own time-shares of the film. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 10/04/12 12:53pm

human resources

Antonelli. (Courtesy PMC)

MoMA Design Curator Paola Antonelli Tapped as First Director of Research and Development

The Museum of Modern Art announced today that it is creating a new position, Director of Research and Development, and that it has picked its senior curator of architecture and design, Paola Antonelli, to fill it. In the new role, Ms. Antonelli “will provide the museum with information and critical tools to evaluate new initiatives and identify new directions and unexplored opportunities, particularly in the digital realm,” MoMA stated in a news release. Read More

By Rozalia Jovanovic 8/23/12 2:19pm

Museums

Martha Rosler. She Sees in Herself A New Woman Every Day (Detail). 1976. Twelve chromogenic color prints, Plexiglas, and tape recorder. 17:21 min. Committee on Media and Performance Art Funds. © 2012 Martha Rosler (Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

MoMA to Present Two-Part Exhibition and Live Performances

On Sept. 12, the Museum of Modern Art will unveil two new performance-based exhibitions. “Performing Histories (I)” is the first of a two-part exhibition organized by Sabine Breitwieser, chief curator of the media and performance art department, that explores the variety of ways media art has engaged with history and will include recent additions to the museum’s collection. On the same day, the museum will also unveil a three-part performance series with an almost identical title, “Performing Histories,” which will present three live performances in conjunction with three exhibitions in the museum. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 6/08/12 6:07pm

Catalogues

"Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan." (Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art)

Alighiero Boetti on Alighiero and Boetti

We’re pretty excited for the Museum of Modern Art’s upcoming Alighiero Boetti show, “Game Plan,” here at The New York Observer office, and our appetite was thoroughly whetted today when the catalogue for the show landed in our editor’s office. It includes an interview between Boetti and critic Bruno Corà. The question of Boetti’s peculiar name comes up—for a long time the artist styled himself not Alighiero Boetti but Alighiero e Boetta. Let’s get to the interview for an explanation! Read More

By Michael H. Miller 5/30/12 10:13am

poetry

(Courtesy Frankohara.org)

MoMA Celebrates Former Employee Frank O’Hara With ‘Modern Poets’ Series

The Museum of Modern Art is turning out to be quite the poetry patron these days. First, as part of its “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language” exhibition, MoMA installed John Giorno’s 1969 piece, Dial-a-Poem, in which a telephone plays back recordings of poets reading from their work (it’s also available on their website). Now, the museum is celebrating its former employee, one of the great poets of the 20th century, Frank O’Hara, who worked as an assistant curator at MoMA’s department of painting and sculpture and wrote many canonical works during his lunch breaks. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 5/23/12 2:50pm

Art Book Pick

Holmqvist

Art Book Pick: Karl Holmqvist’s ‘‘K’

It’s been a full three years since Swedish artist-poet Karl Holmqvist last presented work in New York, but the drought is finally over.

At the Museum of Modern Art, Mr. Holmqvist has lined the walls of a gallery in Laura Hoptman’s “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language” with papers bearing his inimitable texts, long stretches of oddly ordered repetitions of language—carefully conceived poetry, pure sound, the ramblings of a madman—laid out in crisp black capital letters. Occasionally they transform into calligrams—piping hot coffee cups, for instance, with steam rising as snakelike streams of letters. Read More