Back in 1961, such items were for sale in The Store, which is what Mr. Oldenburg called his cheap East Village studio when he kept it open to the public for a month. It was an experiment in the relationship between fiction and fact. You could trade money for art—for sale were, as he put it, “Ham art, pork art, chicken art, tomato art, banana art, apple art, turkey art, cake art.” There were plaster men’s shirts, plaster women’s underwear. There was even a sculpture representing a crude cash register. Mr. Oldenburg staged performances and drew there. It was the beginning of American Pop Art.

There’s a simmering sexuality to Mr. Oldenburg’s art. His early drawings, on display at MoMA, show men, clearly aroused, chatting with long-legged, big-assed “street chicks.” Even his crude sculptures of cardboard and casein vibrate with a tactile aesthetic located miles from the antiseptic Pop of Warhol. Mr. Oldenburg’s Pop Art is flaccid and blobby, not pretty. It’s messy stuff permeated by the street. A dozen drippy sculptures, many featuring commercial logos, are hung salon-style on one wall. His oversized floor sculptures of grotesque comestibles like giant hamburgers, slices of cake and ice cream cones were sewn by his then-wife, the artist Patty Mucha. They look dirty.

With the Mouse Museum (1972-77), the curators of the MoMA show—Achim Hochdörfer of the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, along with MoMA curator Ann Temkin and assistant curator Paulina Pobocha—put on display the accumulation of found objects that Mr. Oldenburg first exhibited in Kassel in 1972. In a structure shaped like the head of a cartoon mouse, there’s an egalitarian mix of about 400 tiny found objects. There are lightbulbs and junk-store paintings—one still labeled $1.29. There are used tea bags, plastic tempura shrimp, a two-headed dildo, a giant toothbrush. There are Japanese ice cream displays, chocolate bonbons, dog chew toys, walnuts filled with wax, a plastic geranium and many more treasures, all tastefully backlit and set in glass vitrines. Accompanying the display is a soundtrack of rubber toys being washed.

Mr. Oldenburg was ever on the lookout for resonant objects: “Every sidewalk is a Ray Gun Beach,” he said of his process of collecting the hundreds of things in the shape of guns on display in the Ray Gun Wing, adjacent to the Mouse Museum. In the tradition of Kurt Schwitters, Mr. Oldenburg is an artist whose materials came more from the street than the art supply store. A wall of his great found wooden “flag” sculptures, from the 1960s, show the messy, gritty, scavenging work that’s part formal study, part documentary snapshot of New York. (Today, Yuji Agematsu continues such work with poetic collections of wispy urban detritus.)

But the significance is not just that the everyday has become art. With Mr. Oldenburg, the very framing techniques used to connote high art became mobile, detached from art objects. They fell into new, rich, nuanced contexts. This model, full of potential, made a theatrical space of the street: anyone could be an artist, any space a gallery, any bit of trash art. It is the absurdity and not the seriousness of the structure—the mimicry of the fictions of the gallery and the museum and how they play with capitalism and art—that makes these forms unique and interesting. Mr. Oldenburg’s Street and his Store, his Mouse Museum and its Ray Gun Wing play with the ways in which art is exhibited. They are the progenitors of some of the most interesting projects in New York today. (Through August 5, 2013)

Update, May 1: An earlier version of this article misidentified Mr. Oldenburg's wife.

Seth Siegelaub in front of 44 East 52nd Street, which housed one of his shows. (Photo by Robert Barry, courtesy 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.)

Titled after a line from a speech that Mr. Siegelaub gave to the AWC in 1970, the jewel of a show, consisting of archival material mostly from 1964 to 1973, is tucked away on the lower level of the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, so there’s no $25 ticket necessary—fulfilling the AWC’s unrealized demand that “admission should be free at all times.” (The AWC did help secure a free day at the museum.) Christiana Dobrzynski Grippe, a project archivist in the MoMA archives, organized the display, which is the perfect addendum to the Brooklyn Museum’s larger show organized around Lucy Lippard, another perspicacious conceptual-art leader, whose name and letters pop up in the Siegelaub papers.

The MoMA show begins in 1964, when Mr. Siegelaub was an art and Oriental rug dealer on 56th Street. Collaborating with conceptual artists on exotic projects of his own devising, he helped pioneer the role of the curator as creative agent, which today’s curators—Hans Ulrich Obrist comes to mind—have taken to even greater extremes.

For 1968’s Xerox Book, whose mockup title page is displayed, he asked seven artists to make work that could be photocopied, sensing the potential of the new technology. (Sadly, the cost was still prohibitive, and the first edition had to be offset printed.) The following year, he organized a two-room exhibition in an East 52nd Street office. In one room he displayed a catalog containing instructions for artworks; the other room contained those artworks’ realizations. Included in MoMA’s display of the documentation related to this show is a typewritten list of 13 instructions for the secretary. (Number eight: “Turn on both Robert Barry pieces.”) A photograph reveals that one artist involved in this was Adrian Piper, who would later adapt such conceptual strategies for artworks dealing with identity and racial politics.

That Mr. Siegelaub’s most ambitious project ended in failure does not lessen its impact, or its prescience. In 1971 he published the “Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement,” written with lawyer Robert Projansky. Among other things, it aimed to guarantee artists a royalty in the event that their work was resold. Notes on display reveal that Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt and Ed Ruscha were all fans of the agreement, but the mechanisms of the art market proved intractable. (Today the German artist Maria Eichhorn is perhaps the only major artist known to use it.)

“This is a substitute for what has existed before—nothing,” Mr. Siegelaub wrote in a 1973 introduction to the agreement. It was a start. By that point, he had pretty much abandoned the art world to focus on collecting textiles. Forty years later, groups like W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) and the Occupy Wall Street Arts & Labor group are beginning to raise many of the same issues that Mr. Siegelaub and his colleagues did, calling for changes in the way the art world functions. Those preparing for the coming debates will find plenty to chew on at MoMA. (Through March 4, 2013)

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.

From there we move to the French artist couple Sonia and Robert Delaunay. Robert’s 1913 painting Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon renders the celestial spheres as fragmented chromatic circles; Sonia’s long scrolls supplement Apollinaire’s words with blocks of color. Modernist writing was an important influence at the time: Stéphane Mallarmé’s seminal poem Un coup de dés from 1897 (reprinted in 1914) is encased here in a vitrine.

“Inventing Abstraction” starts strong and stays strong; even so, a few sections are stand-outs. An entire wall is hung salon-style with a dozen rarely seen paintings by Kazimir Malevich, drawn from collections in Cologne, Amsterdam and Paris. To observe the slight differences in the edges of his compositions is to be reminded that, as much as their idealized geometric forms may suggest otherwise, these pieces were made by a human, not a machine. A spectacular room devoted to the work of Piet Mondrian amounts to a mini-retrospective: black crosses on light ground indicating trees or seascapes give way to entirely abstract checkerboard grids, which lead to iconic Mondrian diamonds of tightly orchestrated primary color blocks.

Such progressions suggest that abstraction comes about when subject matter is finally jettisoned. The works in the show constantly play peek-a-boo with subject matter, though. Malevich’s drawings hint at stage sets, Kandinsky’s, chamber concerts, Mondrian’s, the sea and stars; Theo van Doesburg paints cows and Georgia O’Keeffe flowers, while for the Dadaists the unconscious and chance are other kinds of subjects. Duncan Grant made paintings of Albers-like blocks of color in 1914, but they are clearly depictions of houses, interiors, forests and libraries. Eventually, though, the subject just stops mattering.

Blink and you’ll miss Wyndham Lewis’s pink, brown and maroon paintings (a personal favorite), Anton Bragaglia’s dynamic multiple exposure photographs, Man Ray’s cooly flat “rayograms” from the 1920s and Lyubov Popova’s interlocking lacquered geometries. Léopold Survage’s Colored Rhythm: 59 Studies for the Film (1913) is shown in its entirety: a wall of black watercolor-on-construction-paper paintings that look like early 20th-century theosophist prototypes for tropical drinks or Pink Floyd album covers. There’s a whole corner of dynamic Italian Futurists. And then it’s on to sound: dance notation from Vaslav Nijinski and a room of atonal music by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Debussy and Bartók round out the show.

But the show’s real triumph is to elevate what we might otherwise think of as minor experiments by lesser-known figures. You might, like this critic, note the inclusion of Marcel Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-14), Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column (1918) and Vladimir Tatlin’s Tower (1919) only in passing, and spend much more time puzzling over things like Waclaw Szpakowski’s tightly drawn decorative ink tracings on paper and Mikhail Matyushin’s painterly musical constructions of 1918.

Abstraction was an international phenomenon, and a full half of the pieces in the show are on loan from institutions in places like Leipzig, Otterlo, St. Petersburg, Locarno and Lodz. In demonstrating the interconnectivity of a far-flung movement, a newly created map of an abstract art “network,” on monumental display in the show’s lobby, combines MoMA founding director Alfred Barr’s seminal 1936 diagram of the origins of Cubism and abstract art with more recent theories by art historian David Joselit on the visualization of what he has called the “transitive” networks surrounding a work of art.

If there’s anything jarring about this highly engaging exhibition, it is its claim that “art was wholly reinvented” in or around 1910, as though abstract art popped out of nowhere one afternoon. That the show doesn’t look to earlier years is an institutional limitation, but it should not be an intellectual one. When the catalog wheels in Malcolm Gladwell to describe the aesthetic revolution of 1910, it seems like a case of convenient historical amnesia. French curator Pascal Rousseau’s 2003 exhibition “Origins of Abstraction 1800-1914” at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay made a case for a broader view of nonobjective painting—his kind of organic thought seems more in keeping with how artists today look at history than the pop sociology to which MoMA’s curators have resorted.

That said, it would be great to see the same MoMA curatorial team take on the next 15 years of modern art, and the 15 after that... For New Yorkers, “Inventing Abstraction” is a show that resonates all around us, whether in the architecture of the museum itself, or in the gridded city that surrounds it. The disparate projects on view here don’t demonstrate that anything as monolithic as “abstraction” can be said to have been “invented.” It would be more accurate to say of the many abstractions on display here that the creators were united in their optimism that radical artistic experiments were possible. The show leaves you wondering how artists’ representations of the world—and their understanding of it—might change in the coming years. (Through April 15, 2013)

editorial@observer.com

Update, 1/2: An earlier version of this post omitted the review's opening paragraphs. It has since been amended so that the piece appears as it does in the print edition of this week's New York Observer. We regret the error.

Installation view of Christian Marclay's The Clock, 2010. (© Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York/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.

One chilly night about two years ago, I visited Paula Cooper in the dead of night to catch it during its debut. There was no line to see the film. It felt like a cult movie screening—people smuggled food and drink in overcoats, viewers lounged on the floor or napped on cheap white couches. A few couples were making out in the back.

At MoMA, The Clock is being shown in a vast, movie-theater-sized space. There is usually a 30-minute wait to get in.

Once seated by MoMA’s ushers, you can stop checking your iPhone: Cartiers, Casios, Omegas, Rolexes, Vedettes, Breitlings, school clocks, clocks at work, grandfather clocks and even sundials, all on the big screen, keep the time. Away from the bustle of the museum, the theater is immensely relaxing: people sprawl on the carpeted floor and sit three, four and five to a white couch.

The movie doesn’t feel like an art film. The references are too omnivorous: while I was there, Winona Ryder came home from school. Nicolas Cage pawned his watch, and Mary Poppins floated by Big Ben on her umbrella. A man was bound and gagged, spy-movie fashion.

At 3 p.m., school lets out around the world. Just after 3, everyone’s late to a meeting. Car chases dominate 3:45; in between is a long stretch of tea times, funerals, saloon scenes in Westerns and the occasional act of late-afternoon aggression. My 2 a.m. trip two years ago had more dream sequences, sleeping women and murder scenes.

I visited stock exchanges, Western Union offices, courtrooms, Japanese asylums, Korean boardrooms, diners, train stations and German bars. I registered Julianne Moore, Hugh Grant, Kim Basinger, Marisa Tomei, John Travolta, Will Smith, Jack Nicholson, Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Jodie Foster, Robin Williams, Alan Alda, Charlie Sheen, Mia Farrow, Audrey Hepburn, Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep, Harold Lloyd, Anthony Hopkins, Woody Allen and John Malkovich. Mr. Marclay challenges Warhol’s films Sleep and Empire for sheer scale.

It’s a forgotten pleasure to kill an afternoon at the movies. Although you may have to line up to see it, The Clock is not a spectacle of the sort currently dominating contemporary art museums. Its environment gives you space to contemplate film as a medium. Formalists can enjoy it; so can anyone who likes movies, which is to say probably all of us. The Clock flirts with form and content in a winning way, lacing and unlacing the real and the fictional. To watch it is to see a cinema that is not based on the suspension of time, but rather on an immersion in time. It may well be our contemporary Mona Lisa. (Through January 21, 2013)

Antonelli. (Courtesy PMC)

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.

Ms. Antonelli, who has been with the museum for almost two decades, will continue to serve as a senior curator, splitting her time between the architecture and design department and research and development so she will continue to organize shows at the museum. Her past curatorial credits include the 2011 show "Talk to Me," the 2009 Ron Arad retrospective and 2005's "SAFE: Design Takes on Risk."

"Museums and schools can be considered R&D departments of society, as they pursue a slower, more reliable, productive, and constructive progress that incorporates technological and industrial innovation, but filters them through a humanistic sieve," Ms. Antonelli said in a statement.

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).

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.

"Performance Histories (1)" will showcase nine works by some heavyweights of performance art, including The Interpreter Project (2001), a four-channel video by Sharon Hayes; She Sees in Herself A New Woman Every Day, a 1976 work by Martha Rosler that features photographs of a woman's shoes and legs and a tape recorder; and Open Your Eyes, a 2010 double slide projection by Kader Attia that explores modern Western aesthetics.

The live performance series begins with Andrea Fraser’s Men on the Line: Men Committed to Feminism, KPFK, 1972 (2012), a work based on a 1972 radio broadcast during which four men chatted on a slew of issues related to feminism. After the first performance, the series will continue in January and through the spring with such artists as Ei Arakawa, Fabian Barba, Andrea Geyer, Contact Gonzo, Sharon Hayes, Simone Forti, Eiko and Koma and Kelly Nipper, among others.

Ms. Rosler herself will be at MoMA in November when she holds her Meta-Monumental Garage Sale in MoMA’s atrium, selling off a mix of personal and donated items.

John Rideout (American, 1898 – 1951) and Harold Van Doren (American, 1895-1957). Skippy-Racer scooter. c. 1933. Minneapolis Institute of Arts. (Courtesy MoMA)

The Museum of Modern Art has announced a massive survey of 20th-century design for children, "Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000." The show will bring together 500 items, many of which will be on view for the first time in the U.S.

The show will be divided into seven sections:

-New Century, New Child, New Art

-Avant-garde Playtime

-Light, Air, Health

-Children and the Body Politic

-Regeneration

-Power Play

-Designing Better Worlds

Of the many works on display, some highlights include Lyonel Feininger's comics, Alma Siedhoff-Buscher's Bauhaus nursery, a Skippy-Racer scooter from 1933, Roald Dahl's The Gremlins, Lego building blocks, the Slinky and a selection of original pieces from the set of Pee-Wee's Playhouse. There will be a section of the Playhouse wall along with several characters from the show (Conky, Globey and Clocky). Ah, memories!

"Century of the Child" opens July 29 and will be on view until Nov. 5.

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

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!

Corà: ...What role, in this sense, is played by the word "Alighiero," and what part does the word "Boetti" play? What does Alighiero Boetti bring to this union?

Boetti: Incredibly banal. The most banal thing in the world. Alighiero is the most childish, most extreme part, which dominates family things. Alighiero is what people I know call me. Boetti is more abstract, precisely because the surname is a category, a classification. This is something that affects us all. The first name offers certain sensations of familiarity, acquaintance, and intimacy. By the mere fact that Boetti is a surname means that it's already an abstraction, it's already a concept. If people see one of my works they say: "It's a Boetti" not "It's an Alighiero." "Have you got a Boetti to sell me?"—"How big d'you want it?"—"100 x 150." So it's a Boetti, not an Alighiero. Alighiero, on the other hand, is the one who kicks up a racket—more banal things.

The show runs at MoMA from July 1 through Oct. 1, 2012.

(Courtesy Poets.org)

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.

As part of the museum's "Modern Poets" series, MoMA has invited two New York poets to read from O'Hara's so-called "Lunch Poems" and to give the audience advice on writing their own works. Stefania Heim will read on June 8, and Wayne Koestenbaum on June 15.

Here's a Lunch Poem for you, "Lana Turner Has Collapsed." It goes great with a turkey sandwich, by the way.

"Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)"

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

"'K" by Karl Holmqvist.

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.

Further uptown, Alex Zachary Peter Currie offers up Mr. Holmqvist's first New York solo show, "WORDS ARE PEOPLE." He's taken black marker to the white walls of the dealers' tony townhouse and to more white walls in the gallery's courtyard out back. One passage from his jottings reads, in part: "SLAPSTICK / MYSTICS / WITHSTICKS / SLAPSTICK / MYSTICS / WITH STICKS / GOD'S LOVE WE / DELIVER / MUSCLE / MUSCLE / MUSCLE."

But we’re here to discuss books. A recommendation: while visiting AZPC, pick up a copy of the artist's latest book, 'K. Published on the occasion of his recent shows at Kunsthalle Zurich and Bergen Kunsthall (and distributed by JRP|Ringier), it contains more than 300 pages of unfiltered Holmqvist pleasure, a bargain at $22.

Flipping through it, you may find yourself reading along, energized (ecstatic, even), though never quite comfortable. You glide through sensible sections, replete with references to art and popular culture—“I DRINK MY LITTLE DRINK / INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE / UNDERNEATH THE ARCHES”—but then rougher patches arrive: at signs (@) arrayed to look like giant at signs and tributes (of a sort) to artists like AIDS-3D and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, their names piling up in long columns, page after page.

The artist-critic Ronald Jones suggested of another Holmqvist book that it is “best read occasionally and by chance, opening it at random,” which sounds like sage advice with 'K as well. There’s a lot here: it's not light reading. However occasionally incomprehensible, the texts always seem to buzz with thought, and it gets particularly good when bits of feeling slip through the wordplay and text games, as when he writes, “IF YOU CAN’T BE CRAZY / AS AN ARTIST / THEN WHAT?” Coming from many artists, that would sound grossly nihilistic. From someone like Mr. Holmqvist, though, an artist who has carefully, patiently honed his skills in a single, austere medium for years, it’s clearly a generative mantra.