MoMA: Herzog & de Meuron, Perception Restrained

After enjoying the wonderful Dada show at the Museum of Modern Art, head for the fascinating "Artist's Choice" exhibit curated by noted Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. Do note that in addition, the New York Public Library hosts an intriguing event about the exhibit this Wednesday at 6:30 pm at the mid-Manhattan library.

This is the seventh in the series Artist's Choice—though the first featuring architects—in which MoMA invites artists to select, juxtapose, and comment on works from the Museum’s collection. As one might expect from this dynamic pair, they have created a fascinating multimedia exhibit in which the visitor is confronted with a wide selection of works from the permanent collection, yet challenged to observe them in vastly different ways.

Upon entering the exhibit, it is no coincidence they have installed 15 flatscreen monitors on the ceiling, best viewed with a series of mirrors laid out on plain wooden benches. These film fragments, stretching from Fargo (1996) to Apocalypse Now (1979) to Andy Warhol's Flesh (1968) share the common themes of violence, sex and much drama. This darkened room seems both retrograde and avant-garde, both very Swiss and American, both fascinating and frightening. For those plain wooden benches contrasting with a busy and colorful ceiling recall the famous, remote, and unique St. Martin's church in Zillis, where the intricate imagery on the ceiling is best viewed while seated at a plain wooden pew with a mirror in one's hand. Zillis' 900-year-old ceiling, a tour de force that remains one of the most fascinating churches in all of Europe, both sparks memory and also strains the neck: some pain mixed with visual pleasure. Flash-forward to today's degenerating landscape of violent imagery, and it's not much of a stretch of the imagination to see how Herzog & de Meuron conceptualize the vast American topography as Richard Slotkin has in his books such as Gunfighter Nation and Regeneration Through Violence, a panorama featuring the eternally-recurring fighting man. Whereas the tableau depicted at Zillis—a very important place for the Swiss—reminds the European mind of two millennia of Christian history, this ceiling at MoMA evokes a typically Western European conception of America as the young country of nonstop sex and violence.

Or maybe not; perhaps they are just cleverly vying for the observer's attention. For they do admit: The problem facing the Museum is not a lack of first-rate art but rather a lack of perceptive attention on the part of museum visitors, despite the spectacular galleries in the new extension. Shock value? In other words, maybe because we are visually challenged in visiting a museum of art given this new-media atmosphere of instantaneous and everpresent visual rewards (think video games and online pornography), can the museum's vast smorgasbord of visual imagery challenge us to give any work more than a moment's attention? Even with the assistance of an audio guide, or by dialing a number on our cellphones to learn more about an artwork, or with a Podcast? It's no coincidence that at the Herzog & de Meuron-designed de Young Museum in San Francisco you can do all three of those things. Just plug in and focus. But especially in the case of MoMA, where the galleries are both compact and packed with artwork, when the museum is crowded it's rather difficult to experience much of anything without getting jostled or feeling cramped.

So how do Herzog & de Meuron focus the visitor on the sedate objects d'art after viewing this visual American pantheon seen overhead? By unleashing one of their beloved architectural forms: restraining perception. In challenging MoMA's classical six divisions, they have placed three reorganized departments—shall we say compartments—around their film and media presentation. Each of these chambers features a smallish rectangular slot through which you can attempt with some difficulty to view the objects therein—Architecture and Design, Photography, and Painting and Sculpture. For Herzog and de Meuron, their challenge seems to be creating a new form of visual storage—obscured in part, making it more complicated and thus more enticing to view the objects—as well as a new methodology of organizing these objects. For the repeat MoMA visitor, to whom it is quite obvious that the flow of people through the galleries is both rather complicated and rather bizarre, Herzog and de Meuron offer a compact mini-MoMA. What a contrast from vitrines or the endless and overwhelming and floor-to-ceiling glass storage at the three Henry Luce centers at the Met, Brooklyn Museum, or the 40,000 items at the New-York Historical Society. Or even from looking at Jeff Koons' playful and brilliant vaccum cleaners in a vitrine: rather than starting through glass, here you stare through a slot. Especially at a time when the second-floor contemporary galleries are closed, this restrained view of 110 objects from the collection provides both a nice teaser of MoMA's vast collection as well as Herzog and de Meuron's spatial conceptions and organization, which are, of course, very Swiss. These objects are laid out with precision, in close proximity, and with maximum effect to tantalize the observer. The Architecture and Design selections seem almost like a modern-day German Wunderkammer, which instead of featuring exotic animals dangling from the ceiling of a wood-paneled room instead offers more sedate yet luxurious items from the past century: the 1972 Jensen-designed Bang & Olufson turntable, for example. Or the seminal Josef Hoffmann Wiener Werkstätte flatware from 1905. And then you start to imagine: That Philippe Starck cake server and the Josef Hoffmann liqueur glasses nicely offset the Tupperware popsicle molds and tumblers. What do the artists say about this? They rather slyly and disingenuously claim: The choice does not reflect the artistic taste of Herzog & de Meuron; it simply confirms an undeniable shift in imagery that has taken place in recent years. Fair enough, you might think, yet with so many objects d'art to choose from, every choice implies a conscious selection—as well as loss, a loss of the objects not selected. And yet these innovative objects do receive so little attention today. Who thinks about that Bang & Olufson turntable, or those popsicle molds, or that charming Viennese flatware? Certainly not when Netflix, Grand Theft Auto, and the Internet are such big players in our new world of visual imagery.

A pro pos this new world of visual imagery, their photographic selections are equally fascinating. For when the artist's greatest fantasy comes true ("You can choose almost whatever you want from our collection"), it seems that their choices are most meaningful especially in photography. (Or maybe my thoughts on photography are just too overly shaped by the dogmatic writings of Ad Reinhardt, Susan Sontag and John Berger.) So many natural wonders depicted here—especially the vast American landscape—do hearken back to those 15 film clips projected on the ceiling. Modernization? The rape of the American landscape? The frightening big city? The rural gunfighting cowboy? De Niro and Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver? As though Travis Bickle curated an exhibit on nature, filtered through the cabbie's world-view? Hardly. Yet their thought-provoking combinations of items from the permanent collection are tantalizing. How could we possibly pick out the gems when we only have gems to choose from? ask the architects. In response, look at their selections of painting and sculpture, from Matthew Barney to Josef Beuys, from Giacometti to Calder, Robert Gober and Donald Judd. They present an homage of homages, along with Picasso and Andy Warhol thrown in for good measure. As the visitor goes peeping around this room, staring into the three rectangular slots that open up onto panoramas of Architecture and Design, Photography, and Painting and Sculpture, it seems just too challenging, and most visitors just give up after staring briefly at the ceiling, wandering a bit, and gazing into the three slots.

Thus, Herzog and de Meuron succeed in their endeavor to delineate how The moving image with explicit reference to violence, drama, and sex has received growing attention while traditional artistic mediums require special exhibitions with blockbuster potential in order to be perceived at all. And yet observing the flow of the masses into the museum commencing at precisely 10:30 am this Sunday, as they greedily were admitted en masse, as they climbed escalators to the sixth floor to flood the Dada exhibit, one sees the ultimate paradox in visiting MoMA that Herzog and de Meuron clearly understand (and understood when designing the de Young): The MoMA visitor seeks out wonders, yet confronted with those wonders has trouble perceiving. While the Dada exhibit is packed, Herzog & de Meuron's is not. While the fifth and sixth floors of MoMA have a startling number of visitors, parts of the third and fourth floors are largely void of patrons. While Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon always draws a crowd, why does the similarly fortuitously-placed Boccioni Unique Forms of Continuity in Space not? While some paintings seem orphaned and seldom-visited in those back staircases, the Bell Helicopter remains fascinating and popular as it always was. Because it's huge? Or uniquely American? Or simply great design? And even in the packed blockbuster Dada exhibit, people seem lost, for there is so much there with so few referents. So many scraps from a giant feast of languages (mostly German), cut with the kitchen knife and pasted together—i.e. the Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch collages—yet so obviously foreign to a generation that has little connection to the events transpiring in Germany 80 or so years ago. The entry points—the Zürich and New York rooms—seem sedate enough, but the additive effect of all the Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, and Paris objects appear to just overwhelm; think visual clutter rather than visual depiction or visual storage.

Herzog and de Meuron clearly understand this. Perhaps that's why two of the most popular spots in their San Francisco museum appear to be the ninth-floor observatory (where few are looking at the fascinating perforated copper façade but instead simply enjoy the views of the city) and the outdoor café (where they can focus on the food rather than that perforated copper façade engulfing them—even from above—or the nearby playful sculpture garden). The visual challenges of MoMA, in contrast, are entirely with the design: the white walls (many of which by now have ugly smudges and scuffs here and there) and the constricting and at times asphyxiating galleries. So by presenting these ever-more constrained views of the permanent collection, Herzog and de Meuron actually achieve a tour de force: they reveal not just their Mercurial curatorial genius, but also that they are simply better architects than MoMA's Yoshio Taniguchi.
photo: © Herzog & de Meuron, 2006

Tags:   dada, de meuron, de young, herzog, museum of modert art, Yoshio Taniguchi

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Posted on 7/16/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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