Continuing on my eager tourist route, I checked out the MOMA a couple of days ago - that temple to which all western modern art history classes is dedicated [broken obelisk above is a suitable homage]. And yes, it is always a thrill to see the stuff of canonical texts - to know that yes, without a doubt, what you are seeing has been stamped and approved (for now!) as "the good stuff". (no - I didn't see the Dada show - I am not a fan.)

It has been so long since the new building opened (long - in my memory span anyway), that I forget some of the initial criticisms of the Yoshio Taniguchi structure. (above facade photo doesn't really cut it) I loved it because it not only humbled itself in the presence of the art by refusing to compete - but at rest intervals between galleries, there always seemed to be an available view of the outside fountains, gardens, and sculptures. In other words, in contrast to the Met for instance (or most other historical museums for that matter) one doesn't feel hermetically sealed within the building nor within some kind of suspended timewarp. The building, and thus the art inside, is constantly referencing the world outside - its inspiration, after all, for what is inside and how it narratives are constructed. I guess that's kind of an obvious attribute for a postmodern building - but I liked it!

I discovered that I really liked the work of Philip Guston - a large collection of his paintings from the 60s was featured within one of the ongoing exhibitions. Picture bold pinks and reds - giant organic forms that morph into actual banal objects (like a cigarette dangling out the mouth of an artist as he lays in bed) when you take a step back. I was also so intrigued by the Herzon and de Meuron display (two Swiss architects that are hot hot hot - they did the new Walker in Minneapolis as well as the de Young in San Fran and so much more...) - which included videos set into the ceiling and then reconfigurations of the museum's collections behind small windows, so that you had to WANT to see them in order to peek through. The whole thing made you physically aware of the process of seeing and in turn, forced viewers to see things more carefully and more delibrately than they normally would.[photo below]

One interesting little art historical detour carried me through "Transforming Chronologies" (TC) - an exhibition of drawings exhibiting modernism at its best but in a provocative unchronological way. For instance - aligning work by Matisse, Kara Walker, Vito Acconci, Juan Miro[photo right] (not all together) - so playing with time frames but setting up work that appears to have used similar artistic solutions to make different (or the same) points. The substance of their work cuts across time.

But it should also cut across space. Which brings me to that niggling critique that you knew was coming.

I should say that TC included work from Latin and South America - which was interesting. But while modernism's historical perspective has perhaps broadened slightly to include non-North American or W. European art, the East is still a sticking point. And the proof that it IS a sticking point can be found in the photography galleries - again designed to show the "universal" language of modernism through the camera lens. In here, one African artist - Seydou Keita from Mali is represented with a studio portrait from the 50s; and there are three Asian artists (two from Japan with whom I was not familiar, and Ragubhir Singh from India represented with a shot of women in the monsoon from the mid 60s). They are fascinating interventions upon an otherwise western landscape of modernity.
And you wonder how they got there.

It isn't that you can't find non-western work in the MOMA - you can, if you look for it. But it was in the context of these exhibitions that aimed to display the artistic trajectory of "modernism" in new and exciting ways - that the silences are particularly palpable. Are we still asking "when was modernism" in China, India, African countries, etc...? I guess so.

And so it has to be remembered that MoMa's narrative of modernism - even in this brand new cutting-edge version - only goes so far. If you look between the cracks for other voices, you can find some of them (faintly) - but you have to find the cracks first. And they don't make it easy.

Assez!