Seeing MoMA Through An Architect’s Eyes

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The New York Sun

For the Museum of Modern Art’s “Artist’s Choice” series, a guest curator – usually an artist – selects and organizes work drawn from the museum’s permanent collection. “Perception Restrained,” a bewitching experiment conducted by architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, opened yesterday and is the eighth such show since the series began in 1989.

Having designed, among many other buildings, the Tate Modern in London, the Schaulager in Basel, and the recent expansions of both the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the de Young in San Francisco, Herzog & de Meuron, as they are known, are exceptionally well-versed in the idioms, needs, and challenges of museum architecture. No surprise, then, that they decided to make their exhibition much less about the work chosen than about its presentation.

“Our project,” they write, “is an attempt to offer a spatial alternative to the existing galleries … a site of heightened concentration and density that functions like a kind of perception machine.” Although I was skeptical at first, I can assure you that their machine – really a museum in miniature – will catalyze all sorts of thoughts about art and how we look at it. “By obstructing and putting pressure on perception,” they continue, “the installation intensifies the viewing experience and makes it more enduring, more selective, and more individual.”

Like MoMA itself, their machine is divided by medium: painting and sculpture, photography, design – each in its own room. Yet Herzog & de Meuron give pride of place to film – not, they stress, from their own predilections but instead reflecting a societal shift. Then again they’re not entirely in thrall to the zeitgeist: In the more than 100 works on view, there are no works of video art, per se.

One enters a fairly large, rectangular gallery painted entirely black. For seating, there are five rows of bare, unpainted wooden benches on which have been placed small, beautifully designed round mirrors. A grid of 15 LCD monitors showing fragments of films is mounted on the ceiling is mounted-an ingenious homage to the ceiling frescoes of Romanesque churches. One can pick out parts of “Fargo,” “Apocalypse Now,” Paul Morrissey’s “Flesh,” “Trash,” and “Heat,” among others. The mirrors allow visitors to sit and watch the films without having to look up for extended periods. Also, the bits of film make, in Herzog & de Meuron’s words, “explicit reference to violence, drama, and sex,” and watching them in little mirrors causes the experience to be at once more intimate and more abstract. The few subtitles are reversed and thus unreadable.

Into three of the walls, narrow rectangular slits have been cut, and it is through these that one looks at the other works on view. On the other side, are crammed – and hung salon style – paintings and sculpture, photographs, and objects chosen from the museum’s collection: It’s like looking into a duck blind to see the art.

Strange as that might sound, the set-up in fact produces shifts in what one notices. Because one has to bend and strain to see certain areas of the interior galleries, various aspects of the work are intensified. Each of these galleries is a shallow rectangle, echoing the shape of the slits.

The shape of the painting and sculpture room heightens the three dimensionality of Pablo Picasso’s cardboard “Maquette for Guitar” (1912) and emphasizing the tallness of Alberto Giacometti’s “Man Pointing” (1947). The lateral extension of a 1967 Donald Judd sculpture, affixed to a side wall, both compliments and magnifies the pair of Robert Gober legs (1991) jutting from the adjacent wall at floor level.

In the photography section, the shallow depth reinforces the sense of lying down in Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled #96 (Girl on Linoleum Floor)” (1981). Above it, the horizontal character of the three prints in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s virtually abstract “Adriatic Sea, Gargano I” (1990) winningly rhymes with the Judd in the previous room as well as Richard Prince’s untitled, double-print portrait of Cindy Sherman (1980) hung nearby.

Ironically for an exhibition curated by architects, the format least serves the design section, in part because it forces them to present the objects in staid rows. Design objects, one learns, suffer from such a regimented and strictly frontal display: It feels cramped and sterile, and one gets little sense of the use-value of these chairs and tumblers and lamps.

Herzog & de Meuron were among the three finalists in the MoMA redesign competition, though they eventually lost. One can’t help thinking that this project contains an implicit criticism of the design MoMA got: Even in their statement they write about how the collection is “professionally illuminated, impossible to overlook – but it is not seen.” Still, it is criticism of the best kind: gentle, constructive, and a revelation to experience.

Until September 25 (11 W. 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-708-9400).


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