Yesterday I popped into the Museum of Modern Art (one of the delights of living in New York is maintaining memberships at your favorite museums) to see the exhibition entitled, “Abstract Expressionist New York” (up through April 25, 2011). As the wall label pointed out, many of the paintings, which were pulled entirely from MOMA’s collection, were exhibited in art galleries that used to be right around the corner from the museum itself. They came from the halcyon days of New York art—the days when abstract expressionist artists, who were mostly poor and unknown for much of their lives, were just emerging from obscurity, and the then avant-garde-inclined MOMA was busily buying their art straight from their exhibitions.
As I was wandering through the galleries (teeming with people—where do all these fans of abstract expressionism come from, anyway?). I suddenly became conscious of a whole lot of screaming and hollering. At first I thought some whacko must be running about, but then I caught myself. “Is that noise coming from a work of art?” I asked a guard. He smiled a polite yes. I was hearing sounds from Yoko Ono’s 1961, “Voice piece for Soprano,” part of the recent reinstallation of MOMA’s collection of contemporary art. Installed in the museum’s large atrium, Ono’s interactive performance piece lets museum visitors use a mike while following instructions posted on a wall to “Scream. 1. against the wind; 2; against the wall; 3. against the sky.” That’s what they were doing. And that’s what I was hearing.
Mind you, I’m the type who likes all kinds of art, including a lot of noisy video art and installation art a lot of painters can’t stand. I like Christian Boltanski and Bill Viola, for example. I even like Bruce Nauman’s video, “Clown Torture” (1987), which captures the insane side of the zeitgeist better than just about any work of art I know.
But just as I like dinners presented with their potatoes, veggies and salad all with their separate places on the plate, I like different art forms presented so they don’t run interference with one another. Although I’m not a passionate lover of abstract expressionist paintings, I always give any painting its due when I stand in front of it. How can I do that while simultaneously listening to people screaming? Whatever is MOMA thinking to let a sound piece spill into galleries where there are paintings?
The same thing, it seems, that the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is thinking with part of its exhibition, “The Artist’s Museum.” Last week, while in L.A., I wandered into that show—also a collections-based exhibition (museum budgets are pinched nowadays)—only to encounter, in the very first gallery, one of those funny, super-oversized, realist Charles Ray’s sculptures of a woman dressed in deft business attire, placed where? Placed smack in the center of a roomful of paintings by Mark Rothko.
Mind you again, I happen to admire Charles Ray’s art. His sculptures (what else to call them?) startled me when I first saw them at a Whitney Biennial back in the early 90s, and they still startle me whenever I see one today. The craft is meticulous, the satire gentle, the gigantism absurd in an understated sort of way. But Charles Ray in the middle of a room of Rothkos? Whatever were the MoCA curators thinking? The audience is neither beckoned to contemplate Rothko (who becomes nothing but wallpaper behind the Ray) nor laugh with Ray (whose sculpture looks forlorn, as if it’s been set down temporarily for later pickup).
Museum curators everywhere, I beg you: Ease up. Quit jerking our chain! Maybe you find your job boring, but you’re supposed to showcase art—not mess with it, or worse, mess with viewers’ minds. Those of us who like going to museums don’t need you decontextualizing art all the time. While you may be having fun, you’re flattening art—making it all look exactly the same, forgetting that the glory of art is only discovered by seeing its vast range of differences.
It did Yoko Ono’s piece no good to let it waft into the painting galleries at MOMA. It did Charles Ray’s funny woman no good to plunk her down in a room of Rothko’s paintings. And it certainly did Rothko’s paintings no good to ask them to survive Ray’s ridiculously funny sculpture of a woman. If curators keep on doing this sort of mix-and-match business, I have a title for their next show: “How to Kill a Painting.”
