by Eva Hagberg, published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Volume #8
See here for subscription details - members of FoD are eligible for a 10% discount! 

When the Museum of Modern Art reopened in June 2004, after being closed for two years for Yoshio Taniguchi's renovations, the central atrium was enlivened with Barnett Newman's huge Broken Obelisk and Monet's Waterlilies. The installation was surprising - the painting seemed somehow larger than expected yet at the same time utterly lost, buttressed as it was by Newman's gigantic piece of steel and limited by the fact of so much airspace above it. The triptych garnered a massive amount of attention - much of it critical - for its installation, and was soon moved elsewhere.

Five years later, the Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist created Pour Your Body Out (7,354 cubic meters), an installation that took part in that same oncesparsely- detailed atrium. Instead of a blank wall covered with an artwork, she offered a three-sided environment, centred around a doughnut-shaped seating area. Guests – as it was guests, not visitors, this installation made clear – were invited to remove their shoes and lounge around inside the doughnut, on the doughnut, with back and knees to the doughnut. Music came, it was eventually deduced, from speakers inside the upholstery, and the entire effect was one of absolute sonorous delight. Parents began bringing their children. It turned into MoMA playdate. And the brilliant conceptual artist Rachel Harrison created a piece that implied that the $20 average cost of a yoga class and the $20 standing cost of a MoMA ticket could be overlapped, the experience turned into a hilarious use of space.

Between the obelisk and the Rist came so many more installations.

Dan Perjovschi created a wall piece, in which he drew cartoons all over the atrium that expressed the difficulties of working with an institution as staid as the MoMA. Martin Puryear filled it with gigantic wooden constructions that, despite their abstracted nature, struck to the very core of gentle humanity, and Olafur Eliasson, as part of his travelling retrospective, installed a tiny swinging fan that just barely missed the tallest person’s head.

Perjovschi rendered the space accessible, Puryear visible, Eliasson movable. And Rist rendered it emotional.

Today, the atrium is filled with the work of Martin Kippenberger, the exuberant and prolific German artist who died far too young, but not after making what could be seen as far too much art. And it works. The MoMA, since its first awkward reopening in which the curators weren’t quite sure what to do with their immense and immensely important holdings and so just plonked them on the walls, is starting to know how to occupy its home, use its space.

It started in a so-called brownstone on 53rd Street, a museum founded by three ladies who lunched. It was, as Glenn Lowry writes in an essay published to coincide with the museum’s reopening, separate from the street, pointedly removed, up a set of stairs. This was not a museum that was about ‘accessibility’. It was a museum that was about a particular subculture of the wealthy and connected, until 1939, when J. Alfred Barr, the museum’s first director, commissioned its first proper home, designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone. As Lowry says,

“the Museum of Modern Art recognized that its particular importance resided in its ability to treat its galleries as a kind of laboratory in which to engage the public with its programs and ideas.”

Transforming it from a ‘museum’ into a ‘laboratory’ was the earliest instance of its architecture being informed by – and then in turn informing again – the museum’s mission and programmatic requirements. And for the next sixty years, the MoMA went through six architectural changes, some of which resulted in the creation of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden – recently enlarged by Taniguchi – and the Pelli Tower, among others. What the Taniguchi renovation did, and indeed one of the reasons the minimal Japanese architect was chosen, was to weave together the disparate architectural elements of the museum, to operate as a kind of glue.

“It’s not a museum of the twentieth century,” Barry Bergdoll, the architecture curator says. “It’s a museum of modernism.”

As such, the museum’s architecture reflects the narrative of the museum’s own history, and the history of its mission, which has changed.

“The museum was a mirror of the rest of the world,” he says. “And we were wondering where we were in relation to modernism.”

To Bergdoll, the Taniguchi building is “so clearly a modernist building…although maybe in the future it’ll be seen as a neo-modernist building,” and the very relationship between Taniguchi’s interventions and the museum’s architectural past is what holds so much of the fascination. 

On the 53rd St side, disparate elements come in a streetscape sequence, while on the 54th St side, “the evidence of the various additions of the fifties, sixties, and seventies are all obscured, almost literally erased.”

Bergdoll sees the architecture as profoundly tied to the museum’s history, much as Lowry does, and charts the development of an interest in modernism from something that was essentially a clubhouse for wealthy people who had recently been converted, or could be converted to the cause, into the current scenario, in which modernism has become a cultural mecca.

“Hundreds of thousands of Europeans come to see Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” he says. “You can trace it very neatly in the museum’s evolution from being in a brownstone, which was almost a domestic-type interior, and the gradual erosion of that domestic, somewhat private sense of space, to a big public building.”

There are some challenges for the curator. First of all, it is difficult to represent architecture in the absence of an actual building. Because architecture is such an experiential art, and one that has to be activated by
people, it can be a disservice to the field when it is represented either staidly – with plans and sections – or in an exaggeratedly active manner–with sexy fly-through animations and other computer-aided bits.

“When you look at the early exhibitions, they were about asserting the status of architecture as an art that could be encountered on equal footing with other manifestations of twentieth-century or modernist art practices,” Bergdoll says. “You could say that job was done so well it doesn’t need to be done anymore.” His job now, then, is “to get the public to attend to, and think about, what is at stake in architecture.”

For Bergdoll, architecture shows are a way of getting inside the architect’s mind, showing the thought process, the decision-making process, the design process, and then, he says, “the integration of that process with ethical processes.” The problem is in expressing these architectural ideas, architecturally, without alienating visitors.

“An architect can think space through representation,” Bergdoll says. “Most members of the public cannot see space in representations of space.”

What Bergdoll did, then, was to make his first show at the museum about “architecture qua architecture.” Opened in July, 2008, ‘Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling’ was a twopart exhibition.

One, outside and in MoMA’s West Lot, encompassed five
contemporary prefabricated houses. The other, inside in the galleries, was an activated and kinetic experience. “I had to come up with a very, very active space,” Bergdoll explains. “There were films and computer animations, and the space was quite dense.”

To him, it seemed almost like more of a science exhibition than something one might expect from a thoughtful curator with an academic background, but it is precisely such activation and movability that the museum’s current architecture allows.

‘Design and the Elastic Mind’, Bergdoll’s colleague Paola Antonelli’s show, was a similar embrace of the multiple possibilities of the architectural space inherent within the museum, and truly adopted Lowry’s idea of the museum as laboratory. Literally. In that there was a skin-growing vat, Dunne & Raby’s robots-that-look-nothing-like-robots, and images of typographically modified sperm.

The exhibition design, which separated the sixth-floor galleries into a series of individual spaces, was as much tied to the architecture as Richard Serra’s 2004 installation, a show that included some of the steel sculptor’s gigantic work that Taniguchi’s design had specifically created floor support for.

What’s next? Bergdoll is currently working on a show of Latin American modernism along with four colleagues, as well as on a cross-departmental Bauhaus exhibition. In conceptualising the shows, figuring out how everything is going to get installed comes, he says, somewhere towards the middle of the curating process.

“You have to start thinking about installation in architectural exhibitions much earlier than if you’re just installing an artist’s work,” he says. “There’s a much more symbiotic relationship between installation-exhibition design and content, and it’s a different form of curatorship.”

In other words, it is almost like an architectural practice: figuring out the programme, the site, and the conditions the space has to answer, and then turning that into a three-dimensional and occupiable experience.

Fortunate indeed that the work has such a flexible home. 

This article was published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Volume #8. It was written by Eva Hagberg.