Architecture Is the New Art: The New Museum of Modern Art
By Edward Rubin
Architecture Is the New Art: The New Museum of Modern Art By Edward Rubin
Composite photo of the renovated and expanded Museum of Modern Art, 54 Street view. Photography by Elizabeth Felicella, architectural rendering by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, digital composite by Robert Bowen. Digital Image © 2003 The Museum of Modern Art
Biblically speaking, museum architecture, is the most exciting and provocative thing about the artworld today. Just look around you. Architecture is the new art. Think Bilbao. How about Rome’s Colosseum? Perhaps it has always been this way. Build a church and we will come. I mean, after 5 visits, during the past two years, I am still in love with Dia Beacon. Who else offers you a day trip up the Hudson River, a select and manageable amount of artists who really have serious things on their mind, and more than enough space and light to allow you to think about your own life. And their caf� isn’t bad either.
I now wait impatiently for the 2006 opening of the New Museum’s new 35 million dollar building on the Bowery. Art aside, I am dying to see how the architects, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, in what appears to be a series of concrete rectangular blocks, dazzlingly stacked on top of each other, will transform my life through their use of space. No doubt, with Japanese architects at the tippy top of their game – think Tadao Ando – I will not be disappointed. All of this leads me to the new Museum of Modern Art, Japanese architect Yoshi Taniguchi’s Billion Dollar Baby.
Back from two years of temporary self-exile in Long Island City, Queens, a completely revamped, Museum of Modern Art, with a week of openings and an extra heavy barrage of media coverage, has returned to its 53rd Street address. And none too soon I might add, for out of sight is out of mind. Being fickle, I for one, in a city drowning in museums and galleries, did not miss MoMA all that much. Besides having mounted far too few memorable exhibitions of any size during its pre-Queens years – can you name one? – another cause for dismay was its permanent collection. The museum’s long and linear, follow the dots, chronological method of display had long stopped speaking to me. No matter how the curators tried to spruce it up, turning somersaults to breathe life into long passed historical moments with exhibitions like "Modern Starts 2000", the collection had turned into a closet of old clothes.
More importantly, with its strong conservative bent, the aging, MoMA, nearly seventy-five years old had ceased to be fun. It lacked controversy and the type of youthful pizzazz that the Whitney Biennial and the Chelsea galleries are known to supply. Especially for us locals, tedium reigned supreme. It was obviously to everybody, museum officials included, that something had to be done.
The saving miracle in this morass was the museum’s prescient hiring of Yoshi Taniguchi, the perfect architect to build their new temple. It was a feat of prestidigitation, as the little known Taniguchi, though a respected entity in his own country, with a number of highly touted museums under his belt, had never worked outside of Japan. Having a small and busy architectural firm (only 15 people work in his office) the architect, until this offer, shied away from entering competitions. "I can’t generate something if I’m not 100 percent sure it will be built," he said. Thankfully for all involved, Taniguchi’s desire to win the prestigious MoMA competition both turned his head and changed his mind.
A second near miracle, a largely fiduciary one, was the raising of the necessary money, the final target number being a near incredible 858 million dollars. To get the ball rolling, the museum’s Board of Directors, headed by John D. Rockefeller Jr., Ronald Lauder and its 71 trustees (serving, life and honorary), kicked more than 500 million of their own money, more than enough to cover the museum’s 425 million construction budget. In return, four buildings, the lobby, the atrium, and some 36 individual galleries will feature their names.
The city and state also jumped into the ring. At Rockefeller’s urging, New York City, knowing a good moneymaker when they hear one, contributed an additional 65 million, the largest capital grant to a private institution in the city’s history. The state coughed up another 10 million. Additional monies raised, another couple of hundred million, went towards the purchase of adjacent real estate properties in Manhattan, so the museum could expand. It also financed the building of MoMA QNS, and added the much-needed funds to expansion and capital campaign expenses and the museum’s endowment.
When the Museum of Modern Art first opened, in 1929 at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street with less than two handfuls of employees, it attracted 40,000 visitors its first year and that was considered a good crowd. Today MoMA is a city unto itself. With the new building, along with the 52 story residential Museum Tower, the entire museum complex, smack in the middle of Manhattan, occupies nearly a full city block. It employs some 650 people, of which forty, across the museum’s six curitorial departments, are curators. As far as visitors, the museum expects to attract 2.5 million a year, an increase of about one million over previous attendance.
We are talking big business here, Culture & Corporate, at its uppermost echelon.
The operating budget of the museum this year, according to James Gara, the MoMA’s Chief Operating Officer, will be 120 million dollars. With an entry price of 20, a bone of contention for many, and a 5% annual draw from its 440 million endowment, it expects, as it has for the last ten years, to balance its budget
this year. As corporate head, the museum’s director, Glen Lowry, will be paid 619,663, a sum that doubled since 1998, roughly the year that fund raising began. Twelve months ahead of its fund raising schedule the museum has already raised 725 million dollars.
Numbers aside, the real magic is in the brilliance of Taniguchi’s ethereal touch.
Everything, whether totally new or restored to its original state, like Phillip Johnson’s, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, the 1939 Phillip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone-designed building and canopy, and the 1965 Phillip
Johnson addition has been handled with the utmost grace of a very light hand. From the museum’s new lobby, which cuts through the entire museum connecting 53rd street with 54th street, thus creating two entrances, to the second floor’s atrium that soars 110 feet above street level to the six floor, the museum’s uppermost reaches, the architect has met every challenge thrown him with great aplomb.
Ironically, whether apocryphal or not, Taniguchi is to have said, "If you raise a lot of money, I will give you great, great architecture. But if you raise really a lot of money, I will make the architecture disappear." The architect may have hidden the museum’s escalators and elevators, cleverly at that, but I assure you, at least until the brouhaha dies down, that Tanguchi’s architecture will be everything. How could it be otherwise? With column free galleries, innovative lighting, glass and stone curtain walls, skylights and ceiling to floor windows, all of which offer shifting perspectives and breathtaking views across galleries, up and down floors and out into the Sculpture Garden and the city, Taniguchi’s magic is never far from eye or mind.
The museum’s permanent collection, its chief crowd pleaser, under the guiding hand and watchful eye of its Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, John Elderfield, has wisely reverted back to founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr’s mapping of the evolution of Modern Art. The story the collection tells is the same but the path has been radically changed. Unlike the old museum, where we had to walk a straight line until we dropped, the permanent collection is now displayed in freestanding units, with time dated space, allowing viewers the freedom to chart their own, non-linear or not, path, to enter and exit each gallery at will.
Miraculously, the reinstallation, turning straw into silk, presents everything old as new again. The Painting and Sculpture collection, starting from fifth floor through 12 galleries, cover the years 1880-1940. Here we meet the Post-Impressionists, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin – on through Picasso and Matisse. The fourth floor’s ten galleries cover the years 1940-1970. Here it picks up with early Abstract Expressionism and the school of Paris and wraps up with pop art, minimalism, post-minimalism and Eve Hesse.
The photography galleries, a suite of six galleries on the third floor – it shares the floor with the drawing and architecture and design departments – although
extremely well represented by the usual suspects, with its low lighting and overly crowded hanging, felt rather claustrophobic. Despite hundreds and hundreds of pictures, from Atget’s, Saint Cloud Series (1921) to Cindy Sherman’s, Film Stills (1979) to Gilliam Wearing’s, Self-Portrait at 17 Years Old (2003), strangely enough, I didn’t find any work by Robert Mapplethorpe or Nan Golden.
A big change is the space afforded contemporary art from 70s onward. Located on the 2nd floor, the space is cavernous. It is double the space it had in the old museum. Still, with its 22-foot ceilings, conceivably to allow the showing of larger works, it is the institution’s weakest link. MoMA has always been feeble in this area which is why they wisely linked up with P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens. Nobody takes risks like Alanna Heiss. Disappointingly, the contemporary art chosen to be exhibited – read bankable pieces by past biennial art stars, such as Jeff Koons, Rachel Whiteread, Andrew Gursky, Matthew Barney, Bruce Nauman, Robert Gober – give only the barest and most safe indication of what is really happening the art world this minute.
All carping aside, during the six hours that I spent at the museum – hardly enough to digest one tenth of MoMA’s collection or take in all of the subtleties of the reinstallation — I experienced a few surprises, a few disappointments and a number of conundrums. I will let the reader decide from the following observations, which is which.
As to be expected, like vampires that refuse to take a back seat, Picasso and Warhol, made interdepartmental appearances in their various mediums throughout the entire museum. Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) is only a few yards from John’s Flag (1954-55). Ellsworth Kelly, now an elder statesman, with several major works prominently hung – the largest, a gift to the museum by Ronald Lauder, has been upgraded. Miro, looking good, is prominently displayed in a number of places. Alex Katz’s work, always non-threatening, also appears, as I seem to remember, in the public spaces only. Nowhere did I see or were they well hidden, any work by Kieth Haring, Julian Schnabel or David Wojnarowicz. Oddly, the often crowd pleasing Damien Hirst of "Sensation" fame is hidden in the print department. On an up note, happily Motherwell’s Ellegy never looked better. On a down note, the importance of Rothko, with one painting, seems to have all but disappeared. In fact, the whole Abstract Expressionist collection seems to have shrunk.
Only two artists, Matisse and Pollack, two of Modern Art’s most decorative painters, were given their own gallery. Strangely, Matisse’s Dance (1909), one of the museum’s most popular paintings, looking sadly misplaced, was moved to a wall facing the staircase. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), another of art
history’s historical markers, in the old museum, placed on a wall by itself, has been placed back into Picasso’s oeuvre. Now, somewhat neutered, it is just another painting among his many. Two of the more sly touches emanating, no doubt, from Elderfield’s hand, are the placing of a lone Lee Krasner painting, just outside the Pollock gallery, where she stood in real life, and a single Braque between two of Picasso’s Cubist works, reminding us that Picasso had help.
Though one can, starting at the 6th floor, the special exhibitions floor, work their way down to MoMA’s lobby and maybe even take a quick peak at the sculpture garden – my preference at the Guggenheim and Whitney – there is no way to digest the entire museum in one fell swoop. Between the permanent collection, the promised regularly changing Contemporary Art Galleries, film screenings, gallery talks, lectures, panels, and a full roster of continually changing exhibitions and an added upscale restaurant, and two cafes, and Presto, MoMA is now a city and cities require time. With little exaggeration, the new museum could be called the Modern Met.
I might add, that the true success of MoMA, certainly among those that take their art seriously, once the newness of the museum wears off, will rest heavily on the intelligence, daring and innovativeness of future exhibitions and presentations of all of its departments. They certainly have their work cut out for them. Hopefully, the museum will not rest on the laurels, nor will they spend all of their time and energy in an effort to attract tourists at the expense of the really serious art lovers. That said, all I can say for now is "MoMA, welcome back home. I never knew how much I missed you."
