"Open Ends," at MOMA, Examines the Art of 1960 to the Present
Organized across disciplines and including works from all of the Museum's six curatorial departments, the mega-exhibition "MOMA2000," of which "Modern Starts," "Making Choices" and "Open Ends" are part, inaugurated the vision of New York's most celebrated museum as the Loews Multiplex Theater of the art world: a comfortably relativistic, corporately ambitious, all-encompassing art venue, temperamentally incapable of choosing from among a number of single historical definitions but desperate to simultaneously reflect them all.
Best experienced across the Atlantic in the raw, cavernous galleries of Britain's Tate Modern, the recent spate of massive-scaled, loosey-goosey museum curatorials answers to a series of preterite or petering phenomena. Firstly there is the butt-end of high modernism, as ideologically passe as High Anglicanism, and the subsequent twilight of its lesser, but no less programmatic, discontents: abstract expressionism, minimalism and conceptualism. Mirrored by a worldwide political vacuum, contemporary art has provisionally embraced an exploding pluralism, matching, in turn, the culture's Internet-led information glut. Artists have also, for a decade or more, come to increasingly employ a variety of media, crisscrossing traditional boundaries and challenging the precincts of narrow curatorial assignments, such as MOMA's Dept. of Painting and Sculpture, making them seem dated and arbitrary.
The ensuing curatorial reaction to these phenomena has been less method than a stylized practice predicated on what one might call the standard cocktail formula. Leaning heavily on juxtapositions, a smart curator will throw together three jiggers of flexible exhibition themes, one of ahistoricism and a splash of the ever-popular demotic. The concoction, if properly mixed, can turn refreshing and playfully illuminating. Managed with a clumsier hand, an exhibition like "Open Ends" can be quickly transformed from charming view to cloying display, from revealing to just plain random.
According to director Glen Lowry, MOMA's millennial cycle of exhibitions was never intended as a set of "overarching or definitive statements about modern art or even about the nature of the Museum of Modern Art's collection." Instead, the statements implicit in the last 17 months of MOMA exhibitions have been "interrogatory ones." Contrast this with Britain, where art today is the stuff of national debate (and misunderstanding and also impossible hype). There, the Tate Modern has brazenly but effectively revised the U.S.-centric canon of contemporary art in favor of its own. Note: the Brits and the Tate don't just have an ax to grind, they have a mission (much as MOMA did at its inception and American painting had in the 1950s). MOMA, by contrast, has its golden years to live by; that and a vague commitment to purchase and exhibit, among other materials, contemporary art since 1960.
MOMA, as "Open Ends" amply demonstrates, has been active in amassing some of the best art made during the last 40 years. Even if one takes the narrow view of contemporary art as work produced in the last 20 years, the museum has brought together a fair number of gems. Encrusted within the 11 separate exhibitions that comprise "Open Ends" are fantastic pieces like Charles Ray's eerie Family Romance, a nude sculptural portrait of an even-heighted nuclear family; Rachel Whiteread's ghostly, all-white, negative cast of a walk-in library; and Fred Tomaselli's Bird Blast, a hallucinogenic colorscape that is equal parts reexamination of painting and a paean to the detritus of contemporary culture.
Segregated rather than united by what Kirk Varnedoe, co-organizer of "Open Ends" and chief curator of the Dept. of Painting and Sculpture, terms "rough thematic clusters," these works rest uncomfortably next to design furniture (Tomaselli), documentary photography (Ray) and things white (Whiteread). Additionally, MOMA's everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach becomes the opposite of rigorous where discrete exhibitions are driven by anecdotal ideas. Witness the exhibitions "Matter" (juxtaposing works of contemporary art and design "according to the materials from which they are made") and "White Spectrum" (examining the "formal effects, ethical positions, and social undertones that artists have found in the white spectrum"). The organizational ideas behind these two shows can hardly be of interest to anyone not within the airy confines of graduate school; it's an out-and-out embarrassment that they are entertained at all at MOMA.
Other key works are placed as separate installations around the museum's three available exhibition floors, often serving as adjunct commentary to the largely political thrust of the two most coherent shows in "Open Ends." Titled "The Path of Resistance" and "Counter-Monuments & Memory," the exhibitions take the temperature of political art since the radicalism of the 1960s. Leaving aside the dated posters and documentary photographs, the exhibitions feature important works like James Rosenquist's 86-foot-long F-111, a pop painting of a plane unleashing its payload of U.S.-brand consumerism; Cuban artist KCHO's The Infinite Column I, a stack of boat skeletons paying homage to immigrant dreams; and Cindy Sherman's complete Untitled Film Stills, less interesting as icons of feminist politics than as interrogations of film and advertising cliche.
But then there is MOMA's room-sized installation of Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977: it is, by far, the best reason to visit the museum. A haunting series of paintings done in an out-of-focus, photorealistic style, Richter memorializes the young radicals of the Baader-Meinhof gang, one of the most notorious terrorist groups of the 1960s and 70s, found dead under suspicious circumstances in a Stuttgart prison. The date signals a tragic watershed for Germany: on Oct. 18, 1977, the young democracy lost its innocence and three murderous, youthful idealists lost their lives.
Richter's work is, hands down, the high point of "Open Ends." Elsewhere the exhibition fumbles a virtual embarrassment of riches, establishes no agendas and describes no distinctions. It is now officially up to some other institution to fulfill the brief MOMA refused during this last year of exhibitions: to point the way forward to the art of the next century.