I can't stop thinking about the new Museum of Modern Art. Nor can I stop going there. Since its November reopening, I've been 14 times. I still love the building, but I often feel MoMA is so invested in its own myth of modernism that it and I can't breathe. Myths are monolithic and fixed; they accommodate modification but they don't really change. Art, which is quixotic, is timeless but not mythic. The alarming lack of space allotted for all the permanent collections may mean that MoMA is fated to stay stuck in a myth of its own making.
I know it will take years to understand how this building does and doesn't work. Still, I keep feeling that it brings us to the brink of discovering something about the Modern as an institution and about modernism itself that we haven't quite known before or experienced fully -- something that's remained hidden just beneath the surface, something marvelous.
So far, the reactions to the reopening have been predictably either-or: MoMA is either failing the modernist past or the postmodern present; it's being too inclusive or not inclusive enough; it's betraying founding director Alfred Barr's teleological torpedo or torpedoing him altogether. Whatever, this back-and-forth isn't going to get us through this transitional time or bridge the gap between the achievement of this building and the museum's vaunted collection -- or their tantalizing potential together. There have to be other ways between the polarities, and lots of people will have to be taking innovative stabs at reconciling the differences. Here's mine.
This is a grandiose scheme, but it could be done. In an exhibition called "75 Years," MoMA should integrate as much of its photography, drawing, painting and sculpture collection as possible from 1925 to 2000, and install it in strictly chronological order. This would break the myth and begin to bridge the gaps. An attempt to do this was being led by former curator of painting and sculpture Kirk Varnedoe, who was handpicked by chief curator Bill Rubin, the overlord of linearity. Varnedoe, whose death is a tremendous loss to the museum, opened up Rubin's installation, then helped instigate "Modern Starts," the three thematic messes that filled the museum between 1999 and 2000, of which his, though flawed, was probably the best.
When I say strictly chronological, I mean it. Starting on the top floor and using every space including the atrium, whenever an exact date can be determined as to when a work was made, that date will determine exactly where the work will be installed. Instead of having a gallery of just Johns, Twombly and Rauschenberg, as MoMA does now, we might see these artists with Jess, Jay DeFeo, Ray Johnson, Asger Jorn, Bob Thompson and Bruce Conner; or see Jasper Johns' Flag (1954-55), a de Kooning Woman, a Picasso, a Joseph Cornell, a Jean Tinguely, an early Nam June Paik and a late Giacometti one after the other. Europeans like Oyvind Fahlstrom, Konrad Klapheck, Blinky Palermo, and Bernd and Hilla Becher would hang with Claes Oldenburg, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and Peter Saul. Good or bad, questionable or not, Louise Nevelson would be brought back into the mix, as would Marisol, Arman, Alice Neel, Paula Rego, Elaine de Kooning and H.C. Westermann. The May 1964 section might contain these artists plus Warhol, Richter, Polke, Baselitz, Beuys, Bacon, Katz, Kusama, Avery, O'Keeffe and people we barely remember.
Many will complain that there will be too much so-called "lesser" work on view. But you can't develop what Oscar Wilde called "the critical spirit" if you're mainly seeing masterpieces. Seeing only peaks doesn't tell you how high they are. As Andr Malraux wrote, "We can feel only by comparison. The Greek genius is better understood by comparing a Greek statue to an Egyptian or Asiatic one than by acquaintance with a hundred Greek statues." "75 Years" would allow people to exercise their own "critical spirit." It would begin with Mondrian, Stettheimer and Picabia and proceed until we get to Chris Ofili, Kara Walker and Steve McQueen. I'd put Charles Ray's FamilyRomance -- his uncanny sculpture of a miniature family, all naked and all the same size -- in place of Newman's Broken Obelisk in the atrium, as it would compel viewers to go back to the beginning again to see how all this got started.
Everybody says that nobody owns ideas and that certain ideas are in the air. "75 Years" would create a sense of what the air was like. We would see who was doing what when and who was and wasn't original. We'd see just how shocking some of this art once looked. Imagine the jolt of Johns's Flag. We'd get a sense of what a copycat Robert Morris was, how soon Jim Dine started repeating himself, how Warhol was something that had never existed before, how out-of-it many Americans were, or why Barnett Newman's colleagues felt so betrayed by his work when he first started showing. We'd see dead ends, last gasps, flashes in the pan; Pollock struggling to change styles at the height of his fame, and Mondrian daring to be new even on his last day in the studio. A vision of the freight train of art history would appear before us. It would be chaos out of order and order out of chaos. It would be marvelous.
Nine Ideas for a Better MoMA
It goes without saying that the new Museum of Modern Art needs tweaking. Installations have to be adjusted, and there has to be more than the current five percent of women artists included in fourth- and fifth-floor installations of the painting and sculpture collection. Here are some non-installation suggestions MOMA should implement.
There is no longer a "Projects" gallery in the new museum. MoMA is already appallingly squeezed for space. Nonetheless, it can't only do "New Acquisitions" shows or allow P.S.1 to take up the slack in this critical area. Seeing Mark Dion's nifty Project wedged into the theater lobby of the sub-basement is depressing. MoMA should immediately re-establish a project space. Following this, a large-scale annual exhibition of eight to 10 important young artists (with a catalogue) should be instituted. Meanwhile, the space for video should be tripled. Ditto the stupendous drawing collection -- even if this means less office or education space.
MoMA should present lectures and panels every month. These events should be free to artists and students, and be available later online. The museum should institute a paperback series of scholarly monographs on individual artists and establish a regular publication along the lines of Tate magazine. All this would make MoMA feel more alive. At the same time, the museum should look into having one more free day or evening a week.
Finally, it's great that MoMA mounts retrospectives of artists like Gursky, Richter and Polke. (Thomas Demand is opening next month.) However, it needs to branch out and go lighter on established white guys and Germans.
JERRY SALTZ is art critic for the Village Voice, where this article first appeared. He can be reached at [email protected]