Friday, August 15, 2008
Two Shows at MoMA That Don't Involve Salvador Dalí or Pre-fab Housing
Posted by Mark on Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 11:00 AM
Sure, shows about crazy mustachioed Basque surrealists and homes made in factories are interesting (seriously, Home Delivery and DalÃ: Painting and Film are great exhibitions), but they're also perpetually packed and difficult to enjoy after the first half-hour MoMA opens its doors (at 10:30am Wednesday through Monday). Two less-popular (and more brainy, weird...) exhibitions well-worth your crowd-ducking moves at MoMA these days deal with very specific artistic production at fairly specific times and places.
The newest is the just-opened Looking at Music (through January 5, 2009), an exploration of (mostly) American multi-media art beginning in the 1960s with the sudden wide availability of audio-tape recorders, portable cameras and electric guitars. A wall-sized projection of a close-up on John Lennon smiling benignly (filmed by Yoko Ono in 1968) greets visitors and bluntly states a recurring theme in the show: the intermingling of rock and roll and early video artists in America's 60s and subsequent avant-gardes. Accordingly, several music video-looping TVs occupy the show's second room (featuring The Beatles' "Penny Lane" and Bowie's "Space Oddity" [pictured above] among others), and an accompanying screening series features a plethora of brilliant short films set to hot tunes both classic and recent. There are also collections of envelope-pushing music sheets and indie magazines from modernist musicians and composers that will certainly thrill the music theorists in the audience. Multi-media videos and installations are the bread and butter of this show though, so Laurie Anderson's "Self-Playing Violin" (1974) (pictured), standing staunchly upright as if saluting gallery-goers while it solos , is a particularly fun entry (especially when one reads that Anderson used to accompany the violin on another instrument in live performances). Meanwhile, Joan Jonas's "Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy" (1973), a video of the artist performing a variety of roles for the camera while donning a series of masks and peering into mirrors, questions how one performs in everyday life and to what extent the camera undermines those performances. It's an effective exercise, boiling ideas Altman, DePalma and Romero have spent entire films (careers?) addressing down to a clever shorthand. Works from the likes of Nam June Paik, Jack Smith, Bruce Nauman and John Cage round out a dense and (thankfully) small crash course in the seminal early works of multi-media and mixed-media art.
Comments (2)
Showing 1-2 of 2
like
dislike
Top Commenters
