Last week’s expedition to the Metropolitan Museum was so nourishing that Andy and I decided to hit the Museum of Modern Art Saturday afternoon. The big show I had my eye on was Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, which I understood to be largely centered on Russian Constructivism. I did my best to fill Andy in on what I could remember about Mayakovsky and Malevich, the politics of Constructivism and its aesthetic relationship to Cubism, which all turned out to be pretty accurate. But the show also includes art and artists associated with the Dada movement (the subject of my only visual art class in college), including the great Kurt Schwitters.
The MOMA show also undertook the mission of spotlighting how this movement welcomed women artists, thinkers, and creators, including the likes of Fre Cohen, a name new to me.
The atrium currently hosts a bunch of beautiful, whimsical, enormous sculptures by Korean artist Haegue Yang that look vaguely like animals and/or robots, each one on wheels and covered with tiny bells. At scheduled intervals, art handlers come out and move the sculptures around so viewers can hear them jingle-jangle-jingle. We didn’t get to hear them but I’d go back just for that.
I like how MOMA is cycling through its permanent collection, bringing out stuff that is rarely seen. I enjoyed this Martin Kippenberger piece that inevitably invites life to imitate art and a huge Seth Price wall piece whose ideal form is a PDF you can download online at home.
We sat and watched some of Cao Fei’s fascinating film Whose Utopia, a documentary about a light-bulb factory in China.
In the first-floor lobby, we enjoyed Philippe Parreno’s Echo, especially the overhead piece near the 54th Street exit.
After this visual feast, we went home, made dinner, and I found myself giving Andy a multimedia introduction to Phoebe Snow, about whom he declared, “She was the real deal!”
another eye opens 