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New York Report:
Critical Response to the New MOMA

When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive for a visit, Hamlet tells them "Denmark's a prison." And when Rosencrantz demurs -- "We think not so, my lord" -- his host replies, "Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so..."

So 'tis with the new MOMA. To the visitor there's nothing wrong with the converted staple factory that a little all-weather carpet and some decent programming couldn't fix. Their absence, though, is no accident but the point: to MOMA's princelings, Queens is a prison.

This becomes clear before you've even paid. Line up at the admission desk, whose traditional hauteur has given way to undisguised crankiness, and the museum treats you to video projections of the street outside. In case simple pitiless sunlight on the overweight underdressed isn't enough to put you off, the shots are taken at ankle height, as though from a pothole: "What the world looks like from down here." I suppose if I were arty and working in midtown and suddenly faced a couple-three years of morning commutes to Queens, I'd have a chip on my black-clad shoulder as well.

So naturally I'd christen an exhibit of highlights of the collection "To Be Looked At," stressing how hard the rest of this new environment is on my eyes. Then I'd display them so badly they'd be sure to provoke homesickness for other settings and better days. Under harsh light and over bare concrete floors and against wall dividers that go only partway to the duct-ridden ceilings, Matisse and Picasso look forlorn, victims of urban brutalism. Hope II, Klimt's bare-breasted woman garlanded in people, seems shrouded instead, cringing in the corner to which she's consigned.

Further on, though, Rothko, Pollack, Johns and Rauschenberg look perfectly at home. The setting seems bracing, actually, restoring to their pieces some salutary shock of the new. This suggests a simple solution to the display problem: hang the work in reverse chronological order, so by the time a viewer reaches Seurat she's stopped flinching at the setting and can spend a little time looking at the jewel.

Of course at some point Seurat and Matisse and Picasso were surprising and shocking and brutalist themselves, and restoring freshness to a dusty canon is a worthy goal. But you can't recreate that original feeling without at least a few of the original elements -- say, incandescent light and well-proportioned spaces. Today's 'new' won't serve to recreate the shock or refresh the appreciation of yesterday's. Newness is not fungible.

Issues of newness were obviously much on the minds of MOMA staff curating the "Tempo" exhibit, a witless assemblage of meditations on the passage of time -- as in "Are we there yet?" One of its pieces featured 39 metronomes going, or actually failing to go, at different speeds. A harassed-looking man with a 'Staff' tag plastered to his back knelt before each of them in turn, probably cursing the sculptor's name. Finally he set them all in motion, and sure enough they were -- metronomes at different speeds. Another group of pieces featured the original comparison between time and the flow of water. Its blue-painted tiles and shoreline photos evoked the old joke about the dying rabbi who announces "Life is a river!" Hearing this, Gimpel the fool wrinkles his forehead and says, "What does that mean, 'Life is a river'?" So the crowd asks, "Rabbi, what do you mean, 'Life is a river'?" and with the last of his strength the rabbi shrugs and says, "So, it isn't a river!"

Witlessness can happen anywhere, but it takes a museum in Queens to really dis the provinces. The Department of Photography's "A Walk Through Astoria and Other Places in Queens," a display of picture albums created by photographer Rudy Burkhardt and poet Edwin Denby, seems to embody the museum's entire attitude about its new location. Not content to let Dorothea Lange-style pictures of abandoned Esso stations, grubby children and industrial detritus speak for themselves, Denby rhapsodizes about

"Rail and concrete, asphalt and weed oasis
Remote Queens constructs like desert-landscape scenes
Vacant sky, vacant lots, a few Sunday faces
In this backyard of exploitation and refuse..."

The outer boroughs haven't taken a public hit like this since Hair's Claude Hooper Bukowski bemoaned his roots in "mucky, slimy, smelly Flushing."

As you round the curve into the 33rd Avenue subway station, signs on the museum's roof resolve from abstract shapes into the letters MOMA QNS. What a shame that's the last interesting visual experience you'll have there. And why should it be that way, in a place with new facilities, ample resources and a great collection?

All it would take for MOMA QNS to work is for some fool to ask, "What does that mean, 'Queens is a prison'?" Then maybe the staff could stop wallowing in its own embarrassment long enough to shrug and say: "So, it isn't a prison."

--Kelly Kleiman

Kelly Kleiman's criticism of theater, dance and performance appears regularly in the The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Reader, and numerous other publications. Writer and arts consultant, she holds undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Chicago.

Editorial Note: The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) is currently showing "To Be Looked At: Painting and Sculpture from the Collection." On display are highlights from the permanent collection of over thirty-five hundred objects. Among the exhibited works are Paul Cezanne's The Bather (c. 1885), Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night (1889), Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Henri Matisse's Dance (1909), Henri Rousseau's The Dream (1910), and Gustav Klimt's Hope II. MOMA is at 33 Street at Queens Blvd, Long Island City, Queens, New York State (Telephone: 212/ 708-9400). Its website is http://www.moma.org/momaqns.