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7/1/2000

dot.jp / MODERNSTARTS

The Museum of Modern Art - MoMA, New York

See our recent special projects dot.jp, a series of dispatches from Japan by curator Barbara London which includes examples of media art and features of artists, and MODERNSTARTS, People-Places-Things, a web presentation of the Museums first cycle of MoMA2000 exhibitions, focusing on People, Places, and Things.


Modern Starts is the first of three exhibitions, each examining 40 years of collecting at The Museum of Modern Art through the year 2000. Drawing entirely form the museum's collection Modern Starts covers the period from 1880-1920, a time characterized by a spirit of invention and the pursuit of the new. Revolutionary impulses were manifold, and so was the artistic production of the time. In this time of renewal art had not one face but many. Hence Modern Starts refers to the birth of the modern as a concept as well as to the diversity of means and strategies employed by artists to create modern art.

Looking back on the 40 years between 1880 and 1920, four subjects emerge as the central concerns of the artistic production of the period: the shift from expression to composition in figural representation, the shift in focus from representations of the country to those of the city; the fascination with the idea of the object in and as art, and the birth of non-objective art, abstraction and its legacy.

The organization of Modern Starts into People, Places and Things refers to the traditional genres of figure composition, landscape, and still life, which artists working in the period under consideration increasingly addressed and questioned. Having emerged within these genres, abstract art–instead of being treated as an independent fourth category–has been integrated into the broader thematic structure. A separate section however is devoted to the complicated and oftentimes difficult history of the reception and comprehension of abstract art.

Modern Starts is divided into a series of independent installations that explore different subjects related to the broader themes of People, Places or Things, thereby constantly challenging the norms of the traditional genres and using them as a "resistance" against which the artists struggled in their quest for the modern. Whereas most artists between 1880-1920 still sought to find new means of expression within the old genres, some questioned the generic distinction entirely. Henri Matisse's Red Studio for example defies any categorization of that kind, being a depiction of people, places, and things at the same time. Similarly, Kasimir Malevich's White on White can not be subsumed under any one category, belonging in its object-like quality and its depiction of a Suprematist concept of space simultaneously to the world of things and places. These works of art demonstrating the inherent limitations of the classificatory concept of People, Places and Things are on view in a gallery devoted to the Making of Modern Starts.

The choice of subject matter as the foundation for the presentation of the collection of The Museum of Modern Art consciously deviates from the traditional chronological and historical organization and the distinct presentation of mediums that was originally developed by the first director of this museum, Alfred H. Barr in 1936, and that has guided the presentation of the collection throughout most of the museum's history. Instead of recounting the beginnings of the history of modern art in one linear master narrative subsuming movements, styles, and individual achievements as outlined in Barr's evolutionary chart, Modern Starts offers many different but conceptually related narratives. The diagrams created in the genesis of Modern Starts as organizational charts for the different installations demonstrate the relationships of ideas within each section of People, Places and Things, and hence reveal a structural relation to the overlaying subject: a neural network of interconnected parts for People, a horizontal panorama for Places, and a dense symmetrical object for Things.

With its series of smaller installations Modern Starts refuses to present a definitive art history of the time between 1880 and 1920, but invites to discover a myriad of histories of the art of that time. Driven by an organizing principle that predates the era of the modern "isms," and by maintaining the fiction that the genealogies of modern art history haven't yet been created the exhibition hopes to restore a fresh and original experience of well-known works of art.


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10:30 a.m. – 5:45 p.m. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday
10:30 a.m. – 8:15 p.m. Friday
Closed Wednesday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas day

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