I Sing the Body Electronic: 

If Night at the Museum 3 were set at MoMA last night, the Schlemmers and the Charles Rays and a bunch of other objects that celebrate vehicles, robots, and other hyper-modernist devices would have been dancing in the balconies over the atrium as Kraftwerk launched its eight-night retrospective.

The exclusive, lucky, and/or GIF-adept crowd, which strangely (or not) barely moved, gamely donned their white 3-D glasses to see projections of bikes, trains, and the beloved Autobahn that launched a thousand rock bands and dance parties as the band played the 22-minute title track from that groundbreaking album, amidst selections from their catalogue.

And while the concert highlighted Kraftwerk’s “historical contributions to and contemporary influence on global sound and image culture,” as MoMA puts it, it also happened to recapitulate central themes of the museum’s own history—from early machine-age design to the high-tech innovations showcased in recent exhibitions like “Design and the Elastic Mind” and “Talk to Me,” which boldly went where no art museum had gone before in exploring our relationship to our ever-evolving devices. That sensibility, championed by curator Paola Antonelli, was underscored as hashtags, among other logograms and punctuation signs that have acquired new meanings in our electronic age, floated evanescently over our heads (though disappointingly, the @ sign, a recent MoMA acquisition, didn’t make an appearance).

The event also solidifies the role of MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach as a stager of must-see spectacle, a cultural impresario on equal par with the artists he presents. Like LACMA director Michael Govan, who turned the slow movement of a rock on a flatbed trailer into an international news event—while Michael Heizer, the artist responsible the piece, stayed home in Nevada—Biesenbach became for the public face of the concerts as the reclusive musicians kept, as always, to themselves. The retrospective, the must-see event of New York’s cultural season, was hardly accessible to most, given the paucity of tickets and the way they were offered. Still, it broke new ground for the institution. And somehow or other those electronic drumbeats must have gotten infused in its bones. 

Kraftwerk, Performing at The Museum of Modern Art. PHOTO + WORLDWIDE 2012 © by Peter Boettcher

Magritte Expectations: 

Dancing Neighbor, 2010, by Cuban-born, Madrid-based artist Alexandre Arrechea. The watercolor was at the MagnanMetz stand at the Pinta art fair, along with some of the artist’s spinning-top sculptures.  

Took me a while to realize whose work this reminded of (weird….same picture at the Guggenheim!). But something about that green is just surreal. 

Cat Power:

Indian Warrior, 1931, another fresco from the upcoming MoMA show reuniting murals Diego Rivera made about Mexican history and social injustice for his retrospective at the museum 80 years ago. (See yesterday’s post for more details on his radical project.)

The artist based this image of an Aztec warrior on his deep study of pre-Columbian art. For the conquistador, he drew on Italian Renaissance techniques like the foreshortening in Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ. The connection is odd, because to Rivera, the Spaniard under the knife is hardly a victim. Still, the artist must have thought he made an exquisite corpse. 

Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. Purchased with the Winthrop Hillyer Fund SC 1934:8-1 

© 2011 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Left My People Go:

MoMa was only two years old when Diego Rivera occupied it for the first time. It was the fall of 1931, during the Depression, and the museum brought the artist from Mexico to New York six weeks before his solo show to create what we now might describe as semi-site-specific works. On blocks of frescoed plaster, slaked lime, and wood, he painted five “portable murals”—some on themes from Mexican history (his famous Agrarian Leader Zapata); others on class inequity, and revolution. After the opening, RIvera added three more murals about social injustice in New York—or, as we might say now, the 99 percent. 

That’s the theme of Frozen Assets, shown here, which looks awfully fresh for a 1931 painting. MoMA is reuniting it with other works from the original exhibition in “Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art,” opening November 13. Also featured are designs for Rivera’s Rockefeller Center murals, which were destroyed in 1934 after a scandal over the artist’s “unauthorized” depiction of Lenin.  

 ”Diego Rivera” is but one amazing show on art and politics at an institution built on oil money this fall. At the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, “Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics, 1950–1980” chronicles how artists took to the streets—and exploited the mass media— to support social and political movements advocating for feminism, peace, and more. The website documents works like The Peace Tower, a massive 1966 protest against the Vietnam War featuring hundreds of paintings sent from artists from around the world, and the elegiac performance In Mourning and Rage, staged by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus in 1978. 

How this might impress the Occupy Museums protestors who’ve branched off from Occupy Wall Street to picket MoMA and other museums isn’t clear, since their message seems to have morphed from a critique of cultural elitism to a collective sharing of information and empowerment. In which case they should do a field trip inside the museums too, where they will find (in addition to more Communist art) evidence of the cultural elitism they rightly detect—as well as many programs offering information and empowerment. Sometimes the radicals are on the inside.

Which is to say, there are a lot of ways to occupy museums. At MoMA, Tony Shafrazi spray-painted Picasso’s Guernica in 1974 to get his protest against the Vietnam War on front pages around the world; that was a bad way. Occupy Museums has been deeply controversial in the art world regarding its targets and intentions. But initiating conversations with people outside the museum about cultural elitism, underpaid art handlers, and issues that keep people out of museums? Funny thing—that sounds just like the art inside the museum. 

Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico
© 2011 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Divine Inspiration:

A Barbara Kruger in MoMA’s collection seems to have the same message as the #occupymuseums crowd that was protesting outside.