A MONUMENT BY MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN JOINS TWO CONTEMPORARY ART INSTALLATIONS TO COMPLETE MODERNSTARTS
A monumental, brilliantly colored mural by British artist Michael Craig-Martin goes on view at The Museum of Modern Art on November 21, 1999, as part of the exhibition Things, the third and final installment of ModernStarts. The work joins contemporary installations by Sol LeWitt in People and by Maria Fernanda Cardoso in Places,
two exhibitions that opened previously as part of ModernStarts. While ModernStarts focuses on the years 1880 to 1920, these site-specific projects are incorporated into the exhibitions to show how later artists have treated the traditions, themes, and subject matter of the period. As the first works encountered by visitors at the entrances to People, Places, and Things, the three installations emphasize how the past is viewed through the prism of the present.
Objects, Ready and Not, by Michael Craig-Martin, wraps the walls of the Museum lobby and extends through the Garden Hall as part of Things, on view through March 14, 2000. The installation demonstrates how easily the everyday object can seem unfamiliar when taken out of context; it depicts an array of vividly colored and often oversized things, frequently referencing objects made famous in works of art, including Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, Jasper Johns’s can of paintbrushes, and René Magritte’s pipe. Each simplified and stylized object, outlined in black tape, floats across brilliant lime green, turquoise, and magenta tracts of space. Approximately eleven and one half feet high and 442 feet wide, the painting extends from the lobby to the exhibition entrance on one side, and the Garden Café on the other.
Developed partly in response to objects in the Museum’s collection, Craig-Martin’s piece also includes representations of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, Gerrit Rietveld’s Red Blue Chair, and the Thonet brothers’ bentwood Side Chair. The actual objects are displayed on a nearby platform, mirroring the order in which they are depicted in the wall painting. Additionally, four works from the Museum’s collection are hung in the midst of the wall painting—a cast iron and brass fan (c. 1908) by Peter Behrens; The Song of Love (1914), a painting by Giorgio de Chirico; White on White (1918) by Kasimir Malevich; and Guitar (1912–13), a groundbreaking sculpture by Pablo Picasso.
An online project by Michael Craig-Martin, 16 Objects, Ready or Not, can be viewed through the MoMA Web site at www.moma.org. The project showcases an array of brightly colored objects that slowly drift across the screen as the colors within each object change continuously. Users can interact with the piece by selecting background colors and setting objects in various hues. In order to view the entire work, users may save it to their local hard drives and activate it as a screensaver.
Sol LeWitt’s On black walls, all two-part combinations of white arcs from corners and sides, and white straight, not straight, and broken lines (1975) has been re-created for the entrance to People, on display in the Museum’s second-floor Garden Hall through February 1, 2000. Composed of sweeping white arcs and lines over a black background, this large-scale wall drawing from MoMA’s permanent collection must be re-created from the artist’s instructions for each subsequent showing, and was last on view in a 1985 reinstallation of the Museum’s Painting and Sculpture collection.
Executed in white crayon over a black grid on black walls close to twelve feet high and 154 feet wide, the drawing is composed of 190 combinations of four types of lines that distantly suggest the forms of Cubist figurative works. LeWitt’s work shows the ultimate, fully abstract consequence of the modern development in which pictorial compositions, traditionally designed to represent figural gestures or postures, evolved to depict these gestures and postures in abstract lines and planes. A diagram showing each line type and all possible combinations used in the work accompanies the drawing, enabling viewers to understand the underlying structure of the work.
Inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photographs of a man running, LeWitt first explored serial concepts in three-dimensional structures, examining various ways to order lines as a kind of narrative space. Attracted to the wall’s potential as a two-dimensional surface, he adapted the basic geometric vocabulary of his sculpture, based on open, linear volumes, to drawing. Of the wall drawings, LeWitt has said, “I think of them as a musical score that could be redone by any or some people. I like the idea that the same work can exist in two or more places at the same time.”
Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s Cementerio—Vertical Garden, a dramatic work with 6,000 plastic white lilies, is installed at the entrance to Places, on view on the Museum’s third floor through March 14, 2000. This is the first time that her work is on display at The Museum of Modern Art. In Cardoso’s installation, which is inspired by Minimalist art of the 1960s and 1970s, nature is decontextualized and transformed. Cementerio—Vertical Garden evokes a sense of a garden that never decays and in which nature, although in this case artificial, is perfect and idealized.
Clusters of the flowers jut out from a wall approximately twelve feet high and 112 feet long. Subtle pencil drawings of arches, two by two feet in size, mark the surface of the wall. These drawings refer to the necropolis, where mausoleums are packed tightly together and niches with flower vases line some of the walls. Many of these traditional Latin American and Southern European cemeteries lend context to Cardoso’s work, in particular Bogotá’s Cementerio Central, which is located close to a studio she once worked in. The Cementerio Central, which became infamous in the 1950s as the site where victims of urban violence were laid out for identification, provides a symbolic connection between this period of violence and terrorism in Colombia’s history and Cardoso’s Cementerio—Vertical Garden. Although this work unquestionably has elegiac connotations, the artist herself stresses the “unashamedly beautiful” aspects of the installation.
ModernStarts is part of MoMA2000, which is made possible by The Starr Foundation. Generous support is provided by Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro in memory of Louise Reinhardt Smith. The Museum gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Contemporary Exhibition Fund of The Museum of Modern Art, established with gifts from Lily Auchincloss, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, and Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder. Additional funding is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and by The Contemporary Arts Council and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art. Education programs accompanying MoMA2000 are made possible by Paribas. The publication ModernStarts: People, Places, Things is made possible by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art. Web/Kiosk content management software provided by SohoNet.
