Size Matters

"Put any of MoMA’s art in that building and it will die. And certainly contemporary art does not work there. Even granting that the Williams-Tsien facade is singular (I once compared it to a Kleenex box), the proponents of this building love it as an abstract ideal of a space for art, a platonic thing apart, a fetish," Jerry Saltz has written about the razing of the American Folk Art Museum. 

Originally unveiled in 2001, the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien designed the American Folk Museum as a sort of paean to folk art.  That's probably what is killing it now.  Although there is a lot of debate and hand-wringing happening about the whole incident,  Saltz seems to be the spokesperson here for institutional truth: the reason the building needs to go is because it kills contemporary art.  The backstory is pretty simple:  MoMA bought the building in 2011, around the time the AFAM was running into major trouble as an institution.  AFAM almost folded last year, but is now back to where it started in a lobby somewhere.  And now MoMA wants to demolish the building in favor of more "big" space.

It's almost like a comeuppance, this tragedy, for any of us who ever had the unmitigated gall of taking something so small and insignificant as "folk art" seriously.  After all, Saltz is letting us know in his piece that "folk art" is not "contemporary art."  Saltz loathes Williams and Tsien's creation because it evokes the strange smallness and unnerving disjuncture that a lot of folk/outsider/visionary/whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it art elicits.  He does not know how to categorize something unless it is categorical, defined by tradition, and I guess great big.

Comparing the bronze, beaten, carefully obtuse facade to a "Kleenex box" and then the whole building to a "fetish" is probably the way he sees most of the art that used to be, and would have been, showcased inside the thing.  Something is missing, Saltz is letting us know:  size.  Bigness rules.  Saltz, and the MoMA and its legions, are doing Gordon-Gecko drag here.  Those big MoMA works of art ("big" both literally and figuratively and historically) can't be housed within that itty-bitty Joseph-Cornell shitbox called a "folk art museum."

It's really kind of sad the disrespect not only the arcitecture is getting in this whole weird battle to destroy a "Kleenox box," but also the art that once was celebrated within it.  A lot of folk artists work small, with weird, inarchivable materials, in strange and platonic ways that look dinky and silly, I'm sure, to Saltz' eye, especially when compared to actual "contemporary art." 

If folk art is the Rodney Dangerfield of the artworld, then Saltz' "contemporary art" is the Donald Trump, and the Donald right now is saying, "You're fired" to art that doesn't take up a lot of space literally but that can expand in your head if you give it half a chance.  Same goes for Williams and Tsien's intricate, origami-lush little building. 

"You're fired, Mr. Kleenex Box."

The Artist Is Annoying

 

 

So Bill and I were bored last night, channel-surfing, and finally decided on this documentary on HBO called Marina Abramovic:  The Artist Is Present, about "the grandmother of performance art" and her recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  What an experience 14 minutes of this thing was.  We could only take 14 minutes though.  It was like a parody from the get-go, and as I watched I kept laughing at every move this thing made:  the pretentious, pseudo-Phillip-Glass music, the long close-ups of the artist herself with her side-swept braid hanging over her left shoulder like a beautiful snake waiting to whisper to you, and of course the always fun back-story of how performance art was in response to painting blah blah and blah. 

 

The interviews, especially with Abramovic herself and the curators and critics chosen to speak because they love her, had the starchy self-important self-indulgence of a really good Christopher Guest blow-out, except of course nobody was joking around.  14 minutes in, when the doc follows the artist to her backwoods compound and she is making vegetable soup for some of her followers, I kept thinking this just has to be a joke.  But then no:  the followers get off the Greyhound outside her country estate, walk onto the grounds, take off their clothes and have a fun little group-baptism, in the artist's pond.  One follower says into the camera:  "I've never thought about life in this way before."  Or something like that. 

 

The language used is about how performance makes us question civilization, but I didn't question anything about art or civilization watching the 14 minutes I watched.  I just kept laughing.  Not from the outrageousness of Abramovic's stunts (like the artist driving a van around in circles for hours screaming outside a museum, or the artist standing inside the museum naked and brushing her hair saying how she must look beautiful).  I was laughing at how archaic and dumb performance art looks now that it's been codified and registered as art.  And I kept thinking too, about "outsider art" (of course) and how it is right now going through that same codification, that same institutionalization.  Doing shocking things is no longer funny or epiphanous or even silly; it's just an exercise in self expression, which kind of deflates all the bull-shit critics and curators say about Abramovic.  I kept thinking:  who cares?  Watch any stupid reality TV show and you'll get the same fix:  outrageous people doing stupid things, in clothes or not, is what it is.  It doesn't elicit questions, or even interest.  It is now officially background noise.  

 

 

 

We ended up watching Guest's For Your Consideration on DVD, because somehow actual parody is funnier and more relaxing than unintentional parody I guess.  Plus Catherine O'Hara's slam-bang even empathetic skewering of an actress thinking she's on the verge of super stardom somehow reminded me of Abramovic's performance in The Artist Is Present:  flaky, sweet, creepy, and in the end so self-indulgent the fact that the empress has no clothes is not even jarring or upsetting.  It's just the way things are.  No big whoop. 

 

Knock yourself out Marina, right there in middle of the MOMA.  I guess some people might be impressed or nostalgic.  Who knows?