MOMA Commissions Artists To Create Videos For '9 Screens'

The Museum of Modern Art presents 9 Screens, an exhibition consisting of five new multichannel videos commissioned specifically for the information screens located above the admission desk in the Museum's lobby, from February 3 to May 18, 2010.

The concept for the exhibition was developed during conversations between artist Nicolas Guagnini and Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director, The Museum of Modern Art, about MoMA's interchange with artists-how the Museum was perceived by artists, and also its function and role within the artistic community. In 2008, Halbreich invited Guagnini to observe the inner workings of MoMA and share his observations and critiques with both curators and administrators.

Halbreich says, -I was impressed with the program of exhibitions and lectures at Orchard, a cooperative gallery Nicolas founded in 2005 with a group of colleagues. The idea behind Orchard was to increase the connection between audience and artist, to operate to the side of the art market, and to display under-recognized works, often of a conceptual and political nature, across generations. I thought these ideas would be a good jumping-off point to start a project with Nicolas for MoMA.

After several months of discussion with curatorial and administrative staff, Guagnini articulated some of the challenges he perceived were central to MoMA becoming both a more nimble institution and one less constrained by the canonical history it had contributed to shaping. For example, he thought that MoMA needed to expand its entry point for young, local artists. He also talked about the viability of using more of the interstitial spaces of the Museum as sites for additional display as well as how to compress the long lead time required by large institutions to realize an exhibition. He identified the nine information screens located above the ticket desk as a site to experiment with this idea, noting that the screens' inside/outside position-hovering above the space where the initial contact between audience and institution occurs, yet also visible from the street-made them a unique site of exchange between the Museum and the public.

In conversation with Klaus Biesenbach, Director of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and MoMA's Chief Curator at Large, and Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas, MoMA's Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art, Guagnini selected a group of artists for MoMA to commission to create new works for the nine screens. Guagnini states, -By choosing several other local, New York-based artists that have not shown at MoMA before, I imagined harnessing as well as disrupting this very visible apparatus for institutional display.

The emphasis of the project was to learn from the artists as they spent time at MoMA and, in turn, for the artists to see how MoMA worked. In addition to starting an animated conversation about institutional behavior and expanding transparency, the project has resulted in five works of art that successfully occupy the nine screens, in and of itself a difficult task. By exchanging information for art, a different sort of experience greets every ticket buyer.

The New York-based artists and collectives participating in the exhibition are Fia Backström, Alejandro Cesarco, Bernadette Corporation, John Pilson, and Union Gaucha Productions (which Guagnini cofounded). The artists were selected because, while they represent a range of sensibilities, each tends to work with a mutated narrative form appropriate for the nine screens. Several also were particularly interested in drawing imagery from the way the Museum works. The videos run between 12 minutes and over 3 hours in length, and cover a range of style and content, from what happens in the non-exhibition spaces of the Museum to a day in the life of a lawyer. Each video will be shown on a continuous loop for a three-week duration during the run of the exhibition.

9 Screens exhibition schedule:
February 3-22, Alejandro Cesarco, Turning Some Pages
Alejandro Cesarco's 13 1/2-minute video Turning Some Pages presents a fragmented narrative-a series of questions, observations, and propositions-in which the acts of reading and looking are joined. The pages reference intertitles, filmed texts that were inserted into silent films to move the story forward. In this case, the artist posits a relationship between the way the intertitle works in film and the Museum lobby, the place in which a museum visit begins and information is first offered to the visitor.

February 24-March 15, Union Gaucha Productions, As Long as It Lasts
Union Gaucha Productions' As Long as It Lasts is a three-hour and 40-minute video that uses alternating shots of choreographed actions, artworks from MoMA's collection, and street life. The video is made up of two components linking the world outside the lobby desk to a fictional life produced inside the Museum's galleries. The first is a horizontal traveling shot of Madison Avenue from its beginning at 23rd Street to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. The rhythm of horizontal transit from left to right on the nine screens is dictated by the speed of the automobile. The second component is a series of vignettes produced at MoMA using a curator, an art historian, and artists as actors. These include Sarina Basta, Leigh Ledare, Juan Ledezma, Jonas Mekas, Olivier Mossset, Blake Raine, and Mike Smith as Baby Ikky. The characters engage in behaviors not normally seen in a museum. The result is, among other things, a critical and celebratory vision of the Museum collection the ticket buyers are about to encounter. The title of the video, As Long as
It Lasts, is lifted from a public sculpture by Lawrence Wiener that was used as a point of reference. Edited with Lior Shvil and Francisca Caporali.

March 17-April 5, Bernadette Corporation, Take Your Time
Rather than using the screens as a vehicle for its own creative production, the collective Bernadette Corporation decided to work with the logic of the apparatus itself, rebranding it with a -BC? logo while intervening with the informational content of the screens' existing software. The production of images is dictated by the Museum's built-in visual technology: an automatic, real-time image is generated by plugging remote IP security cameras into MoMA's data network, with feeds from the galleries, gift shop, and coat check. Bernadette Corporation prefers to open up a blank space within a site of communication, introducing a slight stammering within the proposed dialogue between institution and artist.

April 7-26, John Pilson, Frolic and Detour
John Pilson's 12-minute video follows its "lion-in-winter" protagonist, native New Yorker and attorney Arnold Mandell, through a series of post-recession allegories and atmospheric scenarios. It employs both documentary and fictional or hallucinatory imagery to describe one man's daily existence, rich with universal experiences and touching on aspects of domesticity, sex, aging, work, and play. In exploring, at the very site where Museum visits begin, how theatricality, drama, and imagination are essential tools for survival, Pilson suggests that without them life would be nothing but an aggregate of days.

April 28-May 17, Fia Backström, Misty Harbor - at your leisure
Fia Backström's 30-minute video, Misty Harbor - at your leisure, focuses on the dramaturgy of the Museum visit. The piece draws on elements of the Museum's interface, such as its public spaces and information graphics, which, together with the nine screens, serve as a preamble to the actual viewing of art. She thinks of these spaces as "non-events." The film includes a dissolved international graphic museum interface interlaced with fractured lifestyle shots of the transitional architecture-the non-gallery spaces of MoMA such as hallways, lobbies, escalator ramps-populated with idealized global visitors. Camera: Arthur Jafa, On screen: Dineo Bopape, Shadi Habib Allah, Murad Mumtaz, Kayode Ojo. Assist: Morgan Jones.