Art Round-Up
MoMA Has a 2nd Floor

– By Arthur Stampleman –

A visit to the fourth, fifth and sixth floors of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art lets visitors enjoy one of the world’s outstanding modern art collections and some of the best special exhibits. But next time you go to MoMA, spend time on the museum’s second floor for a rewarding and enjoyable (and maybe perplexing) experience. That’s where MoMA houses its contemporary galleries, prints and illustrated books and its media gallery. Currently, there are three temporary exhibits of special interest, along with Barnett Newman’s permanent monumental sculpture in the atrium.

“Artisitic Collaborations: 50 Years at Universal Limited Art Editions,” on view until May 21, is a survey of prints created at Universal Limited Art Editions, a workshop for making prints and books on Long Island. The exhibit features several prints by each of 12 artists among the 50 Universal artists MoMA has collected: Lee Bontecou, Caroll Dunham, Jasper Johns, Marisol, Elizabeth Murray, Barnett Newmann, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Rothenberg, Kiki Smith, Richard Tuttle, Terry Winters and Lisa Yuskavage.

Of special appeal to this viewer are Dunham’s almost-human rollicking figures, Marisol’s prints focusing on details from her figurative wooden assemblages, seeing Newmann’s signature vertical stripe or “zip” in small scale and various colors, and Tuttle’s bright, lyrical abstractions.

Local museumgoers may have seen Josiah McElheny’s small glass installation in a recent group show at the Neuberger Museum. His The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown two-part prismatic glass sculptural model — a cross between architecture and sculpture — is at MoMA until April 9. This is a room-sized installation made of crystalline glass, colored electric lights, metal, plexiglas and painted wood. One part represents a cathedral on a mountain, the other a city-center on an octagonal grid. Shifting, shimmering surfaces result from the kaleidoscopic lights above and below.

“Out of Time: A Contemporary View” is one of those contemporary art exhibits that can be both enjoyable and perplexing at the same time. It examines the variety of ways that contemporary artists address the experience of time – some impressing the viewer with the artists’ technical skills and perceptive observations, others prompting the question, “what was the artist thinking?” There are works of some two dozen artists, including:

- Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 (15 paintings that are based on photographs of moments in the lives and deaths of four members of a German left-wing terrorist group)

- Vito Acconci’s 20-Foot Ladder for Any Size Wall (a monumental photoetching on eight sheets of paper)

- Rineke Dijkstra (eight photos over 11 years of Almerisa—a Bosnian girl whose family had relocated to Amsterdam—as part of a project documenting children of refugees)

- Mona Hatoum’s + and - (a large kinetic sculpture with a motorized, toothed metal arm and a circular bed of sand that mechanizes the practices of mark-making and erasure; its hypnotic and continual grooving and smoothing of sand evokes polarities of building and destroying, existence and disappearance)

- Pipilotti Rist’s Ever Is Over All (envelops viewers in two slow-motion projections on adjacent walls with a surprising outcome)

- Martin Creed’s Work No. 227, The Lights Going On And Off (the content of this work is almost nothing: a gallery with bare walls in which the lights turn on and off: akin to John Cage's influential 1952 sound piece 4''33"—a four-minute, thirty-three-second composition of silence)

- Andy Warhol’s Empire (the Pop artist’s multi-hour silent film of the Empire State Building)

The centerpiece of the second-floor atrium continues to be Barnett Newman’s 24-foot high Broken Obelisk, two pointed obelisks of cor-ten steel unbelievably facing each another vertically. The surrounding walls are currently covered by the abstract paintings of Cy Twombly, with elaborate compositions using his characteristic colorful forms resembling something between scribbles and handwriting.

MoMA, 11 W. 53rd St., is closed on Tuesdays. The museum opens at 10:30 a.m. and closes at 5:30 p.m. except Fridays when it closes at 8 p.m. For more information, call 212-708-9400 or visit www.moma.org.