Scaling MoMA Back

John Haber
in New York City

Sur Moderno, Pope.L, and Betye Saar

How do you reopen a museum spanning seven floors, half a midtown city block, and well over one hundred years of contentious art history? If you are the Museum of Modern Art, with up to fifteen exhibitions. And how do you do it without upstaging the museum itself? Cautiously.

MoMA wants to make its overwhelming new architecture seem like a scaling back. It needs all that space, it insists, just to display its collection, which the last expansion so sorely neglected. If it can do more as well, great—and of course it can. Still, when it comes to more, it thinks small. Who can say where themed rooms end and temporary exhibitions begin? That is why I hesitate to offer a count.

Still, it has a clear agenda—promoting diversity and contemporary art. It has not a single career survey of a single dead artist. Of the eleven installation artists in "Surrounds," not one is a white American-born male. It may display more older art than ever, it says, but this is not your old MoMA. "Sur Moderno" sticks to a gift of Latin American art from the collection, Pope.L to his repeat performances. Betye Saar has only a neglected decade in a far longer career.

Walking it back

Thelma Golden has a room as guest curator while the Studio Museum in Harlem is closed for expansion, starting with Michael Armitage. He uses oil on bark cloth for his mysterious figures in an even stranger landscape. They can seem at a given moment part of East African tradition or abstraction, skeletal or heroic, desiccated or fluid. I cover "Surrounds" and others separately, in a tour of the expansion. Even then, I could not touch on rooms for Richard Serra at his weightiest or Constantin Brancusi. Brancusi had work from the collection just last year, but with less natural light.

"Taking a Thread for a Walk," too, presents itself as an exhibition within the collection, through this spring. It does not just expand Modernism to include "women's work." As curated by Juliet Kinchin, it also expands tapestry to include a history of modern art and design. Along with ample space for Anni Albers after her Bauhaus years, it has Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil at Black Mountain. It has fabric samples from the early 1900s and a "crazy quilt" cover for a computer. Le Corbusier made a mural in fabric, too.

The rehanging of the collection may play down movements, but "Sur Moderno" is all about one. It opens with a statement of principle, from the poster for a 1946 exhibition: "Por un arte ESSENCIAL / Por una invención REAL / abolida toda figuración / romántico – naturalista." Even if you do not know Spanish, you get the message loud and clear. Within hangs the Manifesto Neoconcretol from 1959 as well. These Latin American artists had a program for the new and the concrete.

Other museums have exhibited Cecilia Vicuña, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticia, and Lygia Pape of Grupo Frente in Brazil. You may think that MoMA is just catching up. And it is, decisively, with a gift from Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Her collection takes Latin American art from 1948 to the early 1970s. MoMA has insisted before on the interchange between South America and Europe—starting even before World War II with Tarsila do Amara, Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola, and Latin American architecture. Now it turns to still later "journeys of abstraction."

The journey was anything but smooth sailing, because these artists played rough. They cut into canvas, pierce holes in a panel, circle it in steel, and display the stretcher. Willys de Castro has his Active Object and Gerd Leufert her Wood Strip Window. No sooner do they settle into the grid than they fragment and animate it—in glue for Joaquin Torres-García, lacquer for Alejandro Otero, Plexiglas and nylon for Jésus Rafael Soto, wood reliefs for Raúl Lozza, and wire "kinetic experiments" for Rubén Núñez and Gego. They see themselves as transforming themselves and their nation as well. What, though, can the Modern bring to their transformation?

For one thing, it expands the focus to Uruguay, Venezuela, and Argentina. As curators, Inés Katzenstein and María Amalia García touch on performance, too. If you think of Oiticia as reflecting his gay identity on his move to New York, it finds artists waving a cape as a banner all along. MoMA makes this art its own as well by placing it in context of Europe. Cutting has its parallel in Lucio Fontana, steel spirals in Max Bill and Mira Schendel, mechanical disruptions in Jean Tinguely, and an active grid in Alexander Rodchenko or Piet Mondrian. The collection is again crossing continents.

The length of New York

I keep meaning to walk the length of Manhattan. Last summer I made it from Madison Square Park to the Cloisters, but Pope.L has me beat hands down. He made it the length of Broadway not just from one tip of the island to the other, but to its very end on the mainland after twenty-two miles. (Hint: the Bronx is up and the Battery's down.) And he did it on his hands, chest, and knees. True, it took him nine years, but who is counting the stages or the humiliations?

It was his longest crawl, but not his first or last crawl. If anything, Pope.L (or, at times, William Pope.L) can seem like a one-trick pony with white capitalist America as his rider, like Carlos Martiel in his own self-inflicted pain. He had his first, through Times Square, in 1968, and he debased himself in the gutter of Tomkins Square in 1991. It could well have marked the terminus of East Village art. He hit the ground not running again this September through Greenwich Village—crawling a mile and a half through Washington Square arch and onto Union Square, with support (such as it is) from the Public Art Fund. And this time he invited others to join in.

Between sociability and subservience, he can accommodate anyone and anything, give or take revealing his name. He can claim to be, as a show wryly had it in 2002, The Friendliest Black Artist in America. He has submitted himself to burial up to his chest for eight hours while ice cream melted away inches from his face. He has chained himself to an ATM near Times Square, not with chain link but with a chain of sausages, while handing out dollar bills. He was wearing only a skirt of dollar bills and Timberland boots at that. Need it be said that he had no trouble finding takers?

The humiliation plays on expectations for a black male in the city, much like his parking himself in a cross-walk, seated, like a homeless man. Unlike the homeless, he chose to be there, and he was not begging but handing out more money as well. Then, too, he does everything on his own terms. His performances have included music and lectures, assuming he is ever not lecturing. He knows that Times Square is a tourist trap, but he reduces practically any spectator to a gawker at what an ongoing project calls his Black Factory. He does, that is, until inviting others this fall to submit to a crawl.

His own terms invariably include clothing—or lack thereof. He performed his Broadway crawl in a Superman suit without a cape, since this superhero was hardly flying. He has worn a business suit while carrying a stuffed animal and, as an extended phallus, a white cardboard tube. He has worn pretty much nothing while carrying a watermelon (tarred and feathered, of course) or dousing himself in liquid. He brings consumerism and precious bodily fluids up to date on video, as he pours Flint water from brand-label bottles into the Hudson River, while turning his back on young white couples enjoying waterfront luxury behind him. He is getting out the lead.

At the Whitney, some eight hundred more gallons descend into a tank, as Choir, past an upside-down reminder of segregated water fountains. The sound of cascading water joins voices out of African American history, on top of more text on the walls illegible in the darkness. Are are they preaching to the choir, at the expense of black performance art? He subtitled one crawl How Much Is That Black Man in the Window, and he has eaten (with ketchup) and spat out The Wall Street Journal. An ad, he saw, claimed that subscribing would increase his wealth, so how much the better if he ingested it? Still, just try to keep from laughing—along with him or, more pointedly, at yourself.

Aunt Jemima's sister

Aunt Jemima had a sister. Aunts often do, of course, but not often one like Betye Saar. When Saar exhibited The Liberation of Aunt Jemima in 1972, she believed that sisterhood is powerful, even when it comes wrapped in some pretty appalling packaging. She embraced the stereotype while defying it, just as her version of Aunt Jemima can hold a rifle along with a broom. When the New-York Historical Society exhibited her washboard assemblages last winter, it made clear that defiance takes not just toughness, but also a sense of history and a sense of humor. It takes, too, remembering the role in black liberation of family, including aunts and mothers.

Of course, too, an aunt's sister necessarily has children. Much of African American art and black radical women ever since are among Saar's daughters. Who knew, though, how much she takes the notion of a family history personally? Who knew as well how long it took her art to erupt into a bracing anger and into the third dimension? Prints from the decade before Aunt Jemima look both back in time and to the future, but mostly within. In the earliest, she is still the expectant mother of her third child at age thirty-five, as Anticipation.

MoMA inaugurates its fall 2019 monster expansion with an admirable focus and modesty, just as with concurrent shows of Pope.L, Michael Armitage, and thread. For all its display of institutional power and real estate, it wants to say, it still cares about art. You may take some convincing, but it sticks to just over forty works, almost all from its collection, much as for Louise Bourgeois on paper last year. It has in mind not a retrospective, but a forgotten chapter in an artist's life and a coming to be. It is all about anticipation, and it includes along with the prints a break-out assemblage, Black Girl's Window from 1969. Saar by then is still looking out, looking back, and looking within.

It takes the shape of a weathered window frame, like that of Fresh Widow by Marcel Duchamp also in the museum's collection. In the bottom pane, the black silhouette of a girl looks forward, with foil mirrors for eyes. The work's upper half divides into smaller panes for moons, mystic signs, a mysterious head in profile, a skeleton, other children, and an eagle bearing arrows in its claws, but also the word LOVE. Freedom, it says, takes not just self-esteem and the means of war, but also compassion. Other works introduce frames on a more modest scale, as literally frames for prints. In the prints themselves, one can see the growth of a vocabulary.

Two near the entrance are particularly poignant, in part because they subordinate the mysticism to observation and felt experience. In one, two hand prints frame the coarse black outlines of a third hand. In the other, denser and subtler strokes evoke a back-lit forest, as Wounded Wilderness. In one, Saar is plain and simply leaving her mark, except that nothing is so plain and simple. She relies on etching with only a tough of relief printing for the impression of her hand and the look of an old woodcut, and anyway who has three hands? In the other, she is navigating the darkness and licking her wounds.

From motherhood to Lo, the Mystic City and Fiesta of the Dead, this is not the Saar you thought you knew. She must have learned, like anyone else, from Pop Art, Robert Rauschenberg, and his "combine paintings," but the 1960s, Black Power, and the feminist revolution must have radicalized her as well. By the show's end, she introduces the sign for a "white's only section," a banjo, and a gun. How has she escaped withering criticism for her African American stereotypes, in contrast to a younger artist as wonderful as Kara Walker? Maybe she has the artistry to make clear her intentions, or maybe the left's circular firing squad had just closed more tightly. Or maybe she just grew tougher and funnier without abandoning family and history.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Michael Armitage ran at The Museum of Modern Art through January 20, 2020, "Sur Moderno" through September 12, Pope.L through February 1, and Betye Saar through January 4. "Taking a Thread for a Walk" ran through January 10, 2021. Pope.L also ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through February 28, 2020. Related articles dig into the 2019 MoMA expansion and later work by Betye Saar, as well as revisiting the expansion in December to see how it holds up.