Art Is What Art Does

By Katharine Ulrich

On the second floor of the Museum of Modern Art spectators are confused. In front of a wall covered in AA Bronson‘s red and green AIDS wallpaper, one gray-haired woman asks another “How is that art?” Probably not the first time that question has been asked in MoMA (remember Marina Abramović‘s performance piece last spring where she just sat and stared?) but in the context of the current contemporary art exhibit, it seems far from far-fetched.

In Contemporary Art from the Collections, the curators rummaged around the vast MoMA storage for post-post modern pieces and organized a cohesive examination of pop culture, from the 60’s on. Surprisingly light on the Warhol but heavy on the heart, “Contemporary Art” focuses on social justice issues such as racial, gender, and class inequality, ultimately showing how even in the assumedly liberal art world, not everyone is equal.

“I was surprised by the exhibit. When I think of art, I think of beauty, not this,” said Astrid Parenty, an NYU sophomore. “In French, there’s a term art engagé, which is art that is provocative and with a cause, and I don’t normally like it. But this exhibit moved me – it changed my view of what art is.”

The exhibit opens on the work of Henrik Olesen, his pieces portraying the confusion that is sexuality, with one particularly powerful piece of a picture of a boy and a typed story about all of the abuse he will suffer in his life due to “wanting to put his body on another boy.” Next is the room with the AIDS wallpaper, which provides an elegantly contrasting backdrop to Robert Mapplethorpe‘s portrait of an Hermes statue.

The last three rooms, however, are harder to describe, and to experience. One visitor described it as an “amalgamation of…disturbance” because the curator utilized the emptiness of the space, the exquisite white walls and shiny wooden floors, to capture the lack of empathy shown toward the subjects – the horror of the easiness of evil. From magazine advertisements from the ’90’s by the Guerrilla Girls illustrating the lack of popular female artists to a devastating collage-style piece by Robert Rauschenberg that utilizes newspaper clippings to tell the story of media as an art form in a sixty-foot screenprint, “Contemporary Art from the Collections” inculcates equality as a hypothetical ideal rather than a modern actuality.

Don’t worry, though, for those looking more for a quick romp in the sheets with Culture rather than the committed marriage that is “Contemporary Art”, look no farther than the third installation of Looking at Music 3.0. Music videos from the 80s and 90s repeatedly play on a big screen in the center of the neon-walled room while interactive kiosks playing different performance pieces are set up along the sides of the room so visitors become literally surrounded by music. It’s like a temple.

“Looking at Music 3.0” is a blast from the past – close your eyes, and you can smell the hairspray and economic tumult of New York in the time when Mayor Ed Koch reigned. Sonic Youth, Le Tigre, Weezer, Run DMC, and Jay-Z, among others, vie for the viewer’s attention. As the big screen blares music videos, the booths against the wall provide bulky headphones for their pieces: a decidedly private or shared public experience, the choice is yours.

“By displaying different forms of music like this, it showed the progression in history of styles,” said Dana Avesar, a visitor. “For example, I liked the video of Grace Jones’ ‘I’m Not Perfect’ because I look at that and you can see Rihanna is influenced by her.”

“Contemporary Art from the Collection” focuses on the results of culture; “Looking at Music 3.0” examines the evolution of counter-culture. Though polar opposite in goals, the two exhibits share the interrelation between culture and art, whether in the context of social injustice or music. They make visitors speculate what art actually is, like any good museum exhibition should.

MoMA is located at 53rd Street between 5th and 6th Ave; “Contemporary Art from the Collection” is on display until May 9, 2011 and “Looking at Music 3.0” is on display until June 6, 2011.