Tag Archives: Museum of Modern Art

CAMILLE HENROT — GROSSE FATIGUE

Streaming for the first time, Camille Henrot’s GROSSE FATIGUE—which won the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013—is now on view as part of the Virtual Views: Video Lives program at the Museum of Modern Art.

Henrot uses the familiar setting of a computer desktop to narrate the origins of the universe. The video draws on the artist’s experience during a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, for which Henrot was granted access to film the collections of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the National Museum of Natural History, and the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Set to a spoken-word poem written by Henrot in collaboration with the poet Jacob Bromberg, and scored by Joakim BouazizGROSSE FATIGUE draws from scientific theories, religious creation stories, and oral traditions. The text is voiced by multimedia artist Akwetey Orraca Tetteh...

The work features a rapid-fire choreography of pop-up windows with images drawn from a potentially limitless field of references. The swiftly proliferating imagery signals both the speed and lightness of the digital world and, conversely, the exhaustion provoked by overwhelming streams of data. Henrot has explained that the work attempts to confront “the desire to universalize knowledge [that] is accompanied by the conscience I have of this act. As soon as you think you have laid out and circumscribed the entirety of your universe within a single, selfsame landscape, isn’t the only question of any worth, and which relentlessly nags and torments the mind, But what is there beyond the limit?*

CAMILLE HENROT—GROSSE FATIGUE*

Museum of Modern Art

Camille Henrot, Grosse fatigue, 2013. Images courtesy and © the artist, Silex Films, and Kamel Mennour.

BETYE SAAR — TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

I’m a person who walks looking down, because you can find a lot of things on the ground. I’m basically a recycler. I find other people’s stuff and junk and recycle it into my stuff and junk. — Betye Saar

Check out the documentary short BETYE SAAR—TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS, directed by Christine Turner.

See the exhibition and catalog Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer.

From top: Betye SaarLo, The Mystique City, 1965, etching with embossing, image courtesy and © 2019 the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, digital Image © 2018 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, photograph by Rob Gerhardt; Christine Turner, Betye Saar: Taking Care of Business (2020), film images (5) courtesy and © the artist, the filmmaker, and LACMA.

AN OPEN LETTER TO MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES

We the undersigned write with grave concern about a growing trend of layoffs targeting education staff at major global museums in the name of COVID-19. Museums—including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Mass MoCA, the Serralves Foundation, and many others—have recently reported redundancies, many of them affecting freelance and part-time educators and, in the case of the MoMA, offering no horizon of re-employment. Far from redundant, such workers—employed to give tours, design and develop programs for schools and communities of all ages—are at the heart of museum and gallery work.

As those most in touch with communities outside of the museum, educators push criticality and innovation. Their work is regularly used to attract donors and supporters to many institutions. That they are first in the line of fire for layoffs is disconcerting, to say the least.

This is especially true as gallery education posts are more often to be those in which women, people of color, and members of the working-class are employed to work with communities who are not members of the cultural elite. At a moment when museums and galleries claim an interest in their diversification, why do they de-fund the very people and communities made most vulnerable by the current crisis?

We find this treatment of educators to be a great tragedy in a moment when their skill-sets—meaning-making, public engagement, community care and support—are more essential than ever. This could be a moment in which to utilize these skills to offer more to communities than virtual museum tours. Instead of retrenching museums into conservative modes of exclusionary content dissemination, a more forward-thinking stance would be to intensify the educational dimension of their offer in this moment of fear, loss and community re-organization, and to prioritize relationships with their most excluded groups.

Sadly, the reported layoffs follow years of precarity for museum and gallery educators and other cultural workers, who are rendered dispensable in times of economic or social uncertainty. While our letter is focused on the situation of educators, we stand with cleaners, porters, visitor service staff and other low paid and precarious workers in museums and galleries and call on their employers to reverse these layoffs and to offer fairly paid, secure and protected contracts for all cultural workers.

We implore museums and galleries to take this opportunity to re-imagine—with their workers and their communities—the role of culture in the time of COVID-19 and its aftermath. And we ask those museums who are already doing so to step forward and speak out on behalf of education and other essential workers targeted by these cuts.

List of signatories here.

Donate to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization.

From top: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Questions), 1990/2018, Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, photograph by Elon Schoenholz; Museum of Modern Art, New York City, photograph by Lauren Cavalli; Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, photograph by Jessica Rinaldi; Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal, photograph courtesy of the foundation. Images courtesy and © the institutions and the photographers.

PETER EMMANUEL GOLDMAN — ROUE DE CENDRES

An extraordinary black-and-white film shot in Paris in 1968, ROUE DE CENDRES / WHEEL OF ASHES is a film that haunts you long after you have left the cinema. Peter Emmanuel Goldman is really a forgotten American genius. — Henri Sera, Theiapolis Cinema

Pierre Clémenti is sensational. He’s not acting: he’s living his part. Diaphanous, plagued by an inner fire, his cheeks hollow, he is in close communion with the filmmaker and his quest. Just as in ECHOES OF SILENCE, Goldman’s vision brings us beyond the image into a world of palpitations and callings. — Jean-Louis Bory, 1971, Le Nouvel Observateur

ROUE DE CENDRES / WHEEL OF ASHES

Friday, November 15, at 8 pm.

Tuesday, November 19, at 4:30 pm.

Museum of Modern Art

Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

11 West 53rd Street, New York City.

Peter Emmanuel Goldman, Roue de cendres / Wheel of Ashes; Pierre Clémenti and Katinka Bo. Images courtesy and © the filmmaker and the actors.

MORRIS ENGEL — I NEED A RIDE TO CALIFORNIA

Morris Engel’s unreleased film I NEED A RIDE TO CALIFORNIA—which he started filming in 1968—will screen this week at MOMA, followed by a conversation with Anne Morra, Mary Engel—director of Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive—and Jake Perlin, artistic and programming director at the Metrograph.

Inspired by day-glo psychedelia, societal upheaval, and sexual liberation, Engel crafts the story of Lilly, a naïve, lonely young Californian who finds herself in New York City. Lilly embraces the flower child movement, right down to the bare feet and a ring of daisies in her blond hair. But the city, and Lilly’s circle of acquaintances, are not as compassionate as she hoped they would be. I NEED A RIDE TO CALIFORNIA is a complex, sometimes raw portrait of the era, with Lilly as a fragile voyager in Greenwich Village’s tempestuous counter culture scene. While Engel’s prior feature films explored idyllic, nostalgic moments shared by children, I NEED A RIDE TO CALIFORNIA marks his mature aesthetic engagement with the unsettled social and political landscape of American in the late 1960s.*

I NEED A RIDE TO CALIFORNIA*

Wednesday, October 23, at 7 pm.

Museum of Modern Art

Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

11 West 53rd Street, New York City.

Morris Engel, I Need a Ride to California (1968). Images courtesy and © the Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive.