The New MoMA

After a long hiatus “Manhattan is now modern again,” or so went the advertisement on buses that made their way around New York City announcing the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art. The new MoMA consists of its original architecture with additions that have enhanced its collection overall. Yoshio Taniguchi, the Japanese architect known for quasi-clinically modernist buildings such as the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in Toyota City, Japan, was responsible for MoMA’s renovation. In this instance, however, Taniguchi was able to maintain the architectural spirit of the MoMA’s international style while adding to it. The hustle and bustle of MoMA’s densely urban environs worked as a counterpoint to the museum’s quietude and vice versa. The dialogue between form and context, between aesthetics and the social sphere, had an altogether welcoming effect that one always hopes to find in architectural practice today.

While MoMA’s absence was surely felt on NY’s exhibition radar during its transformation, the results seemed to have galvanized an either love it or hate it attitude. Heated opinions stemmed from two yet not disconnected trajectories. One concerned the narrative constructed when displaying works of art and how this was articulated into the pyramid-like exhibition schema since older works were situated at the top and contemporary works at the bottom. The hierarchy in place, whether intentional or not, is a reminder of the ideological nature of exhibition strategies. The other point of contention is more obvious: does the architectural expansion and renovation occlude the work exhibited? Curiously, there are antecedents to this tepidity in the city’s past: similar anxieties were batted about when the Guggenheim first opened. Is the rotunda’s curvaceous, spiraling feature, which is quintessentially Guggenheim, the proper way to exhibit purely abstract art? Some of the stodgier members of the so-called New York School were worried that the Guggenheim’s lack of planarity would subsume non-representational art and impede the relationship between artwork and viewer. Most of the observations related to this question in regards to the MoMA were of a formal variety, however. To be sure, some works like Monet’s Water Lilies lost visual presence in being exhibited in a less intimate setting. And the seeming bric-a-brac mounting of the contemporary galleries had the opposite effect: they seemed slightly claustrophobic because of their ostensible, jumbled installation. This was not a problem of Tanguchi’s making. Rather, it had to do with what appeared to be curatorial happenstance induced by the inability of displaying works that engage MoMA’s architectonics, and not the other way around.

In any case, Tanguchi’s work is an art and should be seen as such; but at the same time, it merits questions as to the role of the museum and what happens when a museum eclipses the work inside of it. Museums and buildings, in general, should always be in dialogue with their surroundings as well as conveying their raison d’être. Maybe this is too much to ask in a world where a flack like Donald Trump and his white-bread nostalgia is attempting to architecturally trump Libeskind’s Freedom Tower. In the MoMA’s case, its reason-to-be is to highlight one of the most important collections in the history of modern art. And that is a challenge difficult to meet for any architect, but Taniguchi certainly rose to the occasion and so did his newly renovated MoMA. Now if only something can be done about that $20.00 admission price? Capitalism indeed!

RAÚL ZAMUDIO

Art critic based in New York.