A Visit to: Pandemic MOMA
We walked into the gallery and there he was, Jackson Pollock. One: Number 31, 1950, all by itself on a wall that seemed scaled just for it.
I thought of the old story, the house paint, the canvas that hadn’t been stretched, the action. The white male genius pushing against standard definition of High Art. Formalism and abstraction tangled up in drips of black, white, brown, and army green paint. I was ready to dismiss it – the baggage of AB EX, the chauvinism, MOMA’s self-mythologizing and insistence on the linear story of art history, the canon. And yet, there it was, not a head or a moving body or a selfie stick between me and the work. The scale of it, the movement in the paint, evoking Pollock’s moving body, the composition – somehow cohesive even in its randomness.
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I’ve always felt MOMA’s Taniguchi building resembles nothing so much as an airport. Those long escalators (also reminiscent of ascending through one of the city’s great old department stores – Lord & Taylor, say, or Macy’s), the elevator to one side, the bathrooms at the back, floor after floor. The snack bar and the scattered gift shops offering identical wares – just there to catch you at the very moment when desire overtakes the quiet contemplation of art. The hangar-like atrium which nothing, save a Richard Serra, maybe, ever seems to adequately fill. There’s also a shared architectural vocabulary – the contemporary interpretation of capital “M” Modernism – clean, crisp, neutral, cold, linear – grey, black, white, blonde wood. But mostly it’s the throngs of people – albeit better dressed than the average airline passenger – heads bobbing around, bodies moving, clumping, bumping into you, forming endless lines moving up and down the escalator. And, of course, the shared intentionality embedded in the architecture itself – move people through the space efficiently and effectively, don’t let them circle back, walk the wrong way, see things in reverse.
I only visited the Edward Durrell Stone/Cesar Pelli building once or twice before it closed in 2002 – I’d only moved to the city in 2000. But the contrast hangs in my mind. What I remember most about that older interpretation of Modernism was its scale – it was more intimate, more idiosyncratic. The hard edges were softened here and there by a grey carpet and there were surprises around corners; or hanging above the stairs.
On the other hand, the new Diller Scofidio + Renfro addition does nothing so well as simply blend into the Taniguchi building. Or, curiously, remind you of the anti-Modern, hand-tooled Folk Art Museum through its erasure – a present absence in that liminal space between the old and new buildings. The place where it used to stand is now a glass encased stairwell, a literal void.
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Seeing a work like One: Number 31, a long-time highlight of MOMA’s permanent collection, can be like visiting an old friend who looks a little different each time you see him, maybe he looks a little tired today, or maybe he’s happy or excited, or feeling amused by something, or maybe he’s wearing an interesting outfit. You think back to the last time you saw him, what was going on then, what you were doing, where you met up, what you talked about.
MOMA’s remarkable website gives you a chance, like flipping through snapshots on your phone, of remembering some of these past moments with a key work of art like One: Number 31. Or maybe it’s more like looking through a friend’s Facebook page – seeing him change through the years even when you weren’t there with him. There the painting is in the Stone building in 1969’s New American Painting and Sculpture: The First Generation, the drips reflected in the deep sheen of the floor; there it is again quieted by grey carpeting and high-contrast lighting in a gallery in the old building in 2002, when I likely first saw it, sharing space with Matisse’s Dance I; and here again, looking sort of scrappy and fresh against a stark white wall and rough, paint-stained concrete floor at MOMA’s temporary outpost in Queens later in 2002.
The last time I’d seen it was during a visit with a friend from out of town last January, when the Diller Scofidio + Renfro addition was brand new. It was an incredibly busy weekend day, pre-pandemic, and my companion’s patience wore thin before we’d made it through much of the post-war galleries. Coffee was needed, and a place to sit – but even that was hard to find since the cafe line was long, and every available seat had been claimed by a cool-looking young person, or an exhausted tourist.
Flipping through the installation photos of One: Number 31 on the website you feel the way the different walls on which the painting has hung, the company it has kept, and especially the way the different buildings themselves have framed the piece over time, subtly changes the work itself.
I remembered how awfully sad and grey and dwarfed Monet’s Water Lilies felt when it was marooned in the vast atrium of the Taniguchi building when it first opened, clinging to the wall as if to keep from falling into the void. And how much better it looked hugged by that small gallery in the old building, and how happier it feels now that it is embraced by its own special niche.
And so, here the star Pollock was again, in Pandemic MOMA, the number of visitors drastically reduced, masked and keeping to themselves, careful not to bump into anybody. Seeing it was soothing, it was special and a little overwhelming, it was like getting to talk to that old friend alone, with nobody else around to distract him. The painting felt powerful, it felt vibrant and vital in a way I hadn’t thought of it in years.
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Perhaps one day the opening of the Diller Scofidio + Renfro addition in October of 2019 will be seen as the apotheosis of a certain era in the museum world of ever bigger buildings, ever larger crowds, even more money, even more distance from the original mission of simply displaying compelling works of art. Perhaps a correction was needed, or perhaps this all will just prove to be a blip, a snapshot in time for a painting that has seen so many of them. Either way, I’d always be grateful for the chance to see the old painting in a much different light.