PopWars

The survey of Marlene Dumas’s work at MoMA was an absolute sensation. I loved it! You have until February 16th to see it for yourself. I  was like a kid in a giant candy store as we moved through the show. I didn’t want to make decisions on the work because I didn’t want to leave it. I kept going back to rooms I had already seen so the show wouldn’t come to an end.

I hardly ever take the headsets or those talking stick voice-over things around with me in a gallery. They distract and annoy me. But I caught a sample when I was standing too close to someone and it was Dumas’ voice on the thing. Peggi asked in the museum store if they had the narration on a cd and the clerk told her it was a free download at the iTunes store. I plan to do a personal tour with Marlene and the book back at home.

The Modern has a series entitled, “Artist’s Choice” where they invite artists to curate a show. The artist picks work from the museum’s collection that he or she likes. I could easily have spent the rest of my MoMA time with the Dumas show but Scott McCarney had recommended this so we had to do it. The Brazilian photographer, Vik Muniz, arranged his show in a linear pattern along the walls of two rooms. None of the work had identification tags although some of it was easily recognizable like Duchamp’s snow shovel, Picasso’s cardboard guitar and Joesph Buey’s wool suit. We snaked along with the crowd as if we were on a moving sidewalk. Each piece was related to the previous and the next and we were completely absorbed in the dialog when we heard a loud crash behind us followed by a woman’s voice shouting, “Jesus Christ!”

We instinctively moved toward the action. A guard was picking up the Plexiglas case that housed a work we had just studied. It was one of the more irreverent pieces in the show, a wrinkled up piece of paper by Martin Creed called, “Work #301 and it was part of a rock, paper, scissors combo that Muniz had arranged. An older couple stood by sheepishly, the man who knocked the case over with his bag and the woman who chose that opportunity to publicly berate her husband.

Peggi and I were with Duane Sherwood and we had hooked up with my brother, Mark, at the museum. The four of us were studying the case, which was now cracked, and marveling at the new location of the wad of paper. It was up against the side of the case and you could see a little gob of clear glue in the center of the bottom panel where the paper used to sit.

A women guard behind us let her frustrations out by repeating to all those nearby, “People have to watch where they’re going. It could have been worse. He could have tripped over that rock down there (she pointed to another work in the show that sat on the floor). People have to watch where they’re going.”

The chief security guard came briskly around the corner with a walkie-talkie in is hand. He was sporting a really bad hair piece and it became the center of attention for us. He studied  the crumpled up piece of paper and said, “Jesus Christ!”

This theater of the absurd completely overshadowed the show. I don’t even remember finishing it.

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