Peachy the Magazine October/November 2013 | Page 30

The Millennial Shift in Museum Design
“The moment you render them apart,
you’ve lost that tension. What is contemporary today is going to become
historical at some point in the nottoo-distant future. Then you have the
dilemma—where is the line?” The
frisson created by embracing both
modernism and contemporary art
is currently driving MoMA, and the
museum has seen tremendous success
leveraging this tension, primarily in
the large atrium space created by
Taniguchi on the museum’s second
floor. Initially the space was criticized
for being too large—four stories of
“spatial extravagance”, and the art
presented there was ill-served. Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk, for
example, was simply dwarfed by the
atrium’s vastness, as were Monet’s
Waterlillies. However, eventually the
programming began to fit the space.
Martin Puryear’s tall wooden ladder
(Ladder for Booker T. Washington)
and Gabriel Orozco’s suspended whale
skeleton (Mobile Matrix) got things
going, but it was Pipilotti Rist’s Pour
Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)
that really made the space come alive.
In a 2010 New York Times article,
Roberta Smith remarked, “The atrium
was truly anointed as the billboard for
the new, feisty radicality at the end of
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2008. That was when Pipilotti Rist,
one of the few women to tackle the
atrium, covered its walls with giant
video images—close-ups of red tulips,
a menstruating swimmer and a rooting pig. The piece also involved an
immense island of thickly cushioned
divans where legions of people lolled,
looked, snapped photographs and
drifted off. Joseph Beuys’s famous
term ‘social sculpture’ took new
meaning: hanging out.”
Allora & Calzadilla’s Stop, Repair,
Prepare: Variations on ‘Ode to Joy’
for a Prepared Piano, also was performed in the atrium. In this piece, a
pianist played the last movement of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony from a
hole cut in the center of the instrument,
and the piano roamed across the floor

Click the photo above to view a video of
the Stop, Repair, Prepare performance.