Lygia Clark at MOMA

I went to MOMA and stumbled on the exhibit "Lygia Clark: the Abandonment of Art".   The title would normally send me in the opposite direction, and I had vaguely recalled reading something about body art and performance, do-it yourself art, etc., etc. the usual 60's stuff.   What I actually found was an exhibit which mostly featured her work from the 50's and early 60's, when she was part of a Brazilian avant-garde that focused on  completely objective abstract art.

(No photos allowed!)(except when guards aren't looking)

She trained with an architect.  One interesting thing she did was to create lines in her canvases by actually cutting into the canvas, or using distinct, separate canvases.   Much theoretical discussion about lines and planes and space.  But the art was interesting to look at; in a kind of Post-Mondrian style.
Later, she began creating sculptures out of smaller, hinged folding sheets of metal.   In the sixties, she began creating participatory art by allowing the viewer to arrange the sheets of metal themselves.  Thus MOMA allowed me to create my first exhibited work of art at MOMA.  Alas, I was not allowed to take a picture, and soon someone else came along and destroyed it.   By the end, she was creating participatory body art, things like people drooping thread and saliva on a minimally clad person (The Sixties!).   Checking to see what Roberta Smith had to say at the NY Times, I discovered that most of the review was about this later art, and virtually nothing except for a few dismissive lines was said about the earlier painting and sculpture, as it is ideologically out of fashion.   Annoying!


Speaking of annoying, there was an adjacent exhibit by Christopher Williams entitled "The Production Line of Happiness".   The curators continued a recently developed practice of including no labels or markings in the exhibit, not even numbers.  You had to look at a program guide, and even that was minimal and you had to try to figure out what was what.  The exhibit was a sort of meta-photographical thing; that means you get pictures of cameras sliced in half, and printing devices, etc..  What you saw was mostly technically competent photographs, with no particular visual style about them, and without any commentary to explicate the ideological constructs involved.  Not to mention that all the photographs were hung at something just above waist level (for me), so that you had to bend down substantially in order to look at them.   No idea why,..something conceptual?
So I checked Smith again; apparently this is an exhibit about exhibits.  I'm so clueless!  So all the things that annoyed me were meant to annoy me. It's institutional critique!
So here you are, straight from Smith.

The entire show is in many ways a giant, brainy artwork unto itself. With it, Mr. Williams takes us deep into the mechanics of making the exhibition, turning it inside out, exposing both its logistics and its aesthetics.

The exhibition is also a kind of apotheosis of Mr. Williams’s own artistic milieu: 1970s site-specific installation, 1980s Pictures Generation art and the arcane 1990s trend of institutional critique. (The interactivity of relational aesthetics could also be added, given how much reading the show invites.)

Someday I will find out what the interactivity of relational aesthetics is.

She also gets off on white walls: they never do that for me:

Smith:
There are lots of white walls, like pages. If the show is a deconstruction of the museum’s white box, it is also a celebration, and among the most beautiful ever staged in these galleries. There are free-standing walls that seem almost to slide back and forth, like screens, as you move through the show.


I now wear earplugs when I go to MOMA; it really helps.   Though I saw an work that involved recorded music and was annoyed that I couldn't hear the sound well.  I didn't realize until a few days later that I had forgotten that I had my earplugs in!