ART REVIEW : MOMA Enters the ‘90s

Had it been organized anywhere else, “ Dis locations” would likely be seen as a generally engaging exhibition of specially commissioned installations by eight American and European artists of disparate critical reputation, but all well known to the contemporary art world.

However, as it has been mounted at the Museum of Modern Art, the show has a very different edge than it would anywhere else. So large does MOMA loom in the modern art consciousness, yet so small and inconsequential has been its regard for the complexity of art made since the 1960s, that this ambitious presentation inevitably is read against the backdrop of the institution that houses it.

In the downstairs galleries for special exhibitions, Bruce Nauman’s relentless and weirdly operatic video installation, “Anthro/Socio,” echoes through adjacent rooms displaying a mysteriously abandoned meeting hall by Moscow’s Ilya Kabakov and an infernal machine by Louise Bourgeois.

Upstairs, in third-floor galleries normally given over to contemporary art in the permanent collection, Chris Burden’s devastating “The Other Vietnam Memorial,” which delivers the show’s knockout punch, is flanked by two diverse critiques of racism against African-Americans, one by David Hammons, the other by Adrian Piper. And in the second floor rooms that house MOMA’s great collection of European Modernism, the French Conceptualist Sophie Calle has inserted written and doodled remembrances of five paintings temporarily removed from display.

The show, which opened Sunday for an 11-week run (through Jan. 7), was clearly conceived with MOMA in the minds of both its curator, Robert Storr (whose debut this is), and its seven artists. In a way, it picks up where the museum left off about 20 years ago with its last notable exhibitions of contemporary art--”Spaces” and “Information”--devoted to the relatively recent phenomena of environmentally scaled installations and Conceptual art. The Conceptually based installations in “ Dis locations” reaffirm the continuing vitality of the genre, especially at a time when more traditional sculpture and painting seem to have hit some shoals.

Burden’s amazing monument is a touchstone for the exhibition, and for sensibilities dominating American life today. Like a gargantuan steel Rolodex tipped on its side, “The Other Vietnam Memorial” features a dozen movable copper pages etched with small representations of the names of some 3 million Vietnamese soldiers, civilians and refugees, all killed during the American episode of the decades-long Indochina war.

Only about 4,000 actual names are officially recorded or available. To get 3 million, Burden had a computer programmer develop random combinations of these. He also used the word Liet Si , or Hero, which is inscribed on thousands of tombs of unknown dead.

Burden’s monument couldn’t be more different from Maya Lin’s famous wall of 57,939 American names in Washington, where cathartic elegy is gently given a space to emerge. “The Other Vietnam Memorial” instead exudes an icy cold beauty, the light falling across its copper leaves transforming metal into mechanized flesh, its finely machined parts recalling the high-tech machinery of war. The vague enormity of the carnage, which the intellect already knows as an abstraction, is here given blunt form. Spectators are left to deal with it as they will.

In assuming no moral position about the fact of death at such enormous scale, Burden’s art removes itself from the divisive realm of polemic, while replacing with hard fact any possibility of aggrandizing sentiment. This incisive maneuver symbolically brings into view the victims of war that any opposition must habitually repress, creating an awesome sight that today reverberates against the thousands upon thousands of Iraqi casualties in the recent Gulf War.

Ostensibly, the Vietnam Syndrome was smashed by the Gulf War. But, like the Vietnamese finally commemorated here, dead Iraqis were made utterly invisible last spring through such bureaucratic abstractions as “collateral damage.” Burden’s haunting monument is a major achievement, and reason alone to claim success for this show.

Desert Storm also makes an oblique appearance in Hammons’ theatrical “Public Enemy,” where a battle zone filled with autumn leaves is enlivened by balloons and streamers, as if a parade has just passed by. Real weapons and toy ones take direct aim from behind a sand-bag bunker at a life-size photo-mural. The siege is against a familiar equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt, flanked by an American Indian and an African, that stands before New York’s Museum of Natural History--monumental white warrior riding with pedestrian “noble savages” at his side.

In Hammons’ hands, the presumptions of “natural” history collide with those of cultural history at MOMA, where the art of principally white men is enshrined. The parade that’s passed by also can be seen as a declaration that the party is definitely over.

If Hammons’ installation suffers a bit from diffuseness, Adrian Piper’s couldn’t be more pointed. In the center of an amphitheater painted blinding white, video monitors on a white monolith show a black man who repeatedly declares what he is not--”I’m not vulgar, I’m not lazy, I’m not servile, I’m not stupid”--to the assembled faces of those who assume they know what he is. In the background, the Commodores sing “Zoom,” as seductive entertainment is interwoven with another kind of black stereotype.

Bravely, Sophie Calle has waded straight into MOMA’s celebrated collection, creating five “Ghosts” of paintings by Modigliani, De Chirico, Hopper and others that have been removed from display. Calle interviewed various museum employees, from curators to ticket takers, about the absent art, then wrote excerpts of their replies and hung their drawings of the remembered images over grisaille renderings painted directly on gallery walls.

As she’s done before, Calle here projects multiple, even contradictory expressions into museum galleries whose “officialness” suggests that a singular, authoritative reading exists. Perhaps because her chosen form recalls mere captions or labels, however, her “ghosts” grow pale in the company of so much important painting and sculpture. The piece only plays at being subversive.

Kabakov’s tilt at officialdom is also thin and disappointing, although it proceeds from an almost opposite situation: The Muscovite isn’t operating in the face of a powerful status quo, but in a time of vacuum. His reconstruction of a drab Tenants’ Club at a Soviet housing project creates the site of an aborted inquisition about an artist’s vanguard work, interrupted mid-stream: Tables, chairs and paintings have been tipped over and shoved against the walls, as if some mad rush to the exits has taken place. In the dim light, and through binoculars placed on a bridge that traverses the room, a strange horde of minuscule white figures floods into view. Sci-fi silliness oscillates with the immaterial presence of an optimistic dream.

The most straightforwardly sculptural object in the show is Bourgeois’ “Twosome,” composed from two horizontal gas tanks painted black on the outside, red on the inside, and punctured with doors and windows. One slides in and out of the other on a mechanical track. Violent copulation, brute defecation, ritual re-birth and tortured imprisonment are some of the homey, domestic associations this churning machine evokes, its luridness made dizzying by a flashing red police light secreted deep inside its womb.

Nauman’s contribution is a large environment of six video monitors and three video projections of a bald, disembodied head, all simultaneously shouting and singing in endless, high-pitched repetition: “Feed Me, Eat Me, Anthropology,” and “Help Me, Hurt Me, Sociology.” Being surrounded in a darkened room by the cognitive dissonance of such wild wailing is like being trapped inside a brain about to burst from grinding frustration. Nauman’s art has the uncanny capacity to embed ephemeral psychological states deep inside your bones and viscera, and this example is first-rate.

Oddly, “ Dis locations” might be described as an autobiographical show, in the sense that its organizer--an artist and critic who assumed his curatorial position at MOMA just a year ago--has found himself on the inside of an institution whose imperatives he was obliged to challenge in his prior roles of artist and critic. As curator, Storr has perceptively made his own sense of dislocation a subject, and he’s invited seven kindred spirits along to light the darkened path.

Finally, it is this faith in living artists and living art that comes through most forcefully in the show, regardless of the success or failure of individual installations. The personal and social “dislocations” that operate in the work of all eight (Storr included) conspire to create the biggest dislocation of all: Being in the Kansas of this engaging display of new work, you can’t quite believe you’re also in the Oz of the Museum of Modern Art.