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Modernism at the Movies
John Haberin New York City
MoMA's 2021 Fall Reveal and Jonas Mekas
With its 2021 "fall reveal," the Museum of Modern Art keeps its promise to rehang its collection every year, with new selections every time. Its latest retelling opens not with Post-Impressionism and formal experiment, but photography and film.
Sound unfamiliar? All of MoMA was once unfamiliar for me, too. I was just finding my way around New York culture, thrilled and confused every step of the way. Jonas Mekas supplied the map. He did it in both new and old media, like the museum today. In exile, he needed one himself. It served him well? 
Stop-action
MoMA revisits the origins of modern art—and why not? No institution did more to shape that story in the first place. You know how it goes. Photography caught on only slowly as an art form, it runs, but had already made realism and Romanticism obsolete. Why bother with academic standards when a picture can take itself? As for the movies, they were mere pandering or a parlor trick.
Not this time. In The Flying Train in 1902, the view ahead from an elevated rail is as exhilarating as the first flight, more than a year before the Wright Brothers achieved just that. It anticipates Cubism's remaking of space and dreams of remaking the city. As for photography, artists were making good use of it all along. Now with three floors for the permanent collection, modern art still has its greatest hits, but photography and film keep coming back. They must, for modern art had to be reinvented time and time again.
Suspicious? I should hope so. If there is an upside to art after Covid-19, it is unobstructed views of Vincent van Gogh and Starry Night. Cézanne drawings at MoMA returned Paul Cézanne to his place on the way to Cubism just this past year. Surprised, then, to find neither one in the museum's first room? They are waiting only a room away, but first other media.
You may think of Edward Steichen, his gallery, and his love for Georgia O'Keeffe as the story of Modernism's late arrival in New York. Yet here he is in 1904, with a portrait of Richard Strauss on the composer's first trip to America, fierce in recognition of his own genius. You may not associate Edgar Degas with photography, but he took a few years off for it—including a joint portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé, the French poet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Photography also gave access to a hallmark of the new century, city nights. Photos of Coney Island and a movie house lead here to a streetlight, in a painting by Giacomo Balla. Could the frames in a movie have motivated Futurism's stop-action as well?
You have ample time to ask, for MoMA finally has a commitment to its collection, thanks to its 2019 expansion. It has made changes since its first "fall reveal," including Shigeko Kubota and her video "paintbrush," but annual turnover seems more than enough. Once again it pairs past and present now and then—including an X Poster from 2007 by Wade Guyton facing Kazimir Malevich and early Soviet art. The same room gets a jump on postwar abstraction by Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica in Brazil as well. Still, it is not trying to throw textbooks to the winds. This is revisionism, but of a visibly familiar history.
Revisionism today means diversity. For MoMA, that means mostly women and other nations, not queer identity. Politics itself takes a back seat. The room for early abstraction also includes Katarzyna Kobro in Poland, with a steel model not all that far from David Smith or Alexander Calder. She got there first. Abstract Expressionism leads right to Gutai in Japan as well. While a painted figure eight by Atsuko Tanaka looks colorful enough, Tanaka also appeared in public in an "electric dress."
From cinema to performance
Gender and culture mean the body, constrained or set free. A room on that theme with Eva Hesse and Valie Export circles back to Dorothea Tanning in Surrealism. Carolee Schneemann attests to the past life of her studio, in manufacturing, with cut fur. When Guadalupe Maravilla evokes Mayan myth, his feathered serpents look like costumes as well in a personal drama. "I create myselves," he says.
Plural it is and hardly confrontational, although Suzanne Lacy and others at CalArts spoke out about sexual abuse decades before #MeToo. Another room speaks of the Divided States, but the art is hardly divisive. Faced with a commission from the Center for Inter-American Relations in 1968, Marta Manujin even held cocktail parties to bring people together. On film against the center's bare white walls, minglers look like strokes of color. Drip painting should have half this good a time. It should also be half as immersive.
The museum has gone to the movies, for performance or the thing itself. A room centered on the United Nations never manages to evoke life inside, despite a glass wall, but it throws in Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte as well. The room also includes its architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro. How does it get from the UN by day to avant-garde cinema at night? Maybe the museum just likes the moving image. It takes over increasingly, even at times from photography.
It, too, demands diversity. A woman was behind the camera as early as 1928 with Germaine Dullac, for whom a clergyman skips rope. Black directors were making full features, like Oscar Micheaux in 1932. They just had to settle for hard-boiled thrillers and a professional world apart. Gordon Parks did not exactly distinguish himself with Shaft in 1971, but he did break into the mainstream in photography. Film captures Cecil Taylor at the piano as well. Now if only Afrofuturism at the Met paid comparable attention to free jazz.
In time, the movies give way to video and the movie theater to the museum. Performance and installation art take over as well. The floor for postmodern and contemporary art opens with Dana Birnbaum as Wonder Woman and Cindy Sherman. I just wish that her Untitled Film Stills hung in a single row, like a film strip. Diane Burns, a poet, performs for Sky Hopinka in what becomes a Native American light show. Once again the body is on the line, even as it dissolves in light.
Politics is ever present but indirect and muted. Pruitt-Igoe Myth, by Chad Freidrichs in 2011, documents the sorry state of a housing project in Saint Louis. He could have caught it in a titanic act of self-destruction. Dumping Core, by Gretchen Brender in 1984, refers to the core dump of a nuclear reactor. Video, though, has a chaotic life all its own. TMI here could stand not for Three Mile Island but for too much information.
A map of modernity
To say more would be to review the museum itself and more than a century of art. Who would dare, and who would supply the storyline? Just when you tire of mine, there is always the modern art you knew. Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Rauschenberg are not going anywhere soon. Painting is back and politics in art is everywhere. They just keep some unexpected company.
Still, there are lost opportunities, big time. Blame it on MoMA's new slant or the old one. Julie Mehretu slips in, fresh off her Whitney retrospective, and Richard Serra has a corner room directly beneath Claude Monet and his Waterlilies. Her large abstraction has all her intimacy and publicity, his stacked cubes every bit of their aggressive beauty. But then photography began its life with artful stagings, for that is what people expected from image making, and exposure times demanded it. Its naked truth was a modern invention.
Did Modernism, then, culminate in new media? In practice, modern art had to reinvent itself time and again, just to stay modern. Can it still? I am no longer sure, but another museum looks back to a lifetime in film and video. Like me, Jonas Mekas had to find his way around New York. And he did indeed supply the map.
He did it in print and behind the camera. He did it for over sixty years—long enough to move from sixteen-millimeter film to video. As the Jewish Museum has it, "The Camera Was Always Running." Galleries make an awkward theater and a theater an awkward exhibition. Mekas was not Jewish and had only tenuous ties to the museum. But he could not stop, and the show captures his restless pursuit of a sense of community and himself.
Not that I could have named him back in the day. I could not have remembered his writings for the The Village Voice. There and in Film Culture, he did much to create a new model for film criticism, before Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael. He was one of many at the birth of the Film-Makers' Cooperative, including Andy Warhol. He helped others explore classic and independent film, too, with the Anthology Film Archives. In his words, he wanted them "to find their own meaning and path through life."
That may be asking a lot: note the shift from an art form to life. Mekas, though, kept the camera running out of personal need. Born in 1922 in Lithuania, he survived forced labor under the Nazis, months in hiding the advancing Soviet armies, and displacement camps after World War II. Had he found at last a home in New York? For him, the museum argues, "the camera was a tool to fight against the wrenching loneliness of exile and to resist the violent erasures of being 'other.' " That sounds dire, but do not overlook how often it succeeded.
New York was always running
If you, too, do not remember Mekas, he moved easily between observation and memory. They fed nearly a hundred works, from less than a minute to nearly five hours—and more than two thousand stills that he selected as a work in themselves with a telling title, In an Instant It All Came Back to Me. Their celluloid glimmer brings a glimpse of people known and unknown. More than a few offer a smile. He may have found a community after all, in the city or the avant-garde, but which? Compare two very different pictures of New York.
Walden in 1969 captured a culturally vital city, the city of Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and John and Yoko in bed for peace. Lost Lost Lost in 1976 turns to Lithuanians in exile, but are they altogether lost? The film has its bitter winters, but also its picnics in summer and a wedding. It has friends dropping by in the East Village just to say hello. New York contributes its landmarks, too, as it did again in 2000, for As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. Mekas thought of all his work as "glimpses."
Memory is a slippery thing. If Warhol seems an essential New Yorker, a film of him sticks to his summer retreat in Montauk, at the far end of Long Island. Mekas takes the Kennedy children, Caroline and John Jr., there as well, for This Side of Paradise: Fragments of an Unfinished Biography in 1999. But is it really paradise, and whose biography? For Mekas, these are "personal notes on events, People (friends) and Nature (seasons)." He was "around the block in eighty days."
An exhibition is not a film festival. The curators, Kelly Taxter with Kristina Parsons, have a novel solution. The "chapters" of a film or video play simultaneously on up to twelve screens, for an immersive experience like his own. As a chapter ends, the screen goes blank, for a slow fade into blackness. Is that a poignant or puzzling ending? It is, literally, just a matter of time.
The plan squeezes a lifetime into three hours, although few visitors will last that long. Call it a failure, if a noble one. Yet the very onslaught is revealing. While the French New Wave like Jean-Luc Goddard moved quickly, Americans like Warhol and Stan Brakhage made films that go nowhere fast, like Warhol's shot of the Empire State Building. Like John Cage, they trust to chance and silence. Mekas has no plot and no stars, but nothing stands still. He has the screen to himself for Self Portrait in 1980, but no easier to pin down.
Some have called him a political artist in a refugee crisis or an advocate of "relational esthetics," giving away celluloid fragments for free. In his last years, he was in exile yet again, evicted by gentrification before moving to Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, where he died in 2019. Still, the move brought him closer to the remaining Lithuanian community and an emerging gallery scene. Did neither last, and does it matter? As he says in Self Portrait, "I attach myself easily to wherever I am."
The 2021 "fall reveal" at The Museum of Modern Art opened October 30. Jonas Mekas ran at the Jewish Museum through June 5, 2022. An earlier review looked at the 2020 "fall reveal."