artist's choice at MoMA

There is an amazing carved pear table by Hector Guimard standing on a low white pedestal, in a small room, buried somewhere in the bowels of MoMA. It would be worth your while, I mean to say, just to get there, and find that table, and take in its elegant tripartite forms, its rather organic manner of flowing in lovely tapers to its contours, and its subtle; intense and sexy presence- the precise and labial; graceful petals of the flowery front triangle. 

I don’t know that you want or need an orientation either, in a situation like the one you will find yourself in, in that particular room. Leave your orientation in the coatcheck, and wander, its free on Friday night, this cavernous Las Vegas of culture; this disorienting and vast (dis)connection of rooms; atriums; vertigo inducing glass-walled drops of what feels like a hundred feet. And so you may, as we did, find yourself enjoying more physical contact than is normal in a “museum”, because there is no elbow room, so to speak- in fact one hot young couple I noticed at one point inches away in peripheral vision were sharing a mutable, two chambered mouth energetically. In the future, it won’t just be the nude couple in Yvonne Ranier’s black and white video undressing in these rooms? When they ask me to do artist’s choice…..

The room’s dominant theme is set by a group of intensely colored; intensely patterned and structured images, on onionskin, brite white paper, in thin polished aluminum frames, and hung somewhat away from the wall, at an angle, with their bottoms some six inches out, and tops maybe two. These are frightening- terrible- (terrablita, recognized by the Pope was it? in Michaelangelo, is here in quantity), they are also gorgeous, sumptuous, fascinating, compelling, incomprehensible to most of us, utterly so- you feel the intense and tyrannical footprint here of a relentlessly utilitarian language, a terrible precision of logic dictating the surprisingly varied forms.

The fact that they tell so much in relation to the central theme show currently running in the same building, Inventing Abstraction, that they encompass decorative patterning and other ways of confirming the forms that many painters distilled long before these diagrams were dreamed up in arroyos in the ad-hoc chunks of continent that were jammed together recently at the western end of Nevada, adds to the impetous you may feel to visit the room soon.

And learning that they were diagrams necessary to the process of manufacturing computer chips, and that these rather large diagrams were created in advance of etching the same patterns onto microscopic bits of silicone, after using photography to reduce them? They aren’t as titillating as the Guimard table, but they are something to see. This only leaves out about ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the exhibition in which these items are currently on display- and its an exhibition that easily lives up to its author’s claim and apology, which says in other words: sorry its so dense, but there is no non-epic item here, and none that feel to me less than necessary.

Trisha Donnelly then is an artist who I look forward to following, an artist who’s work I am entirely unfamiliar with, apart from this exhibition- in itself truly an artwork that rocks.