Color Chart: Reinventing Color 1950-Today @ MoMA
My first stop (after a mediocre breakfast at a cafe on 53rd @ 7th Ave) on a busy art day was a visit to the Museum of Modern Art. This was a day when museum memberships prove their worth as I was able to avoid the very long lines outside the museum and stroll right in at the 10:30am opening time. The nice thing about getting in at 10:30am at MoMA is that if you know where you’re going, you can beat most of the crowd to the exhibits and have a chance to look at things more closely before the throngs start clogging the galleries.
The Color Chart show focuses on the use of systems, chance, and ready-made colors in art since 1950. I found the show quite stimulating to look at, though it was perhaps not the kind of “inspired-to-go-home-and-paint-right-away” exhibition that I might have expected. Most of the work displayed little brushstroke or other articulation, with flat color application the norm. That said, there were a number of pieces worth noting.
Francois Morellet had a piece in the first room of the exhibition which filled a grid of something like 40,000 tiny squares with either red or blue paint, using numbers in the phone book to determine which color to apply. Even numbers yield one color, odd numbers the other. If I hadn’t read the wall label to learn that the numbers were thusly distributed, I would have stared at the painting longer to see if it “popped” like a 3d stereogram.
I’m not usually a big fan of John Chamberlain’s work (they’re fun, but if you’ve seen fifty…), but I enjoyed the enamel (car-paint?) coated panels on display here with names like “Elvis”. I think these are the first time I’ve seen Chamberlains that weren’t crushed cars.
I also don’t usually get excited by the light sculptures of Dan Flavin, but a particularly playful (and very bright) installation here at MoMA was worth the green afterimages it produced in my eyes. In the room following Flavin, Byron Kim’s “Synechdoche” seemed to glow green and purple in between the flesh-colored panels, either my eyes playing tricks on me or more likely the lingering effects and leaking light from the adjoining Flavin display. (In the aptly named piece — Synechdoche is a type of metaphor where a part is used to stand in for the whole — Kim paints each panel a different flesh tone based on a real person’s actual skin color.)
A Blinky Palermo piece made from dyed cotton stood out with its simple, Ellsworth Kelly-like composition of red & blue rectangles. (Kelly is also included in the show with his random grid of colored squares.)
I love Sol LeWitt’s work and Wall Drawing #91, a grid with each square marked by “non-straight” lines of three separate color pencils, didn’t disappoint (though it was not as exciting as a work I had seen at MoCA in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago).
Near the end of the exhibit in a side nook, a suite of Katharina Fritsch paintings practically glowed. Each piece consisted of a panel or canvas of smoothly applied color surrounded by a deep metallic frame that reflected color and light from the center of the piece as well as from other works in the room.
In the last gallery, I found a video by Cory Arcangel somewhat compelling. I can’t recall the exact algorithm described on the wall panel, but here’s the gist: Arcangel digitally reworked the movie “Colors” so that it consisted solely of vertical bands of color based on pixels in the original movie. It’s intriguing to watch the stripes dance on the screen in sync with the audio and to note how the color themes change depending upon the scene.
On a final note, the staff at MoMA wore Daniel Buren-designed vests of variously colored, presumably 8.7cm-wide stripes. I asked one of the guards if they get to keep the vests after the show. He looked at me, perplexed, and shook his head, “No.”
