Review: Vic Muniz and Pipilotti Rist at MoMA

Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (–Feb. 2)
Artist's Choice: Vik Muniz, Rebus (-Feb 23)

Two shows at the MoMA aim to enhance our museum experience and expand our minds. Pipilotti Rist has totally transformed the 2nd floor atrium into a womb room that comforts as it attunes our body to the experience of visual sensation. Vik Muniz offers a visual puzzle that pushes our understanding of art and its connections to other art and the world.

Muniz is the ninth artist invited to guest curate a MoMA show. Known for his technical proficiency and wit -- think of his photograph of a Mona Lisa made of peanut butter -- Muniz also takes a clever tact as curator. He's created what he calls rebus, a kind of visual puzzle where meanings are created combining one or more objects. He's fashioned connections between all manner of objects, including some fun picks from the design department. A 1963 venetian blind is paired with the bars of a prison window (a Robert Gober installation), in turn matched to a Doris Ulmann photograph of a chain gang outfitted in striped prison uniforms. Later on, a photograph by Joel Sternfeld shows children's toys littered on a landscape, leading us to, what else, but Legos and a Rubik's cube, which then takes us to a African-inspired Giacometti figure whose outstretched hands you could imagine twisting and turning the plastic puzzle. Muniz wisely dispenses with wall labels. Instead you're given a poster-sized index of all 82 objects. I recommend bringing a pen so you can connect all the dots.

Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist makes dreamlike meditations on gender, sexuality and the body. For "Pour Your Body Out," MoMA's atrium space is enclosed in pink curtains and covered in carpeting. Visitors wanting to sprawl out on a large eye-shaped sofa are told to remove their shoes. (It must be a socks moment in the art world. The Gugg's "anyspacewhatever" also has a shoe-free zone.) On the day I was there, there was an impromptu kindergarten in the area inside the sofas, with little ones toddling around in a way that seemed in keeping with the art. In fact, the wall text encourages dancing and singing. Projected onto three large walls is a 10-minute looping video. It's a hallucinogenic hayride that loosely follows a woman she as she gets her feet wet in a dirty puddle, plunges underwater, then crawls naked through a field miming a wild boar. With a super-saturated palate and reassuring New Age soundtrack, its part Björk video, part Teletubbies episode.

You might compare what the two artists are doing to the effects of drugs. Muniz is like Ritalin, concentrating the mind and creating cognitive leaps, and Rist is like magic mushrooms, making a sensous space that bridges body and mind.

Reviews Roundup: Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave at the MoMA

Installation view of Models (1994. Ink and chalk on paper. 100 drawings)

Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave at the MoMA (-Feb. 16)

"Ms. Dumas’s work tends to aim for the solar plexus, as the show’s morbid title suggests. Fusing the political and the painterly, it grapples with the complexities of image making, the human soul, sexuality, the beauty of art, the masculinity of traditional painting, the ugliness of social oppression. How much it delivers on these scores is a question that this exhibition doesn’t quite answer. The show suggests that while this amply talented artist has created some riveting images, her work becomes monotonous and obvious when seen in bulk. ... The consistency of this show suggests an artist who settled too early into a style that needs further development. Stasis is disguised by shifting among various charged subjects that communicate gravity in shorthand. Ms. Dumas’s painting is only superficially painterly. The photographic infrastructure is usually too close to the surface, which makes it all look too easy. Worse, it makes subject matter paramount." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"The impressions are emotional. A Dumas retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Cornelia Butler, affected me slowly at first, then in a rush, overcoming a resistance I’ve had to Dumas’s fast and loose, insouciantly ugly pictures, almost all of which are based on photographs of corpses, torture victims, terrorists (Osama bin Laden looking crafty and sensual), pornographically posed nudes, gawky children, and endless anonymous, discontented faces. ... I became fascinated by the refusal of Dumas’s art to let me admire it, despite passages of whiplash drawing worthy of Edvard Munch and a quakingly tender way with incidental colors (pinks, creams, turquoise). The art historian Richard Shiff’s surprising comparison, in the show’s catalogue, of Dumas’s method with that of Willem de Kooning adds up. Like that great Dutchman, she draws in a manner opposed to drawing’s descriptive function, keeping her line loose and a-crackle, in gladiatorial combat with the subjects that occasion it. ... Her art rarely conveys feeling so much as excites it and then absorbs it, to the benefit of the work’s authority. She doesn’t give; she takes. This turns out to be a fair deal, which alerts us to our own untapped emotions. The experience of sheerly responding pleases." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"If the dead don’t look much different than the living here, it is because the departed have only one expression. Like Dumas’s haunting art, it is likely to remain in the mind long after the bearer is gone." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg

"A trademark Dumas canvas melds frigid existentialism with a heated, painterly passion. We’re repelled by its chill, captured by its glow—and end up caught in a Dumasian gravitational pull." -Kate Lowenstein/TONY

"Not since its obsession with Pavel Tchelitchev in the 1930s has the Museum of Modern Art exhibited, in depth, an artist of such irredeemable mediocrity as Marlene Dumas. The 150 pieces spread across two floors are so devoid of true color, pictorial skill, new ideas and pleasure of any kind, positive or negative, that I found myself, at the opening Wednesday night, desperately searching the crowd, whose faces, as on a bad acid trip, seemed joined to Dumas’ bulbous visages, for things of visual interest. ... The Dumas method is simple: She borrowed Francesco Clemente’s overused gouache technique and perved it up. Her subjects are burnished to dullness by her pathetic brush handling. There are some rear shots of masturbation, a blowzy self-portrait, the groups of schoolmates and bridesmaids, in which she throws in a freaky grin or stern look for variety." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet

"As you might expect of portraits without sitters, there is an internalized aspect to Dumas' work. This is an artist searching for icons of her own emotions, so she simplifies form, creating a rapid notational style for the figure itself. Pictures of the full body tend to be slapdash, and more about the body as a commodity or dead fact, but the faces get Dumas' full attention. She hangs no drapes before the windows to the soul." -Dan Bischoff/Star-Ledger

"At MoMA, in galleries filled with painted bodies – dead, tortured or writhing in simulated ecstasy – I overheard one insider confide to another that he hoped the economic slump might sweep away all the glitter that has clung to the Dumas brand and reveal her as the great virtuoso she had always been. I was thinking along similar lines but came to a different conclusion. I imagine that once Dumas loses her quantifiable status, she will fade into the nether reaches of art history, a curiosity of the crazy boom years. ... Spread over two floors, the show tracks the non-development of an artist who discovered both her style and her subjects early on and then continued to plumb their shallows over ensuing decades. ... She covers some of the same terrain as Leon Golub, whose immense paintings of torturers, war criminals, and massacres argue that only a fine line of circumstance separates victim from perpetrator. Dumas gestures wispily in the same direction but she lack Golub’s rhetorical force. She is a mistress of the limp provocation and the mild shock." -Ariella Budick/FT

"So why does Marlene Dumas's painting, appropriated from this loaded image, feel inert and facile? Tiny splatters of blue-gray paint flatten any sense of the sagging weight of inanimate flesh, and the smudged background offers none of the documentary interest the police photographer's scribbled notations lend to the original. ... Part of the buzz around Dumas's work concerns her transformation of source photos into purely painterly forms that supposedly double back and blindside us with emotional content. But the fraught expanse that photographs create between viewer and grisly subject matter was strip-mined by Warhol for his 'Death and Disaster' series decades ago, and with more painterly aplomb." -R.C. Baker/Village Voice

"I mean, look at this ... It's like there's no paint on the canvas at all. There's so much restraint, and the details are all so beautiful. Just look at the nipples. The work is so careful. ... there's a lot of explicit stuff that I wouldn't have the nerve to do ... It's sexy and not vulgar ... Like Titian's nudes are very sexy, and Titian's drawings, you know? A lot of tits in your face. This goes to the edge of pornography." -Alex Katz via Andrew Goldstein/NY Mag.

"...we are witnessing the outcome of a vision that pushes into the edges that define what we should and should not see in a painting." -Sara Rose/AP

"Marlene Dumas' evocative and often provocative work, now on display at the Museum of Modern Art, is full of frightening beauty. These pictures by the South African native, now based in Amsterdam, bear brutal witness to news events and the contemporary condition." -Susan King/St. Petersburg Times

And the blogs!... Eyes Towards the Dove, James Mroy, Pink Pig NYC, Band of the Bes, Anaba, James Kalm. And, for good measure, a couple other much more timely roundups: Two Coats of Paint and Flavorwire.

A Lot of Empty

Micro Compact House by
Horden Cherry Lee and Haack + Höpfner

Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling
Museum of Modern Art
July 20–Oct. 20

Imagine a house available to anyone: cheap, easily assembled, expandable, portable and with all the amenities inside a compact rectilinear design. It can be situated anywhere, including in a park near other similarly designed structures.

That dream’s been a reality for more than half a century. In fact the U.S. has more of these homes then anyone else, millions of them. Its name is the mobile home, the trailerpark.

There are no trailers or double-wides on display at “Home Delivery,” MoMA’s off-the-mark prefab survey, which not-surprisingly is more concerned with the design concepts of big-name architects.

The main attraction is five commissioned prefabs arranged in the museum’s nearby empty lot, soon make way 75-story skyscraper designed by Jean Nouvel. But first we’re instructed to visit the museum’s 4th Floor for a dizzying, and sometimes amusing, history lesson as told through an overabundance of plans, models, brochures, drawings photographs, films and computer animations. (The catalog does a better job.)

Prefab’s origins are traced all the way back to 1833, a year that saw the introduction of a kit home for British colonists in Australia. But things only really got going in the 20th Century with a fever for bringing industrial efficiencies and materials to housing.

The ever-inventive Thomas Edison saw the answer in the concrete home. A single standardized mold was used for everything including staircases, bookshelves — even for pianos, which couldn’t have been very melodious. More than 100 were built in New Jersey, and a few are still standing.

It was the modernists, with their rationalist utopian ideas about transforming the world, who really got excited about prefab. Bauhaus chieftain Walter Gropius pioneered a system of copper-paneled houses which were Palestine as homes for Jews who left Germany in the prewar years. Ironically, the project’s co-designer, Hans Dustmann, would go on to become a major architect for the Nazis; Gropius fled to the United States.

Gropius protégé Marcel Breuer created his own prefab system, which was exhibited on its own in the MoMA’s garden in 1946. It was a commercial failure, and the model was bought by the Rockefellers for use as a guesthouse on their sprawling Westchester estate. However, the first structure displayed in the garden, in 1941, was Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Deployment Unit, or DDU, a repurposed grain bin which was used by the Army in WWII; for more on Bucky and his far-out housing ideas head over to the Whitney.

The inspiration for the Brueur home display was a contemporaneous prefab display in a nearby vacant lot (sound familiar?). The provocatively named Lustron was a aluminum steel-panel prefab scheme based on, no joke, White Castle hamburger joints. In an interesting turn, part of the Luston is now assembled inside the MoMA; its battleship aesthetics make it easy to understand why it failed.

Also displayed are sections of an elegant steel-based structure by Frenchman Jean Prouvé originally designed for use by a secondary school headmistress in Niger. One surviving example was bought at auction for $5 million by the hotelier Andrew Balazs for use as a lounge inside a Costa Rica resort development.

Other materials were also explored, such as with the unrealized nautilus-form All Plastic House by Ionel Schein of 1956, and a comically modish late-60s fiberglass UFO by Matti Suuronen known as Futuro House. Richard and Su Rogers too made use of plastics and other high-tech materials in their banana-yellow Zip-Up Enclosures (see above left), designed for a 1969 competition sponsored by DuPont, best known at the time as the makers of Agent Orange.

While we think of prefabs as stand-alone homes, modularity and off-site construction were also brought to bear on apartment building design. The pied piper of the apartment block himself, Le Courbusier, designed a 12-story structure for Marseille that was described as a wine rack, into which modular units could be inserted like bottles.

Following in Corbu's footsteps, the 60s saw a rash of interest in modularity and mega-structures, including by everyone’s favorite architectural fantasists, Archigram, represented by their far-out Plug-In City and Living Pod. In terms of building that were actually built, there is Habitat ’67 in Montreal, a super-cool geometric pile of interlocking concrete units designed by 24-year-old Moshe Safdie as part of his graduate school thesis. While the structure was intended to organically expand as necessary, it has remained in its original form. A similar story is told with the Tokyo’s Nagakin Capsule Tower of 1970 (see above), an arrangement of studio apartment modules attached to a central core. Architect Kisho Kurokawa intended them to be periodically replaced; they weren’t and are now suffering from disrepair. Also from that year is the practically-minded Oriental Masonic Gardens, an affordable housing community for New Haven that features clever pinwheel clusters of mobile homes (imagine that), which its architect, Paul Rudolph, dubbed the “Brick of the Twentieth Century.” Despite the enthusiasm, it would be his only realized project taking this approach.

Much more successful were the concrete-panel low-rise apartments of the Soviet Union and Eastern Block. And in the U.S., suburbia itself can be seen as partially prefab. The prototypical Levittown cookie-cutter colonial made use of standardized designs and precut lumber; in fact, William Levitt’s ideas were more popular in France than those Jean Prouvé. Today, one third of U.S. home are built offsite. But Japan is home to the most successful prefab industry, with homes are widely available through companies like Toyota and Muji.

While MoMA emphasizes the many failings of high-design prefabs, they remain optimistic. Their reason? It’s the same song we heard at the museum’s "Design and the Elastic Mind": computers are our salvation.

To gaze into this bright tomorrow, we head for the empty lot, where we’re greeted with BURST *008, a homely beach home on stilts adorned with 70s-style sunburst patterns window and connected bleachers. Designers Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier use sophisticated software that allows prefab even for complex forms, doing away with the need for the boring box. It didn’t bode well that the house was temporarily closed to visitors.

Also employing a computer-intensive approach was a shed concept for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Created by MIT’s Lawrence Sass and collaborators, the shotgun-style house features a neat-looking pixilated New Orleans neoclassical façade. The inside was empty, with no indication of what the layout would looks like. By contrast, the arrangement of appliances seemed to be the main point of the shoe-box shaped System3 by Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf/KFN Systems. All mechanical features, including kitchen and bathroom, are arranged around a central core.

The aptly named Micro Compact House (Horden Cherry Lee and Haack + Höpfner) is a clown-car prefab, packing everything from bed to espresso maker into an impossibly and oppressively small space. What appears to be a parody is actually for sale. One the other end of the size spectrum is the four-story Cellophane House by Kiernan Timberlake Associates, featuring eco-chic plastic walls interwoven with photovoltaic cells and a steel frame made of off-the-shelf parts.

To the MoMA’s credit, the five prefabs aren’t all chic glass boxes out of Dwell Magazine. But, somehow they come off as insubstantial and unrealistic.

We’re told that despite its long history of failures, that modern prefab still holds promise, even offering solutions to problems as big as the environment and poverty. It’s a message that rings untrue. This utopianism feels dishonest when the museum's empty lot is soon to be another luxury tower for the mega-rich. We remain undelivered.

Sensational

"Beauty," 1993

Take your time: Olafur Eliasson
MoMA and P.S.1
April 20–June 30

Ever since reading about his "Weather project," a huge artificial sun at the Tate Modern, I've been intrigued by the work of Olafur Eliasson, and eagerly anticipated the double-whammy show at the P.S.1 and MoMA.

"Take your time" is the kind of show that you can enthusiastically recommend to friends who only set inside a museum once or twice a year. It's fun, you'd say. There's this circular room where the walls light up and change colors, bathing everyone inside with intense color. People sit on the floor taking photos of each other. It's wild. Maybe my favorite piece, you continue, is this regular electric fan that hangs on this really long cord from the ceiling in the MoMA's atrium space. It swings around powered by it's own wind. Kids love it and chase it around. There's something sweet and surreal about it...

Olafur Eliasson is likable because his works are straight-forward and easy to understand without any back story or art history degree necessary. In fact, none of the works in "Take your time" are labeled. If you want to know the names of the pieces, you can consult a glossy hand-out, but it's clear that the artist and curators feel it's unnecessary. We don't need to know that he's 41 years old, Icelandic, has a residence in Berlin and that he's influenced by "Light and Space" artist Robert Irwin, or that he is comfortable discussing his work in terms of Continental philosophy, specifically phenomenology and the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

In fact, his works are so stripped-down and baggage-free -- a huge rotating mirror on a ceiling, a wall covered in living moss -- that it's easy to blow through the show. It's something Eliasson is cognizant of. Witness the show's injunctive title -- "Take your time."

His more immersive environments encourage languor on their own. His blockbuster 2003 "Weather project," had visitors sitting or lying on the floor of huge turbine room at the Tate Modern, basking in an artificial sun. In the current show, visitors lie beneath a rotating ceiling mirror in a piece with same name as the show (this is a new work specially made for P.S.1).

Lying under the mirror, you're taken by how fun and calming it is to commune with a bunch of art-loving strangers, staring at yourself and others. Then, after a few minutes, you notice that the mirror is tilted, causing your image to recede, get closer, and so on. It's meditative. You feel pleasantly disembodied. It's the same deal in the "360° room for all colours"; you feel a sense of spontaneous community, bathed together in the shifting spectrum, as your subjective perceptions are tweaked and your sense of objectivity is loosened. It's a bit paradoxical: a group experience of heightened subjectivity.

In a clever but lighthearted way, Eliasson aims at upending our critical faculties and tweaks our preconceived notions, such as about the separation between nature and culture. In the brilliant "Wall eclipse" (2004), a spotlight shines on a slowly spinning mirror, filling the room with shifting shapes of light and shadow, arranged so that it perfectly to illuminate and "eclipse" opposite walls. In "Beauty" (1993), a light shines through a spray of mist creating a spectral like rainbow that changes shape depending on your viewing angle.

His best works are both lyrical and reveal themselves over time. All his works reveal how they work, with simple materials and nothing hidden. There is no trickery in his spectacles. This simplicity at it's best is charming and honest. For his lesser works it can be stupefying. (As Leslie Camhi writes in the Village Voice, formalism is his Achilles’ heel.)

Such is the case of "1 m³ light" (1999), an arrangement of spotlights defines the shape of a cube in a dark, foggy room; and "Reversed waterfall" (1998), a contraption of basins and hoses that ferries water up.

"Take your time" is the first joint exhibition between MoMA and P.S.1 since their merger in 2000. It's a bit sad in the context of the ouster of P.S.1's founder Alanna Heiss and inevitable corporate encroachment (see recent reporting by New York Magazine). While surely it's a sign of institutional changes, perhaps the split exhibit makes sense for Eliasson, who likes to mess with the museum space and its normalizing and essentializing devices like the frame, the wall label and the white cube. (One unexpected and annoying difference between the shows is that photography is allowed at MoMA and banned at by P.S.1, as enforced by their disgruntled guards -- why?)

While not all of it is completely successful, there are a handful of brilliant and beautiful works and happy-making participatory spectacles that engage every viewer and make this show one of the year's best.

Edible Apple Phones and Other Oddities

"apple phone tree" by Hannah Roisin
(St. Gregorys School)/Alan Outten

Design and the Elastic Mind
February 24–May 12, 2008

Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today
March 2–May 12, 2008

Museum of Modern Art

If the MoMA's last major design design show, 2005's SAFE, was a kind of dystopia of homeland security paranoia, Elastic Mind can be seen as the opposite -- an eco-chic utopian future where technology, science and nature work in harmony to make our lives more, um, elastic.

They define elasticicity as a kind of sped-up adaptability necessary due to the "momentous changes" of the Internet and cell phones. Designs that embrace tech, and better-yet, biotech, we're told, can do some strange and groovy things. Or can they?

The catch is that the bulk of these objects are prototypes. They don't work, and probably never will. Certainly, not all design has to be a fully-functional finished object like an iPod. Design is about ideas and problem-solving, even social commentary. But some of these "elastic" creations are a real stretch (pardon the pun).

What are we to make of "Victimless Leather," an imagined lab-made leather jacket cooked up in vitro? Or "BEE's Prototype," a glass vessel where trained bees might smell out cancer? Or "Sniffing Others," prosthetic nose pieces that would allow us to smell the genetic code of potential lovers? It's hard to take this stuff seriously.

Worst is an LED persistence-of-vision device that attaches to a dog's tail so that Rover can communicate to us. Woof-woof. Translation: yeah, right. This I'd expect to see in a SkyMall catalog, not at the MoMA.

Amidst this collocation half-ironic gee-whiz fakery, there are a few things that actually work: the "Power Assist Suit" is a wearable exoskeleton developed in Japan that can double your lifting strength; a diagnostic ingestible camera pill; and rapid prototyping technology that allows one to sketch a chair and table, and then "print" it to exact specifications.

The best section looked at data visualization (information design, I suppose). The "Million Dollar Blocks" project maps New York City, showing blocks where more than $1 million is spent to incarcerate its residents.

But my favorite display, called "No Robots Please!" was dreamed up by children. Asked by Alan Outten to design for the future, they imagined an “apple phone” (see above image): “…it produces apple that are used as telephones. So if you are having a private conversation, you just eat the apple.” Almost as cool as the iPhone, kiddos.

Sharing the sixth floor is "Color Chart," a show about artworks that employ and address commercial color. Despite uncomfortably appropriate sponsorship by Benjamin Moore, it's a nice bright counterpoint to the confusing and crowded design show.

The show opens with a 1918 canvas by Marcel Duchamp "Tu m'," a surreal allegory involving the light spectrum. The story picks up in the 50s with Elsworth Kelly and Yves Klein, who, appropriately enough, take a ready-made approach to color. Kelly used chance to arrange various shades of commercial color on a canvas ("Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance II" (1951). Klein, who invented his own shade of blue (International Klein Blue), is represented by a charming little book, "Yves: Peintures" (1954), that purports to show reproductions of monochrome paintings, but is actually simply signed sheets of commercially printed color paper.

Things really pick up speed in the 1960s. The maestro of commercial techniques, Andy Warhol is represented by two gorgeous paint-by-numbers canvases. There's a series of smaller paintings by Frank Stella commissioned by Warhol and named after the prosaic paint colors used ("Delaware Crossing," "Hampton Roads," etc.).

The 70s highlights are Sol Lewitt (beautiful colored-pencil wall drawing) and films by Richard Serra ("Color Aid," depicts the artist leafing through sheets of colored paper) and John Baldessari ("Six Colorful Inside Jobs" shows the artist as housepainter redoing a room in various hues).

Best is a 1985 Dan Flavin room installation called "untitled (to Don Judd, colorist)" that takes color-art to light speed is Flavin’s signature florescent tubes in T-shaped arrangements, a sensuous color bath in pink, red, yellow, blue and green.

More recent works are more cerebral, and less celebratory. One standout is Byron Kim's "Synecdoche," a wall of 8x10-inch panels, each painted its own hue of pink, brown or beige, representing a skin-tone portrait of various individuals painted from life. The piece was shown at the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Another is Cory Arcangel's "Colors," the 1988 Dennis Hopper movie tweaked to show only one horizontal line of pixels on each go-through (to see the whole piece would take 33 days). The lines are repeated vertically, creating shifting and entrancing bands of color.

MoMA's Contemporary Feminine Side (Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now)

"Now" (1973) by Lynda Benglis

Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now
MoMA
Nov. 21, 2007 – July 28, 2008

The MoMA in particular has been criticized for overlooking and excluding art made by women. Memorably, Jerry Saltz has tackled the issue, most recently last November, finding female representation at the museum well under 10 percent (he counted 15 percent at the Whitney, and 1 percent at the Frick).

MoMA's new contemporary show seems to attempt a corrective. I count 38 men and 29 women (43 percent!), and the show's curated by a woman, Deborah Wye, the museum's chief curator of prints and books. There also seems to be more wall text dedicated to women.

And a talented group of women it is, with marquee names like Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holtzer, Lisa Yuskavage, Elizabeth Murray, Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith.

Exhibited in the museum's second-floor contemporary art galleries, the show, culled from MoMA's collection, stakes a claim to define contemporary art, stating that it began in 1970. Why 1970? What happened that killed capital-M Modern art?

This show hints at the answer by presenting several different currents in contemporary art. Awkwardly titled Multiplex (don't think Loews, think different wavelengths on one frequency), it's loosely divided into three sections: Abstractions, Mutability and Provocation. Overall, it's about plurality and multiplicity.

Unlike, modernism, which was, ahem, more rigid.

Which leads us to a tongue-in-cheek floor sculpture by Lynda Benglis called "Modern Art Number 1" depicting two blobs -- one aluminum and one bronze. We're to assume it's two modern sculptures (by men) melted down.

So, maybe it's the women. After all, 1970 was prime time for feminism. Benglis herself was a pioneer, challenging gender norms in her work, which includes video performances. She may be best remembered for by posing nude with a dildo in mid-70s Art Forum.

In fact, it's possible to see a good deal of feminist art at this show. From the 70s, there's explicitly political work by Benglis, Ree Morton and Nancy Spero, the latter whose "Notes in Time" -- a large paper work depicting women's struggles throughout history -- is given its own room. (Incidentally, you can see Spero's work in mural form at the Lincoln Center subway stop.) From the 1980s, there's Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. More recently, and less explicitly feminist is Lisa Yuskavage, whose painting "Wrist Corsage" depicts an nude woman with a massive derrière, done in a soft-focus children's storybook style. Work by noteworthy newcomers Sarah Lucas and Rachael Harrison also deals with gender issues.

Maybe my favorite work by a woman artist in the show is by Louise Bourgeois. (Ms. Wye is an authority on her work.) "Articulated Lair" (2006) is a circular room created using folding panels. Inside is a space marked by ambiguous, slightly ominous and slightly phallic rubber shapes hanging from the wall like evil surrealist sausages. Strongly informed by Freudian psychoanalysis, Bourgeois creates in this installation an interplay between feelings of safety and refuge and violence and repression.

In an interesting small show upstairs, the MoMA more explicitly casts a critical eye on itself. 75 Years of Architecture at MoMA addresses the history of the museum's take on architecture, noting that Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock's monumental MoMA exhibit and book, which defined the steel and glass International Style in 1932, actually excluded many other modernisms.

One of these other modernisms is the so-called organicism of Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The show goes on to tell how, in the 60s and 70s, Johnson and Hitchcock's successor, Arthur Drexler, moved away from the sterile International Style, putting on shows about urbanism and the Beaux-Arts movement.

The exhibit has a nice collection of architectural drawings and models, including a wall dedicated to drawings by acid-drenched 60s "visionary architects" like Peter Cook and Haus Hollein.

But as far as I could tell, not a single female architect! No Denise Scott Brown, Susana Torre or Zaha Hadid.

One last thing, I stupidly missed the Martin Puryear show, but his large-scale sculptural works in the big second-floor space are stunning. There's a giant wagon wheel and a latter to the sky called "Ladder for Booker T. Washington."