A "HAPPENING" AT MoMA
by Alexandra York
Yup. It really happened, this “Happening.” Not having yet visited the renovated Museum of Modern Art in New York, I finally set aside the time when invited to a private party there a few weeks ago. There would be only a couple of hundred people attending the after-hours event, so I could see the “art” in its new setting without hordes of tourists, without paying the high-ticket fare, and with a few glasses of wine to brace myself for what I already knew I would encounter art-wise. After all, I had been to the old museum enough to know what to expect.
Many of the museum’s offerings were quite a chuckle, actually, like the paint-scratching (or scratch-painting?) maybe 20’ X 30’ by a very famous (I’m mentioning no names) contemporary “artist” in the party’s reception area, where we got our first glass of warm white wine. A note card stuck on the wall beside the “work” explained how the “artist” sat on the shoulders of his assistant, who then moved back and forth and up and down—some of it on a ladder, I presume--while the "artist" brushed on the paint at will, all along riding the ups-and-downs-and-all-arounds of his assistant’s gymnastics. The new building, itself, is spacious, though, and well designed to show off its wares of huge “things”; its high ceilings, wide walls, and fast-paced escalators serve both the displays of “art” and the museum’s visitors just fine. The most interesting floor, hands down, is the design floor, featuring all sorts of wonderful 20th century objects like furniture, kitchen appliances, and such—it really is a worthwhile tribute to American ingenuity and imagination in creating useful things that make using them an aesthetic and pleasurable experience as well. I won’t bother to describe the rooms with typical paintings by the to-be-expected, household names of modernism or contemporary concoctions adhered to the walls, familiar to everybody, or the piles of “whatever” sculptures by “whichever” other famous names that are strewn about or sticking up or hanging down, with plenty of room to walk around and wonder, because what I want to tell about is the “Happening,” the piece de resistance of the evening: The Map. You know, the map they give out at the information desk, so you can find your way around the museum. I mean, the paper brochure with lines, words, and color pictures on it. You know, that little lay-out map.
Well, someone had accidentally dropped one in the dead center of a very large room with pieces of “sculpture,” “installations,” and deconstructed “constructions” parked here and there. The map had lots of floor space surrounding it and lay there all by itself, sort of important like. It wasn’t wrinkled or wadded up or anything like the paper “sculptures” I had seen down in a Lower East Side gallery on one of my junkets to that neighborhood. It looked fresh and pristine. So I walked over to it and called out loudly and excitedly to my husband: “Come look at this! Isn’t it just so wonderful how your focus becomes riveted on this small and simple but oh! so crucial piece of paper? And they don’t even have a little fence or anything to protect this piece of art, and it’s so little in outward form but filled with such big inner meaning”—and on and on. My husband joined in with his own jargon, and gosh! we got really exercised over this incredible find.
Pretty soon, a whole bunch of other visitors were gathering around me, my husband and the map. Some of them called spouses and friends over to look, walk around it and ponder. Some smiled at both the map and me, but, truth be told, most actually tried to “understand” it, the insecure looks on their faces revealing whirling brain waves and synaptic staccatos that just couldn’t seem to settle down. Was it supposed to be humorous, or did it signify something they just hadn’t grasped? And there was no little note pinned anywhere to explain it! By now, we had quite a crowd, so I called over a guard and asked him worriedly about the safety of this exquisite work, because it seemed to me that someone might walk on it and damage it without noticing. On the other hand, I mused, lots of contemporary art is meant by their creators to be walked on or kicked around. Was this one of those? The guard looked uncertain. Most museum guards just stand around like potted plants, but now this one. . .well, he shuffled his feet in place for a minute or two, seemingly unable to figure out what to say or do. A tangle of twine or a fan-blown, hanging sheet or twisted car parts welded together, I suppose, he could cope with because they were pretty common, but. . .well, I would guess this did look just like one of the museum’s maps even to him, so, well, he just looked sort of stumped.
Finally, my husband and I could stand it no longer. We had had about ten minutes of real fun—it was a good party after all. We cracked up. I picked up the map and handed it to a newcomer edging his way toward the rather large group that had assembled by now to view the “Happening.” “Oh, sir,” I said, with some concern. “You look lost. Here take this and relocate yourself.” Very few people laughed with us. Some looked shocked, others offended, and some looked so lost that I wished I had more maps to give out.
The whole incident reminded me of the time a few years ago, while doing research for my novel CROSSPOINTS, when my husband and I entered a posh, well-known gallery down in SOHO. The place was full of empty wood boxes dumped here and there around the space, but nothing else was in the room. After some minutes of standing there and being ignored, we called over the typically snooty female “artist representative,” who coolly asked how she could be of assistance. With a look of sincere bewilderment on his face, my husband said, “Oh, I see you must be in between exhibits here. What’s going to come in?” The young female answered with undisguised boredom, “Sir, this is the exhibit.” “Oh, I see,” he replied with a straight face. “Well, I don’t know much about this kind of art. Could you please explain it to me?” Disdain replaced boredom. “If you see empty boxes in an art gallery, sir, it is obviously a metaphor for the enigma of existence.” True story. We smiled and made it out the door and all the way around the corner before we burst out in a laughing jag that brought tears to our eyes. But the incident also brought tears to my heart for the sad state of our culture and the stuff that, unchallenged by most (including critics), passes for art in it. Nevertheless, it was great research fodder. As a writer, even of fiction, I could not have made up that story in a million years. So it went into the novel exactly as it happened.
Gosh, if only the “Happening” of “The Map” at MoMA had happened then, I could have included it, too. Gosh darn-- But then, if I put it in a novel, nobody would believe me.
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