“Artist’s Choice: Vik Muniz, Rebus”
December 11, 2008–February 23, 2009
MoMA
Imagine the following scene: within an infinite warehouse stand rows of unmarked crates. These boxes hold a massive museum collection, from which 82 objects must be selected for an exhibition. Arranged without any order, the crates contain no indication of the objects within. The exhibition’s curator asks that the crates be opened, one after another, to reveal their contents. Like an alien archaeologist, he walks the length of the aisles to examine each piece meticulously. What is this beautifully detailed plastic hamburger? Where did it come from? What was its original purpose? Is it an artwork, a toy, a pedagogical aid, a religious icon? The curator is uncertain, but knows that it is a perfect rejoinder to the last piece he has seen, a fake fly on a plinth. He jots down its acquisition number to indicate that the hamburger will be next in his emerging sequence.
“Rebus,” ninth in the Museum of Modern Art’s Artist’s Choice series, casts the artist Vik Muniz in the role of this hypothetical curator within MoMA’s finite but prodigious collection. Suspending his knowledge of museum taxonomies, Muniz’s strategy is to create a sequence of definite yet unnamed connections between individual objects. These links function on a variety of registers—formal relationships, linguistic puns, spatial resonances, commonalities of subject matter. Pulling from the range of the Museum’s disparate collections, the exhibition contains prints, drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos, and design objects. Muniz eschews wall texts, an obligatory element in survey exhibitions, thereby allowing the objects to resonate with each other in a space of possible equivalence.
At the exhibition’s outset, Muniz uses Fischli & Weiss’s 1987 film The Way Things Go to introduce his curatorial approach. The film shows a continuous chain of chemical and physical reactions taking place among disparate found objects in an industrial space. In his own artistic practice, Muniz often remakes art historical images using unlikely materials—chocolate, sugar, dust. “Rebus” is his way of recreating The Way Things Go, with pieces from MoMA’s collection as his medium.
The exhibition’s precise presentation forces the visitor to consider first only what is visible. This sharpening of perception makes even incidental details seem significant: on the first wall of the exhibition gallery, a common thermostat is hidden from view by a painted white housing. This box is at eye level and bears an uncanny resemblance to the first work in the show, a ballpoint-pen drawing of a radiating block. Is the thermostat a functional piece of museum architecture or the exhibition’s secret genesis?
Rem Koolhaas, describing Salvador Dali’s Paranoid-Critical Method in Delirious New York, succinctly defines paranoia as a “delirium of interpretation” (emphasis in original). An overall theory becomes the driving force for reading the world; every successive phenomenon is taken as a confirmation of the original idea. According to the financier and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, such over-interpretation is biologically ingrained: narrative fallacy, the predilection for good stories over facts, arises because the human mind more easily stores narratives (patterns) than disconnected units of information. To resist this tendency, Taleb encourages close, sustained observation rather than the hasty adoption of theories.
Though inspiring manic interpretation à la Koolhaas, Muniz’s curatorial strategy and formal presentation in fact appear founded in a skepticism similar to Taleb’s position: the exhibition rejects a totalizing thematic order, instead focusing on specific connections between individual objects. Every sequence of linked objects is presented as self-evident, as if requiring no further consideration and containing no latent meaning beyond an initial moment of visual recognition. A prison window built into the gallery wall is adjacent to a photograph of African American prisoners shoveling dirt, next to a common snow shovel suspended from the ceiling, which shares floor space with a green household bucket. Incarceration is transformed into everyday labor.
However, the works’ captions, presented only in the gallery brochure, reveal more complex associations between objects. The snow shovel is Marcel Duchamp’s readymade, In Advance of the Broken Arm, juxtaposed with a plastic kitchen pail which Gino Colombini designed for Kartell. The first and obvious visual connection conceals a second comment on the relationship of art and design. The readymade gains significance through its context, display, and distribution within an art system. Presented sans wall label, it allows itself to be compared critically and aesthetically with other mass-produced objects. In another case, Muniz has chosen to exhibit two Brillo Boxes stacked one on top of another. Is one of these the original Brillo Box, designed by the aspiring painter James Harvey while moonlighting as a commercial artist, and the second Andy Warhol’s appropriation? As it turns out, both boxes are by Warhol.
Muniz, who worked in advertising before his career as an artist, is acutely aware of historically slippery relationship between art and design. His early Relics series included fake archaeological pieces such as the Ashanti Joystick (an African figure grafted onto a roughly-hewn base with buttons) and the Pre-Colombian Coffeemaker (an Aztec jug with a ceramic filter holder on top). These joking hybrids complicate the picture of American consumerism by making visual parallels between contemporary commodities and pre-colonial objects of spiritual or religious value.
The tension between the functional and the emotional has preoccupied design discourse throughout the 20th century. Modernist design operated with a stated focus on clarity and objectivity. However, this illusion of transparency and inevitability concealed an unacknowledged level of subjective choice. As contemporary designers refashion themselves as artists, they often forget that even within the Modernist tradition, the most enduring design cannot help but create conceptual statements, evoke associative memories, construct unbidden narratives, and intervene in the communication of a message.
The curatorial strategy of “Rebus” presents itself like a classical design problem: a straightforward solution to a self-imposed brief. However, attempting to decipher the show unveils a logic that is quite different from that of its titular puzzle. Rather than direct equivalences between forms and contents with a univocal meaning, the associations between objects in the exhibition are more akin to the leaps that occur during psychoanalysis. Facile at first glance, the formal rhymes, resonances, and echoes in the show begin to seem like ciphers for deeper relationships that have been censored. Muniz’s original intentions are obscured, and only links between substituted symbols remain.
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“It’s your first trip on the Concorde, the supersonic jet airliner that crosses the Atlantic in three hours and forty-five minutes. … You glance out of the window, hoping to see Greenland. Instead you see a gleaming white cylinder, several times larger than the Concorde but without wings, engines, or ports. The object, glistening in the early morning sunlight, is coming straight at you!”
So begins Inside UFO 54-40 by Edward Packer, twelfth in the interactive Choose Your Own Adventure book series. In this series, the reader plays the role of the narrative’s protagonist and makes choices which determine how the story unfolds. Inside UFO 54-40 begins formulaically: a mysterious object abducts the reader–protagonist, who attempts to navigate the alien realm and return home. However, Inside UFO 54-40 contains a structural ruse: the story’s only preferable outcome (in which the protagonist arrives at Ultima, the planet of paradise) is inaccessible through all available narrative choices. Reaching this hidden ending requires circumventing the book’s logic—in other words, the reader must cheat to win.
Let me propose another ending for “Rebus,” with Inside UFO 54-40 in mind. Currently, the exhibition space consists of a single large room. The sequence of works is arrayed linearly along the room’s outside perimeter. The entire center of the room is blocked from view by gray-painted walls; the neutral hue diverts attention from the exhibition plan’s inner void. Perhaps this walled-off interior is the exhibition’s unconscious: a space, concealed in plain sight, which might house a set of alternative curatorial choices.
Imagine that, in defiance of space and time, the entire MoMA collection could be transported into this inner chamber. For one year, Vik Muniz, the curator, will spend his days here. Contained within the exhibition, he considers departures from his original decisions. The curator begins to undermine the clear logic of the first exhibition with other, more radical connections. Questions arise: why did the first exhibition include only seven women and one African-American? Why was its focus nearly exclusively on North American or European artists? Were potential selections avoided, and for what reasons?
Every week in this expanded matrix of possibilities, the curator identifies individual works already in the exhibition for replacement. Beginning first with objects at the center of the sequence and moving outwards, pieces are packed up in plain view while new works are crated in. As this substitution unfolds, original connections are complicated, effaced, and written over by new ones. The entire exhibition is remade by the end of the year. The curator’s program remains the same, but other symbols now join together in an equivalent and yet completely different sequence. It is a transformed exhibition, only one conceivable narrative from a limitless archive of the world.