To encounter the woodcut print Cropland (1987) by Xu Bing (b. 1955) is to visit a patchwork of garden plots, with vigorous lines denoting orderly rows of plants that recede gently into the distance. Looking closer, plant groupings come into focus, with different carving techniques distinguishing stalks, flowers, and fallow areas. Looking closer still, Chinese characters or hanzi are legible in corners of the plots. Reconsidering the composition as a whole, plantings and characters blend back into a landscape of marks.

These blendings—of plant and garden, individual plot and collective farm, word and image, representation and abstraction—help to locate Cropland in the time and place of its cultivation, specifically as a key moment in Xu’s artistic development in the Beijing region during and just after the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).

Cropland is a single print from a Series of Five Repetitions (1987-1988), a seminal work exploring the printing process through landscape imagery. Conceived as part of his thesis project at the Central Acadamy of Fine Arts in Beijing, the artist printed the images in stages as he developed and then obliterated each one, beginning with a fully inked uncarved block, culminating in a legible landscape, and then ending with an overcarved, nearly blank sheet. The imagined landscapes draw upon Xu’s memories of working on a communal farm in the 1970s and also from quick schematic sketches of rural landscapes made during travel.

Landscape imagery, visualization of process, and word-image integration in Cropland anticipates their centrality to Xu’s subsequent work. This is seen most clearly in Book from the Sky (1987-1991), his landmark project documenting 4,000 invented characters, and “landscripts” (1999–2013), an investigation of different types of landscape painting in relation to Chinese writing systems.

A deeper dig into the work reveals how these themes represent the cultivation of an adaptive strategy by the artist. This becomes clearer by putting the work in biographical context.

Born in 1955 to educated parents who held positions at Beijing University, the family’s life was thoroughly disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. This experience profoundly influenced the artist, especially his “reeducation” at Shouliang Gou, a farming village 50 miles north of Beijing, from 1974 to 1977.¹

By all accounts Xu adapted by embracing his “advanced educated youth post,” detailed in his brief memoir “Ignorance as a Kind of Nourishment.”² There, he realized, “where no one cared about his background,” one could work hard and “prove himself a useful person.”³ And this he did, tending fields and minding livestock while mobilizing his writing, drawing, and design skills in service of the village. Relevant to Cropland, the artist recalls, “The task I feared most, squatting down to pick weeds, meant that you had to spend the day moving around in a squat . . . . The days are tough in a rural village, but we didn’t feel it then. It’s what we had rushed there for.”⁴

As a result, by the late 1970s Xu was recruited in the first generation of students to attend one of the newly-reinstated art academies. As the rare “educated” member of a class chosen for their Maoist credentials, the artist recalls being “earnest and dutiful for a reason . . . . Some of us had landlords in our families and others were labeled bourgeois or deemed spies with overseas connections.”⁵

At the Academy, blending with fellow students also meant harmonizing disjunctive pedagogies, where residual Beaux-Arts methods (copying from Classical plaster casts, for example) was integrated with the Maoist ethos of “art for the people.” Printing in particular, the department to which he was assigned, carried strong positive associations with the populist New Woodcut Movement (1912–1949) and his instructors were well respected for their practice in that mode.⁶

At the same time, emerging art and social movements meant new ideas and new possibilities for an emerging printmaker in Beijing. The surfacing of No Name painters, working underground since the late 1950s, opened up a space for subjective experience in art, presaging the inception of the Stars Group and April Photography Group in the late 1970s, groups that overtly pushed boundaries on aesthetic free expression and personal points of view.⁷ In this context of change within and beyond the art scene, Xu closely followed these developments and made sense of them as an observer: “[W]hile others filled Tiananmen Square with poems and speeches,” he reflects, “I was sketching among the crowd. I believed it was what an artist should do.”⁸

In that setting, an exploration of the printing process through remembered images of collective farming made both aesthetic, political, and personal sense as a thesis project. At the time of the work’s completion in the late 1980s, the audience for Five Repetitions was largely local, but it became well known in that context, received as a successful integration of the Modern Woodcut tradition with subjective expression to convey a sense of the quotidian.⁹

This integration of Socialist Realism, process-oriented printing, and individual experience into the Five Repetitions goes deeper however. Further meanings surface by digging further into the artist’s blending of word and image, land and landscape, individual and collective into Cropland.

Of the ten works in the series, only Cropland features actual hanzi. The four characters read Zhao, Qian, Li, and Sun. They refer to the first names in a Song dynasty (960–1279) list of one hundred prominent families. Many Chinese viewers would recognize the list as the source for the phrase “old one hundred names,” a way to describe mass, shared culture. In addition, reference to the Song dynasty is significant as the origin point for traditional Chinese landscape painting and a unified writing system (typography in Book from the Sky is modeled on Song-era letterforms).¹⁰

The significance of planting family names into communal cropland is further revealed by an alternate translation of the work’s Chinese title (庄稼地, zi liu di): Family Plots or Private Plots. The term is specific, defining areas allotted to individuals within collective farms,¹¹ rare instances of self-determination in a nationalized system. Though considered the “tail end of capitalism,” as Mao put it, the practice more or less continued until dissolution of the commune system after Mao’s death.¹² The term also conveys intimacy with and fondness for rural life which Xu could certainly claim. 

This distinction between individuated family plots and anonymized cropland becomes clear by comparison with another work in the series, titled Field (田.1987) While the mark-making is similar, a directly aerial view suggests a psychological distance remote from the situated perspective of Cropland/Family Plot, where one can imagine standing in the narrow walkways between plantings. Similarly, a mass of tadpoles swarms a flooded area of the Field, perhaps suggesting collectivism.

In both farming and language, meaningful units are cultivated in an orderly and repetitive way to yield sustenance and nourish new growth. Bringing the Repetitions to fruition by working and re-working the images section by section evokes both the repetitive tilling of land and the process of becoming literate by copying thousands of characters stroke by stroke.

In this way the plantings also evoke the modularity of written Chinese, in which characters can be arranged on a grid to yield multiple readings, as seen in the artist’s Magic Carpet (2006). Writing about Repetitions at the time, Xu also describes the visual regularity as a response in part to contemporary life, where “dramatic advances of industrialization and concomitant standardization” could be infused with “a deeply spiritual, incredibly rational, man-made beauty. . . .”
¹³

Was the composition of Cropland determined by a formal system? Evidence of Xu’s process suggests an intentional but not formulaic approach. To develop the image, he worked the woodblock surface intuitively and spatially, carving out almost all the plots from visual foreground to background. This suggests a process more consistent with the phrase “meaning comes before the brush strokes,” familiar to some Chinese artists, than to a strictly rule-based system. Still, Cropland “reads” like a newspaper page, complete with individual stories and varied typefaces.

These subtexts emerge by close observation and close reading. By articulating some of the stories embedded in Cropland, a rich landscape is revealed, one that incorporates Xu Bing’s life experience and presages major themes of his subsequent work. As the artist wrote at the time,

it breaks with the common understanding that works of art always appear in rigid form, revealing an aspect of art that is hidden . . . . it not only emphasizes process, but also gives complete expression to the artist’s line of thinking.¹⁴

Xu Bing’s Cropland is on view in gallery 207 of MoMA’s reinstalled galleries.

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“Reproductions . . . more than originals, mediate the artistic-cultural relations of today,” declared Czech avant-garde catalyst Karel Teige in 1922, joining other experimental artists, writers, editors, and designers exploring the expressive possibilities of new photographic and printing technologies.¹

Teige and fellow members of the 1920s leftist avant-garde group Devětsil put these ideas to the test in the production of experimental journals such as Disk (two issues published, 1923 and 1925), Pásmo (Zone; 1924–26), and ReD (Revue Devětsilu; 1927–31). “Little magazines” such as these thrived in Europe during this period, integral to an international network in which members of the avant-garde could share ideas.²

But what was involved in bringing these abstract ideas about mechanized life to the messy reality of print publishing? What can be learned from the close examination of Czech journals in particular? 

To find out, I joined an impromptu team of researchers at the MoMA Paper Conservation Lab. There, Meghan Forbes (C-MAP Fellow for Central and Eastern Europe), Barbora Bartunkova (Museum Research Consortium Fellow), and I (Reader Services Librarian) sat with Erika Mosier (Associate Conservator) and Lee Ann Daffner (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Conservator of Photographs) to share our varied expertise. Laura Neufeld (Assistant Paper Conservator) got into the act later, capturing the magnified images shown here. 

Gathering around the microscope, we examined several journals in the MoMA Library collection, seeking evidence of how group members manifested their ideas about the power of reproduction through actual photomechanical reproduction. We wondered, how did image processing work then? Were the methods they used similar to those employed in European printing centers such as Paris and Berlin, or were there local differences? What kinds of production choices did the group make, and what creative strategies emerged in the process?

Our adventure began with the word štočky. Translated variously from Czech as cliché, copy negative, or copy print, and pronounced to an American ear like “SHTOTCH-kee,” these photo-based images appear to have been key elements in the printing process and crucial to the exchange of visual ideas among publishers. But what are they exactly? How did they function in the printing process? And why were they passed around so much by editors? 

These questions emerge from Meghan’s dissertation, “In the Middle of It All: Prague, Brno, and the Avant-Garde Networks of Interwar Europe,”³ through her primary source references to the exchange of štočky. For example, in a 1930 letter in German, Neue Stadt and Neue Frankfurt editor Josef Gantner urged Teige, “Please send me immediately the cliché of the Prague housing estate [Baba, the Czech Werkbund modernist housing development].”⁴ We would learn from other examples that the term cliché was used interchangeably with štočky in German and French correspondence of the time.⁵

As a catalyst for avant-garde publishing, Teige was a good source for such material, based upon “the method of interchange he set up at an early stage through [the journal] Stavba. The regular accounts of current developments that Teige published in the magazine depended on a network of contacts, constantly maintained by correspondence and the exchange of documents.”⁶ He also had štočky on hand from the production of Pásmo and Disk, even sending a list (for return) to Devětsil colleague Artuš Černík in Brno.⁷ I discuss one of these images, a work by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, below.

Expanding upon this research using the MoMA Library collection, Meghan spotted an advertisement for štočky in another Czech journal from this period: “All štočky for Vest Pocket Revue are supplied by [the graphic arts association] Polygrafia in perfect condition.”⁸ Another full-page ad in the journal ReD touts, “Why throw money out the window on expensive štočky when you can obtain them at a lower price and better made from B. Peješ and Company?”⁹

From this evidence, then, we knew that štočky are images in some physical form that could be readily circulated and printed. But we wanted to learn more.

Back in Paper Conservation, we examined issues of the 1920s Czech journals Disk, ReD, Pásmo, Vest Pocket Revue, and the book Film¹⁰ from the MoMA Library collection. Our search for štočky focused here on images in Pásmo, nos. 9 (1924) and 10 (1925), specifically the masthead, a “photographic poem” by Jiří Jelínek, and a reproduction of Mies van der Rohe’s Friedrichstrasse skyscraper project.

To understand what we were looking at, we needed to review printing processes of the time, specifically letterpress production, and to distinguish the mechanics of printing solid areas (such as lines and shapes) and tones (photographs in particular). At this point, Lee Ann looked up from the gelatin silver prints on her examination table. Standard commercial printing at the time, she explained, involved arranging metal type and images (the latter processed into typelike blocks) in a metal frame, or chase. Once set up in the printer, the composition was repeatedly inked and pressed into paper. 

Štočky, it turns out, played a key role early in this process of transforming images into small metal printing blocks (here called line blocks and halftones). They and their brethren clichés, copy negatives, and copy prints could take a variety of forms: they could be negative or positive photographic images developed on glass, paper, or film; they could also be either screened (I’ll get to that) or unscreened. One thing they had in common, however, was though they were expensive to produce, they could be sent through international mail, which enabled them to be circulated among publishers.

Crucially, štočky (I’ll call them “process images” from here) served as a key reproductive step in the process of turning an origin image, such as a line drawing or photograph, into print form. Moreover, the images they were based on were generally made with print publication in mind. In fact, the term camera ready then referred to an origin image that would hold up well during transformation into a process image, then printing block, then composition (known as a “forme”), and then print.

To make this first reproduction, images entirely composed of black and white (known as line art) were photographed one way, and continuous tone images (such as photographs) were photographed in a slightly different way. Both were photographed in high contrast to make a printer-friendly image, but continuous tone images were shot through a screen, filtering the tones into black dots of varying size. In this way, all elements of a composition (type and images) were rendered in pure black and white, ready for etching into blocks. From here we’ll call these “line blocks” (for black-and-white images) and “halftones” (for tonal images such as photographs).

Lee Ann pointed us to an example of a line block from the time, discussed by Adrian Sudhalter (Distinguished Scholar, Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art) during her reconstruction of Tristan Tzara’s unrealized publication Dadaglobe.¹¹ To make this block for the related publication Dadaco,¹² an image of a certificate was photographed in high contrast and then etched into zinc. The zinc plate was then attached to a wood block, making it interchangeable with type and other print elements.

While this process may appear to be fully mechanized, for most of its history, photomechanical reproduction was a complex, labor-intensive craft involving optics, chemistry, metalworking, woodworking, and other technical skills. Printing meant working with materials such as acid and cyanide, hammers and chisels—and even a substance known as “dragon’s blood.”¹³

“Plastic anvil” is theoretician Reyner Banham’s way of describing how industrial production (such as letterpress printing) depended upon such technicians “performing a function relying heavily on coordination of hand and eye, knowledge of material, and accumulated years of what can only be called craft skill.”¹⁴ Machine precision, he argued, was a myth “propagated by twentieth-century aesthetes,” in particular “the high poetry of Le Corbusier and the Futurists in the 1920s.”¹⁵

Banham made a further point relevant to process images: traditional manufacturing depends upon limited precision, which was “not that aspect of machinery that was so much admired in the 1920s and 1930s.”¹⁶ Specifically, the interchangeable part so fundamental to industrial production “can only be made to interchange by making the fit sufficiently sloppy.”¹⁷ This built-in imprecision, or tolerance, he argued, enables parts to work together just right. If we think of process images as an interchangeable part of avant-garde exchange, we can see that they fit this criterion well. These idea-parts were easily transportable and also malleable enough to work together through the mail and the production process.

Looking for these process images—and plastic anvils—back in the lab, we next focused the microscope on line block and halftone images in Pásmo.

We started with the bold masthead of early issues such as Pásmo 1, no. 9 (1924). Commanding the right column, a strong graphic forms a sans serif P from a strip of film and, apparently, a circle, with the journal title in a serif typeface beside it. 

In her dissertation, Meghan notes that pásmo translates as zone, but also as band or belt.¹⁸ This linear quality makes for a compelling image in itself, but also anticipates intense interest in typographic experimentation. Much of this was focused on reforming traditional typography in line with modernist principles of functionalism and mechanization. Like the Pásmo P, these experiments often involved reduction to geometric elements (circles, lines) and elimination of traditional attributes (e.g., capitalization, serifs, variable strokes, and italics).

The best-known example is Herbert Bayer’s 1927 Universal alphabet.¹⁹ Bayer’s experimental lettering system would become known to Devětsil group members through the journal ReD, in which a rendering of it was reproduced in 1929—and critically evaluated by Teige himself.²⁰ Also in 1927, Kurt Schwitters introduced Systemschrift, a reform alphabet based on phonetic principles.²¹ Preceding all of these is the logo for Max Burchartz’s design firm Werbebau, which features a lowercase b. Moreover, similar P’s and a lowercase b are reproduced in Jan Tschichold’s influential Die neue Typographie.²²

At first glance, the P appears to be solid black. One assumes that the circle is a flat shape, with an overexposed filmstrip added to render the letter. But Meghan noticed some tonal variation in the circle, suggesting an image of a vinyl record (or possibly a reel of film), and indeed, one can make out a pattern suggesting just that when looking at it through a microscope. Looking even more closely, a series of tiny white flecks within a faint outline of frames hinted that an actual film clip could have been used as the stem of the P.

If the P was intended to be a strictly black-and-white element, it would have been prepared and processed that way. In other words, a big black circle, probably hand drawn, would have been overlaid with an overexposed strip of film. This would then have been photographed in high contrast (i.e., made into a process image), on its way to becoming a line block.

But if the P was intended to read as a photomontage of an LP and a film clip, it would have been photographed and processed as a halftone. In this scenario, an image of an LP and a strip of film would have been pasted together and then rephotographed through a halftone screen. Under the microscope, halftone dots are clearly visible on both the LP and the film strip, strongly suggesting that the creators intended it to be read as a photomontage and not as a simple graphic. 

The next Pásmo image we placed under the microscope prompted similar questions about photomontage and publisher intention. This time we looked at an example of Devětsil’s signature photographic poems or picture-poems, of particular interest to Barbora.

Turning to page 6, we found “Remo Fotografická báseň” (Photographic poem by Remo [Jiří Jelínek]). Combining image and type for expressive purposes, picture poems were conceived by Devětsil’s offshoot Poetist group as a thoroughly modern expressive form, merging the “economy, truth, [and] brevity” of telegrams and photographs.²³

Poetism grew from Devětsil interest in mass-produced imagery. The modern picture, Teige argued, should be “either a poster—that is, public art, like the cinema, sports, and tourism, with its place in the street—or a poem, pure visual poetry, without literature, with its place in the book, a book of reproductions, like a book of poems.”²⁴ He was confident that “picture poems conform precisely to contemporary requirements. Mechanical reproduction provides the means for making picture books. Books of picture poems will need to be published. Methods of mechanical reproduction will assure the wide popularization of art.”²⁵

The Pásmo image clearly aspires to this ideal. Montaged elements include musical notation, photographs depicting ships and wildlife, and words, such as the English phrase “NEVER MORE” hand lettered in the middle. Some of these are joined and some are set into heavy black or white borders. A white L-shaped border holds the components together, with the date 1924 and the inset “MANON” suggesting a title or label, possibly referencing an eighteenth-century comic opera by Jules Massenet or another musical reference (Jelínek was an accomplished jazz trumpeter).

Here the production photographer was presented with a single image composed of both line art and continuous tones. Processing it as a line block would have reduced the photographs to high contrast black-and-white shapes. Processing it as a halftone would have tended to yield fuzzy, low-contrast line art. The photographer chose the latter, as the murky result shows. 

What’s lost in the murk are the choices made by (perhaps) the artist and (definitely) by the production team to yield the best result. For example, the photographer could optimize exposure, the developer could burn and dodge, the platemaker could do some precise chiseling, and finally the printer could optimize ink flow to achieve the most legible outcome. 

What’s unclear is how much the artist understood this process and whether he took it into account in making the work. If reproduction was truly the future of art, as Devětsil proposed,²⁶ did Remo consider camera readiness when making the origin image? Consider the musical notation, for example. Was it a piece of found material, cut and pasted into the composition, or was it rendered specifically for it? Incorporating found material might have been a purposeful choice, celebrating the readymade element of collage at the expense of print legibility. But if the notation was rendered specifically for the purpose of reproduction, then the artist had to make choices about scale, line weight, and contrast, which would have influenced how the work communicated in print.

Production considerations also figure into the layers of borders within and beyond the origin image. The work plays with this dark and light framing, with further complexity added by photographs butted together and partially layered. One possible production effect is found in the heavy dark border edging the origin image: its varying thickness (thinner on the sides, thicker on the top) suggests that the work’s proportions were modified to fit the print layout. 

Then there’s the thin outer border around the whole image, shown here magnified. Edging images—either by chiseling into the block or by adding lead rules around it—was standard procedure at the time, and the practice is found throughout the issue. It served as a way to delineate images, especially those with large unprinted areas, as seen in the final image we examined. But in the picture-poem, the edging blurs the border (so to speak) between the origin work and the print layout. Was Remo aware of these factors when preparing the work, and if he was, would it have influenced how he made the origin image?

A close look at the initial collage, if extant, might provide evidence (or its absence) of preparing the work for camera readiness. Despite the group’s preference for reproductions, some maquettes survive,²⁷ and perhaps these works will have their day under the microscope, too.

Finally, we looked at Pásmo 1, no. 10 (1924), zooming in on an image of Mies van der Rohe’s Friedrichstrasse skyscraper project (1921),²⁸ one of several versions of this influential perspective view.²⁹

Pásmo reproduced the now-historic large-scale perspective drawing only a few years after Mies put charcoal to tracing paper and arranged for publication of the results in several German journals. It’s unclear how the Pásmo editors sourced the image, but they either received a scaled-down process photograph in the mail from an international contact or made one from an available reproduction. From there, the image was clearly processed as a halftone and paired with commentary. 

The image is striking for its forceful composition, in which a stark tower dominates a Berlin street relegated to the shadowy edges of the frame. In 1924, the idea of a glass tower was powerful in itself, but as we would see, its power was enhanced by the creation and dissemination of the drawing. Moreover, the drawing’s power originates in compositional and print-savvy choices strongly influenced by successive alterations to copies of the photograph upon which it was based.

Mies’s talent for making and disseminating images is well established, and Friedrichstrasse is particularly well studied. Lepik, for example, asserts, “Everything suggests that this entire series of large montages and drawings was produced for either publication or exhibition, each one moving farther from the original context of the architectural competition,”³⁰ with its strict submission requirements. 

Mies quite possibly commissioned site photographs for the project, and research by Sudhalter points to commercial photographer Curt Rehbein. Rehbein had a studio nearby, and his professional stamps are found on copy prints of the architect’s projects from the early 1920s.³¹ The photographs exist today only as early copy prints.³²

Sudhalter deduces that the commissioned photograph most likely involved ”a large glass negative . . ., a powerful, wide-angle lens, [and] a tripod.”³³ Together, lens, plate, and framing enabled dramatic perspective, telescopic depth of field, and emphasis on the open space of street and sky. 

Here’s where process images came in: Mies “seems to have had multiple prints of the image developed in which the sky and building site were blocked out, leaving an area of white emptiness at the composition’s center. These working prints would presumably have had a matte paper surface, conducive to pencil or charcoal, and would have been of a scale comfortable for drawing.”³⁴

Which is exactly what happened next: In this first altered version, the skyscraper is drawn in, following the forced perspective of the photograph. The rest of the photograph remains largely unaltered, contrasting the traditional street view with the soaring, hand-drawn tower. In a second altered version, the surrounding traditional buildings are heavily shadowed in “thick crayon,”³⁵ but with gaps at the right and bottom edges, anticipating subsequent cropping. 

The final drawing reproduced in Pásmo was clearly derived from these overdrawn photographs, and the image takes advantage of both media. Here, overhead lines and hanging streetlights have been edited out, traditional buildings have been fully shadowed into framing edges, and the foreground fades in a few clear tonal steps into the deep background, where an enhanced bridge frames the perspective vanishing point. Arguably, these combined visual strategies helped the work to reproduce well.

Which brought us back to the lab. In the Pásmo image, production effects influence how the work communicates. For example, the tower reads as more of a solid volume than the transparent glass of Mies’s fantasy. This is partly the result of the low-quality halftone and paper, as well as the small size of the reproduction. Also, the publishers’ addition of a border (discussed previously in the picture-poem) effectively fences in the dramatic open sky. One wonders if such effects of reproduction influenced the editorial commentary on the work as an example of “resisting the incessant and newly appearing senile neo-classicism.”³⁶

It’s unknown exactly how the Friedrichstrasse image made its way to Pásmo,³⁷ though its inclusion in Teige’s 1927 štočky inventory strongly suggests that it came through the avant-garde network. To get more of a feel for this type of distribution, I’ll conclude with reproductions circulated through another institution dedicated to spreading new ideas: The Museum of Modern Art.

Soon after its founding in 1929, MoMA recognized the power of disseminating images of modern art, architecture, and design for publication. This is seen most strongly in a collection known as the Architecture and Design Department Photo Files. The files date to the Museum’s early years, and by 1946, the design section alone constituted “nearly 2,000 photographs, mounted and labeled . . . in daily use by students, journalists, and the Museum’s own staff, especially the Circulating Exhibitions Department. The file provides material for the Museum’s design exhibitions and publications.”³⁸

File copies of Friedrichstrasse images evince years of use. One shows crop marks, used to trim and resize analog images for publication. In another, the sky has been clearly lightened in the darkroom, presumably so that the image would print better. A third credits the photographer who made (yet another) copy print. “Please return” stamps are common on these prints and negatives, reflecting their frequent and often (involuntarily) permanent loan. In this way, the image endured long enough to be distributed internationally through the twentieth century.

Finishing up in the lab, we turned to the first page of Disk, another Devětsil journal, where a typographic manifesto by Štyrský declares: “A picture must be active. It must do something in the world. In order to accomplish the task . . . it must be mechanically reproduced. 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 copies. . . .”³⁹ Teige famously went a step further, predicting, “Mechanical reproduction and print will finally make the original superfluous: after all, once we print a manuscript we toss it into the wastepaper basket.”⁴⁰ Our investigation of these journals shows that štočky, one step removed from originals, were actively saved and exchanged, and not instantly discarded.

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From the 1960s revival of SoHo in downtown Manhattan to the 2009 opening of the Sharjah Art Foundation Spaces, artists and gallerists have long sought out neglected and abandoned structures and adapted them for use as studio, exhibition, and performance spaces. During recent C-MAP visits to Mumbai, Delhi, Goa, Bangalore, and Kochi, I noticed similar art-driven adaptive reuse of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture. This caused me to wonder about preservation of such structures in India, and what it signifies in a vast, diverse country experiencing rapid growth amid centuries of architectural heritage.

In India, various public and private institutions address preservation, but there’s no national mandate for relatively recent works. Nationally the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the Architecture Heritage Division of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) monitor sites that are more than one hundred years old.¹ The internationally oriented advocacy group Docomomo International (“Docomomo” stands for “documentation and conservation of buildings, sites, and neighborhoods of the modern movement”) follows developments in India but lacks a national chapter.² At the city level, initiatives vary. One promising development is the 2006 creation of the Indian Heritage Cities Network (IHCN), which is affiliated with UNESCO New Delhi.³ The thirty-two member cities (including Bangalore and Kochi, discussed below) have agreed to take on a lengthy list of responsibilities related to preservation and adaptive reuse.

In Delhi, preservation of works less than one hundred years old is limited to municipal initiatives that influence alterations to selected works built before 1950,⁴ and recently INTACH proposed a program called Modern Architectural Heritage of Delhi to address post-1947 architecture.⁵ In Mumbai, the Heritage Regulations for Greater Bombay Act of 1995 established graded protections for different types of built environments,⁶ the first law in India to protect a precinct (in this case, the Fort District).⁷ Two other groups—the Bombay Environmental Action Group (BEAG) and the Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee (MHCC)—also have influence. In addition, the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI) acts as a think tank and advocacy group.⁸ But given the city’s size, deep history, and architectural complexity, preservation of relatively new works is only beginning. As one writer notes, Mumbai, “whose boom took off in the 1860s, is simply too new by the standards of a country that groans under its staggering wealth of historic buildings.”⁹

In Goa, according to one source, current obstacles to preservation include rent control as a disincentive for upkeep, the difficulty of dividing houses in inheritance resolutions, and increased land values motivating demolition.¹⁰ On the other hand, as a major tourist spot and home to several UNESCO World Heritage sites, there’s evidence that sensitivity to architectural heritage is becoming a factor in local development initiatives. In Kochi, as in Goa, heritage initiatives are influenced by the local tourism industry. For example, the Cochin Heritage Zone Conservation Society (CHZCS) is charged with planning and maintenance (though it’s ineffective, according to several sources),¹¹ and some property owners in the heritage zone complain of marketing difficulties due to maintenance requirements and alteration restrictions.¹² But preservation also figures into infrastructure planning, as seen in initiatives such as the Kerala Sustainable Urban Development Project (KSUDP). The state, in the form of the Kerala Art and Heritage Commission, also has some influence.¹³ As a result of these varied conditions, preservation and adaptive reuse in India are often the result of enlightened self-interest as much as organized planning. And that’s where the art community comes in. Several examples encountered during 2015 and 2016 C-MAP visits are discussed here.

In Mumbai, the group visited a revived Victorian-era museum and encountered an Art Deco district in need of attention. The Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (BDL) exemplifies a public-private partnership. A striking Victorian structure in the heart of Mumbai constructed in response to the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, the BDL opened in 1872 as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bombay. By the late 1990s the museum was neglected, but Tasneem Zakaria Mehta (managing trustee, honorary director, and MoMA International Council member) committed to restoring and revitalizing the institution, which reopened in 2008.

A key element of the new program is commissioned artist interventions, creating a platform for artists to enliven the space and to introduce new audiences to contemporary art. The museum’s visitors tend to be residents interested in Mumbai history, and so interventions that critically engage local culture are especially apt. A recent example is Games People Play, in which the artists known as Thukral and Tagra created interactive environments inspired by games in the collection.

Along Mumbai’s Marine Drive I noticed beautiful Art Deco buildings in various states of repair (Mumbai is said to be second only to Miami, Florida, in its number of Art Deco buildings).¹⁴ Regarding local interest in their preservation, it seems that in Mumbai, as in many cities, public initiatives and private developments form a patchy safety net. At the international level, the district was proposed for UNESCO World Heritage site status in 2013 (Delhi’s Old City was chosen instead),¹⁵ while on the local level, groups such as the Oval-Cooperage Residents Association (OCRA) are starting to incorporate Deco preservation into their missions.¹⁶ Meanwhile, sites such as the Liberty Cinema demonstrate how art-world adaptive reuse helps to fill a gap. The cinema has been open continuously since 1947 and is lovingly cared for by its owner .¹⁷ Though high operating costs make conventional programming difficult, film festivals and live performance rentals keep the doors open for appreciative visitors.

New Delhi has its own architectural identity, and adaptive reuse patterns reflect it. As the nation’s capital, with its sweeping urban plan, embassy district, and post-Independence state modernism, the city’s sensibility tends toward the monumental. Yet like Mumbai, economic growth and a swelling urban population are driving much demolition and rebuilding, often destroying significant modern architecture in the process. A case in point is the planned demolition of the Hall of Nations and Nehru Pavilion, the work of architect Raj Rewal and structural engineer Mahendra Raj at Pragati Maidan (1972). Recent efforts to save these endangered icons of Indian modernism demonstrate complex social and legal forces at work.¹⁸ As a representative from INTACH put it: “More than the fact that there is difficulty in wrapping one’s head around the idea of modern architectural heritage, it is the bureaucratic apathy that is causing trouble.”¹⁹ In that context, it was refreshing to encounter several art-driven preservation efforts in Delhi. One involved an actual structure—a house reinvented as an alternative space—while in others, artists, photographers, and architects are incorporating architectural documentation into their practice.

Gujral House, situated in the upscale Jor Bagh neighborhood, is a residence turned project space, the family property of architect and developer Mohit Gujral and entrepreneur Feroze Gujral. Our visit to the house was my first opportunity to go behind the scenes to see a domestic space. We entered the characteristically walled property to encounter a peaceful, landscaped courtyard in which the freestanding house and an outbuilding are situated. The multistory concrete dwelling has numerous windows, each with a concrete canopy typical of the area. Inside, rooms are organized around a central stairway, which leads to a roof terrace. Though it was difficult to make out the original program or guess at the architect’s intentions, one could get a general sense of the layout and infrastructure, discerning formal and informal spaces along with remnants of kitchen and storage areas.

These remnants of domesticity amplify the boldness of the interventions, in which artists have punched holes, excavated, and otherwise modified the building. I was especially interested in the residue of a work long since de-installed: The House of Everything and Nothing (2013) by the Raqs Media Collective. The original installation visualized data flow between the group’s New Delhi studio and the rest of the world, taking the form of a network of neon mounted in and on the building. The lighting was installed in channels formed by removing the concrete stucco to reveal the brick structure beneath. As if the building had been excavated from the outside in, the remains helped me to understand its underlying structure.

The group encountered other traces of New Delhi modernism in virtual form. Photographer, activist, and C-MAP advisor Ram Rahman, for example, has put great effort into documenting the work of his father, architect Habib Rahman.²⁰ The elder Rahman was a key figure in the development of Nehruvian state modernism in the post-Independence period, but with relatively few institutional archives available, preservation of the architect’s photographs, drawings, and correspondence remains a largely private endeavor. Similarly, architect and artist Saher Shah and her partner, photographer Randhir Singh, integrate architectural documentation into their practices. Shah’s drawings reflect upon the built environment, often incorporating photographs and plans. In Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force (2009), for example, the artist drew upon archival photography of the 1903 Delhi Durbar, a colonial spectacle, to embed alternative spatial—and by extension social—perspectives into her interpretation of the power-laden event.

Addressing more modest but equally symbolic structures, a fascinating series by Singh focuses on contemporary shrines. The photographs celebrate the way that these diverse ancient, transcendental forms are translated into modern industrial materials such as concrete, tile, and ironwork, and how they are integrated into the contemporary landscape. Since these structures are largely private and unofficial compared to more conventional building, simply documenting them is valuable, serving as an informal complement to the national archaeological survey.

The C-MAP group also visited Bangalore, a thriving, tech-driven city. One writer claims that the city has more alternative spaces than traditional galleries, positing that “in the absence of government infrastructure or commercial enterprise, artists and art students have taken on the responsibility of leading Bangalore’s art scene.”²¹ The group visited an exuberant example: 1 Shanthi Road, a collective founded by artist and historian Suresh Jayaram and designed by architect Meeta Jain. Jarayam argues that such efforts are critical as much as practical endeavors: “Most of these spaces are institutional critiques . . . They are an alternative to established art institutions because there is a disconnect between what is being taught and practiced.”²²

In addition to visiting 1 Shanthi Road, we were welcomed to the commercial GallerySKE, which stands out as an example of art-driven adaptive reuse in the midst of rapid urban change. In a recent interview, founder Sunitha Kumar Emmart describes how, seeking to expand from a more conventional gallery space, she found the unusual house: “I came across a ramshackle property on the lane that runs parallel to my home. The roof had caved in, it was all paved and concrete with no garden except for two old mango trees. It became a restoration project. People somehow now think I’m interested in restoring old properties but I’m not. It seemed like a great positioning for me to have this house built in the 1870s: a piece of old Bangalore which is disappearing and a window to show contemporary art in this historical setting.”²³ Her sensitive renovation of the house incorporates historical elements, such as the entry vestibule and exposed roof beams, into spacious contemporary gallery and office areas that flow into a gently landscaped courtyard. According to Kumar, the house would have been demolished long ago were it not for the adjacent graveyard (considered inauspicious) and a long, previous property dispute.

In Goa, the group visited the Heritage Hotel: Art Spaces, a one-hundred-year-old Portuguese-style villa turned hotel turned artist residency. Founded by artists Romain Loustau, Madhavi Gore, and Nikhil Chopra, Heritage Hotel is intended to be “a space for reflection, inspiration and creation; a place where artists come together, meet, make and share their ideas, processes, experiments and collaborative efforts with each other and the community.”²⁴ Artists from all over the world share seven studios, several bedrooms—and a cat. Pleasant shared spaces have been adapted to facilitate interaction among residents but also with the community beyond, which is invited to visit during the program’s regular open-studio days.

I will end this essay where I began the C-MAP visits to India, at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Of all the sites discussed here, the biennale is arguably the most spirited artist-driven force integrating architecture of the past into the city’s present and future.

Kochi is a historical port town on India’s tropical southwest coast. Long a center for international trade (especially of spices), the built environment strongly reflects the city’s heritage, especially in its Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial architecture. The artists and curators who organize the biennale, now in its third iteration, set out to fully engage this history, aspiring to “create a new language of cosmopolitanism and modernity that is rooted in the lived and living experience of this old trading port, which, for more than six centuries, has been a crucible of numerous communal identities” and “to explore and . . . retrieve memories of this past, and its present, in the current global context to posit alternatives to political and cultural discourses emanating from the specific histories of Europe and America. A dialogue for a new aesthetics and politics rooted in the Indian experience, but receptive to the winds blowing in from other worlds, is possible.²⁵” As a result, the biennale is sited within historic venues in or near the Fort Kochi heritage area, from the maritime warehouses known as “godowns” to public parks, to former military barracks, to empty houses.²⁶ To visit is to feel thoroughly oriented to place and time, and to experience art in ways that strongly resonate with it.

As a result, several venues are being sensitively renovated. The Dutch-Colonial-era godown named the Pepper House has been most fully adapted by the biennale’s foundation and is now in year-round use, incorporating a gallery, café, residency program, and even an artist-organized library (Laboratory of Visual Arts, or LaVA, by Bose Krishnamachari).²⁷ Many other biennale sites are minimally renovated, however, creating unique opportunities to experience the buildings and the art placed there. In these spaces one senses their former functions through building orientation, layout, and general style, but also through tile-lined counters, wall wear, old wiring, and utilitarian shelving. Even temperature, light conditions, ambient sound, and smell become part of the experience.

Aspinwall House, the biennale’s anchor space, makes this immediately apparent. The large waterfront property, built in the 1860s for the eponymous English trading firm and later disused, incorporates large, atmospheric warehouses and related spaces. Ironically, this condition makes the property’s future uncertain: owned by a company affiliated with the original trading company, the land is more valuable than the neglected buildings.

In that context, a work sited at Aspinwall House in the 2012 biennale is especially relevant to the theme of art-driven adaptive reuse: Sheela Gowda and Christoph Storz’s Stopover (2012). The pair collected and installed more than one hundred wet-grinding stones in a central, symmetrical room that opens onto a small pier. Such stones were once used domestically to grind spices and other ingredients for cooking. Usually embedded in the floor, they were a standard fixture in Indian homes built well into the early twentieth century. Today they are being replaced by food processors, but it’s hard to discard a four-hundred-pound boulder, and so the stones are often dumped in vacant lots—the artists describe how they would find them in “little cemeteries of grinders.”²⁸ The strong forms are smooth on top, showing their decades of daily use, but rough on the bottom, as if just excavated.

As an installation the stones represent once-unmovable objects set in motion by irresistible global forces. They also evoke gravestones, marking the death of a tradition. Their placement suggests the movement of spices out into the world, but one can also picture the abandoned stones being rolled off the pier and settling back into the land below. One is left to guess at the next site for the stones, the fate of the building, and the future of the biennale as a global force. In this way Stopover and Aspinwall House vividly manifest the spirit of art-driven adaptive reuse we witnessed in our travels, bringing new life to historic but marginalized structures in Indian cities.

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The Museum of Modern Art consistently attracts direct engagement—or what I call “messing with MoMA”—by artists, the general public, and staff. These actions take a wide variety of forms, from manifestos and conceptual gestures to protests and performances. “Messing” connotes the variety of these interventions, which question, play with, provoke, subvert, and comment on MoMA as an institution, and on the paradox of institutionalizing modernism.

Documents related to seven decades of interventions are shown here, selected from my ongoing attempt at a comprehensive chronology. (This related exhibition checklist has other examples.) The selections are organized chronologically, focusing on more intimate, less well-known interventions from which a common theme emerges: a consistent desire for inclusion in the messiness of the modern project, a drive to fully engage with the art of our time.

Even in its first decades, MoMA engendered debate and controversy. Much of the criticism came from journalists and concerned the nature and validity of modernism, but artists and staff sometimes joined the fray. The earliest example here is a satirical invitation to the 1939 opening party for the Museum’s new building. Miffed that some fellow staff members weren’t invited, Manager of Publications Frances Collins organized and circulated this official-looking card, complete with a deckled edge and engraving-style type. By opening the card, the front of which bore the phrase “Oil that glitters is not gold,” recipients were invited by hosts “Empress of Blandings” (a fictional sow featured in P. G. Woodhouse novels) and “Charles Boyer” (presumably the film actor) to the new digs of the “Museum of Standard Oil.”

According to Russell Lynes’s history of the Museum, Collins was especially irked that staff members such as telephone operator and “office boy” Jimmy Ernst weren’t invited.¹ (Ernst, a child of artists Max Ernst and Louise Strauss, later worked in the Museum’s film library). Lynes notes, “The staff, if not the trustees, were greatly amused by what their young colleague had done.” Indeed—Collins was promptly fired.

Today, Collins’s sardonic gesture would be called institutional critique—an analysis of the sociocultural context in which art functions. In fact, in 2007 the card was appropriated and incorporated into just such a work: R.S.V.P 1939 (2007–2009) by Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Media Farzin. Though the works were conceived seventy years apart, they show how questioning the role of oil-industry funding in philanthropy remains prescient.

A year after the new building opened, the American Abstract Artists (founded 1936) organized a protest, demanding more curatorial attention to contemporary American artists. This accompanying broadside by artist Ad Reinhardt asks, “How Modern Is The Museum of Modern Art?” Responding specifically to the exhibitions Art in Our Time (1939), Modern Masters from European and American Collections (1940), and Italian Masters (1940), the pointed text reads in part:

How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art? Let’s look at the record[.] In 1939 the Museum professed to show ART IN OUR TIME—

Whose time Sargent, Homer, La Farge and Harnett? Or Picasso, Braque, Leger and Mondrian? Which time? If the descendants of Sargent and Homer, what about the descendants of Picasso and Mondrian? What about American Abstract Art? [. . .] What about Towne and Ward—British cattle painters—turned loose on a Missouri farm? A Minnesota grain elevator painted by Daubigny? Bellows’ Stag at Sharkey’s done by Henri Regnault? The Nebraska prairies by Eugene Boudin? The Bowery by Eugene Carriere?

And MODERN MASTERS . . . Eakins, Homer, Ryder, Whistler. . . . Those are the only Americans included. Are they the grandfathers of the Europeans they are shown with? [ . . . ]
ITALIAN MASTERS—Caravaggio, Raphael, Bronzino! And such examples! How easy to justify a Praxiteles show! How revolutionary the Egyptians! [ . . . ]

Art in Our Time, a massive survey, was the first exhibition in the new 1939 Goodwin and Stone building (the opening party for which Frances Collins conceived her invitation). Italian Masters, a show of canonical Renaissance and Baroque art, was largely a historical accident: following their showing at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, New York, the works were stranded in the United States at the outbreak of war, and the Museum took advantage of the opportunity to put them on view. According to curator Dorothy Miller’s catalogue introduction, Modern Masters was intended to complement the Italian Masters show, demonstrating “the great indebtedness of the modern masters to the work of their ancestors. . . .”²

As it turned out, more than fifty peeved descendants of these “ancestors” signed the broadside, including A. E. Gallatin, Agnes Lyall, Louis Schanker, and Suzy Frelinghuysen—but also Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, and David Smith, who were already becoming integrated into MoMA’s master narrative.

In the late 1950s, the esteemed art writer Calvin Tomkins made a quieter intervention. The intimacy of his gesture, his insight into it, and the feeling of being alone in a peaceful gallery is conveyed in his memoir:

. . . when I was just starting to look at contemporary art, a painting at the Museum of Modern Art stopped me cold. It was an exhibition called “Sixteen Americans [1959],” and the artist . . . was Robert Rauschenberg. The painting—its title was Double Feature [(1959)]—was covered with a number of apparently unrelated passages of messy paint . . . along with several odd collage elements [including] part of a man’s shirt, with pocket. . . . Glancing around to make sure nobody was watching me, I fished a quarter out of my pocket and slipped it into the pocket of the shirt in the painting. It was a dopey thing to do, but I felt good afterward. I’d made a connection to something that would become, for reasons I didn’t even suspect, increasingly important to me. Marcel Duchamp claimed that the creative act is bipolar, in that it requires not only the artist who sets it in motion but also the spectator who interprets it, and by doing so completes the process.³

In contrast, the 1960s are correctly associated with political activism as museums and other institutions began to be aggressively questioned by artists. MoMA in particular became a site of active debate on topics such as the artist’s role in the exhibition and the sale of his or her work, emerging and historical art movements, and overarching social issues such as the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and economic injustice. High-visibility activities well documented elsewhere include group interventions by the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC),⁴ Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG),⁵ Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, and Angry Arts. Specific gestures such as Takis’s removal of his sculpture from the exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968) and Hans Haacke’s MoMA Poll (1970) are also landmarks in this period.

Organizing efforts by curatorial staff were also highly visible at the time, but it’s worth pointing out that work actions by non-curatorial staff, in particular Security and Housekeeping, have received far less attention. This press release regarding a strike by security guards is one of few traces, even though non-curatorial departments were some of the first to be unionized and their quiet but crucial work keeps the Museum functioning.

The selections here focus on individual artists’ activities, most of which are critical but quieter and often mischievous or elegiac. These involve artists Bruce Conner and Ray Johnson, Vern Blosum and William Anthony, as well as writer and curator Gene Swenson.

Conner and Johnson’s gesture is discussed by Anastasia Aukeman in her forthcoming monograph on Conner.⁶ She traces how his SUPERHUMAN DEVOTION sic was considered for the 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage, but the work was damaged during shipment to New York and declined for the show. In response, as the artist recalled, he put the assemblage back in the shipping crate and, along with Johnson, brought it to the opening:

I invited Ray Johnson to the gallery and we painted the box, drilled holes in it. I had previously asked Ray for 100 hands and he opened a box and scattered 100 watch hands in the box, set fire to part of it, glued things on it and made a rope handle to carry it. We caught a taxi to MOMA for the opening . . . and were refused acceptance at the check stand. The guard wouldn’t let me carry it inside the museum. The box sat in the center of the entryway and everyone walked around it. After the opening we took the Staten Island Ferry and Ray and I threw it off the ferry in front of the Statue of Liberty.⁷

Two years after Conner’s assemblage was hurled into New York Harbor, MoMA acquired Vern Blosum’s painting Time Expired (1962) as an early example of Pop art and displayed it in the exhibition Around the Automobile (1965), linking the parking meter image to the material culture of cars. Further research revealed the work to be, in fact, a critique of Pop, painted under a pseudonym, and one of several. Writer and artist Greg Allen and curator Lionel Bovier conducted in-depth research into Blosum and traced how the Museum came to understand (and misunderstand) the artist and his work.⁸ The theme of transience, embodied by the parking meter and time “expiring” in this work and echoed in others from the series, supported Allen and Bovier’s conclusion that the elusive artist was mourning the ascent of Pop at the expense of interest in Abstract Expressionism, to which he was committed.

In a similarly mischievous approach to the passing of art historical time, artist William Anthony’s Object Stolen, Circa 1965, by the Artist from The Museum of Modern Art (2011) incorporates a wall label “acquired” from a quiet gallery. His gesture is similar to Tomkins quarter-in-the-pocket move a decade prior, but using the strategy of removal instead of addition. In an e-mail, Anthony recalls:

[C]irca 1965 the galleries of the museum weren’t so populated as they are now. I had the gallery to myself when I did the dirty deed. After ripping the label off the wall I ran like hell out of there joining my girlfriend (now wife) Norma and some friends in a nearby gallery. I’m not sure but I think we all had dinner at the museum, shamelessly gloating over the stolen goods. Anyway I remember the gloating.

Ironically, Anthony “ran like hell” with the label for Abstract Painting (1960–61), by Ad Reinhardt, creator of the 1940 broadside objecting to the lack of artists like himself at MoMA.

A more mournful gesture from this period involves writer and (briefly) staff member Gene Swenson. According to a perceptive memoir in Artforum,⁹ recollections by Linda Nochlin,¹⁰and Swenson’s own writing in the New York Press, in the context of personal difficulties and alarm about social conditions he believed would lead to revolution, in 1968 Swenson began to picket the Museum, carrying a large question mark. Later that year he stridently objected to the exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and their Heritage (1968), arguing passionately that curator William Rubin’s formalistic approach trivialized profound, psychosexual, and revolutionary aspects of the movement, an interpretation Swenson called “The Other Tradition.” Again Swenson took it to the street, placing newspaper ads and instigating a protest at the opening. One of the ads reads:

Dada is Dead. MOMA is Dead. Celebrate! Mausoleum of Modern Art . . . Artists and poets! Do your thing! Join Les Enfands du Parody in: The Transformation! Tea and black tie optional.

Photographs from the event show Swenson in front of the Museum, in black tie, leading a cohort of costumed demonstrators. According to several accounts, at the time Swenson was likely undergoing a break with reality, adding a psychological dimension to his concern with Surrealism and its reach for the subconscious. Increasingly marginalized in the art community, Swenson died in a car crash in 1969.

Performance predominated messing during the 1970s, put toward a variety of expressive ends. These included political issues, responding to art world sexism and government repression in Brazil and Russia, but also lyrical and mischievous interventions, one involving a road trip and anothera prankster.

The poster Attention! Women Artists and Feminists! (1972), recently acquired by the library, embodies this spirit. Created under the auspices of the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts for a demonstration that year, the text demands that “Women artists must no longer be invisible” as a pattern of silhouetted women marches in the background. In a similar mode, as part of a 1976 demonstration, artist Joanne Stamerra placed erasers stamped with “erase sexism at MoMA” throughout the galleries, as documented in the magazine Womanart. More recently, the long-lived activist group Guerrilla Girls paid indirect homage to her gesture with their own series of erasers.

In her photographic series 100 Boots (1971–73), Eleanor Antin thoughtfully engaged public spaces at MoMA, and her project is an early example of collaboration with the Museum. Antin conceived a series of photographs showing one hundred pairs of boots installed in diverse settings. Photographed by Philip Steinmetz, the images were intended to function like film stills, suggesting a journey from California to New York. Antin printed and mailed the images as postcards. In the one shown here, the boots enter the Museum, engaging the sidewalk.

In a series of pranks likely intended to satirize the machine aesthetic and Minimalist sculpture, in 1971 one Harvey Stromberg placed “illegal art”—illusionistic photo-sculptures of fixtures such as an electrical outlet—in the MoMA galleries. A photo essay of examples in New York Magazine is shown here, along with an invitation to an unofficial opening.

Other interventions from this period addressed global politics. For example, artist Vagrich Bakhchanyan initiated his First Russian Propaganda Art Performance at Museum of Modern Art in New York (1978) by engaging with Russian avant-garde art in the Museum’s permanent collection from the perspective of an immigrant. According to fellow émigré artists Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin, in his performance

Bakhchanyan walked around the Museum . . . dressed as a “walking propaganda center,” covered from head to toe with slogans like “Stalin is Lenin today,” “Beware, savage dog,” and “Why is there no vodka on the moon?”¹¹

Bakhchanayan documented the event in this modest, self-published artists’ book. In the wry linking of political propaganda and the persuasive language of gallery talks, as well as interest in the diaspora of early Russian avant-garde art, Bakhchanyan’s performance and book presage the activities of Goran Djordjevic and Yevgeniy Fiks, discussed below.

Similarly, Marta Minujín’s Kidnappening of 1973 appears playful at first sight, but reveals an equally somber political undertone. In her performance, enacted during a Museum gala, selected visitors were blindfolded by artists (whose faces were painted to resemble Picasso portraits) and driven around the city in taxis. On the one hand, the work enabled art worlders to enjoy a garden party Happening and “afterparty” adventure. On the other, by essentially enacting an abduction, Minujín was inviting the subjects to experience, in highly sanitized form, the disappearances and abuses of power under authoritarian regimes in her native Argentina.

Beginning in the 1980s, with politically engaged art practices ascendant, “messing” started to become an accepted practice at MoMA and other art institutions, with artists and curators collaborating on projects. Meanwhile, independent actions continued apace.

On the independent end of the spectrum, following completion of the Museum’s 1984 expansion, the group Women Artists Visibility Event [sic] protested the underrepresentation of women artists in the opening exhibition, An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture. The group organized a color-coordinated series of protests, of which this flyer was part. Demonstrating their expertise in institutional critique, the group subverted the Museum’s own promotional methods, incorporating rigorous branding, curatorial statements, and even a satirical version of pins worn by Museum staff.

In a collaborative but also critical gesture, in her show Projects 9: Louise Lawler (1987), the artist mobilized MoMA’s means of production to send a political message. She designed the exhibition brochure to include this paper airplane, intended to contrast the complacency of attending cultural institutions with U.S. military action in Nicaragua.

A similar tension between participating in and being critical of the institution emerged when artist Chuck Close found a clever means to identify and fill a gap he found in the collection: Chuck Close: Head On/The Modern Portrait (1991), one of a series of guest-curated Artist’s Choice exhibitions. Close chose to assemble portraits from MoMA’s collection and wanted to include a portrait by Ray Johnson, but the Museum didn’t own any of his work. As a work-around, a portrait from the library collection, part of an extended mail art exchange between Johnson and MoMA librarian Clive Phillpot, was displayed. As Chief of Library Milan Hughston often points out, this exemplifies how the work of many now-established artists first entered the Museum through the library collection.

Returning to the theme of populations underrepresented in the collection, in the late 1990s the Guerrilla Girls organized a postcard campaign to protest the exhibition Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life (1997). The card reads: “3 white women, 1 woman of color and no men of color—out of 71 artists?” Of the many cards received by the Museum, one in the MoMA Archives bears the note, “How embarrassing for you,” while another recommends “Fish, Murphy, Matthíasdóttir. Brady. Quintanilla. Rego. Celmins. Etcoff. Blaine. Neel.”

In a final example from this period, filmmaker Tony Kaye mobilized his objection to Philip Morris’s sponsorship of the exhibition Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (1996–97) by having a giant canvas erected across the street from the Museum. Perched in a bucket lift, Kaye hand-painted the quip “look at Jasper’s pictures / think we are nice / smoke our cigarettes and die.” A year earlier, when Kaye was at the Museum to receive an ad-industry award, his request to park his car in the lobby was declined. In response, he had a similar banner hoisted, reading “CON CEPTUAL.”¹² Both actions suggest a figure ambivalent about the power of commercialized communications, even as he mobilizes them.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, a millennial mindset prevailed at MoMA, taking the form of collection shows, a substantial expansion project, a staff strike, and a merger with P.S. 1. One of the strongest responses to the Museum’s expansion came from artist Filip Noterdaeme. Following completion of MoMA’s expansion project in 2004, Noterdaeme produced this flyer to protest high museum admission prices and to address the ongoing issue of homelessness. The flyer parodies an advertising theme created for the MoMA reopening and incorporates an image of Marcel Duchamp’s famously rejected Fountain (1917). A year later, Noterdaeme took the theme a step further with MoMA HMLSS (2005), a suitcase designed for on-the-fly display of miniature versions of objects in the Museum collection. Modeled on Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1935–41), the artist’s traveling miniature monograph, Noterdaeme added a critical dimension by taking the suitcase on the road, in particular to the sidewalk outside of MoMA, making his “collection” freely available to literal outsiders. Both works are part of his Homeless Museum of Art (HOMU), founded in 2002.

Returning to the theme of Russian avant-garde diaspora, artist Goran Djordjevic’s ongoing project The Museum of American Art in Berlin deconstructs the circulation of Russian modernist tenets in Eastern Europe during the Cold War via MoMA and other Western institutions. The exhibition catalogue cover shown here appropriates the design of a book by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., intended to popularize modernism. Barr’s What Is Modern Painting? (1943) was revised and reprinted for decades, and it was translated into several languages—but not Russian. Djordjevic incorporates in-depth contextual research into the MoAA project, which encompasses performance (taking on personae such as Barr and Gertrude Stein), gallery models, copies of artworks, texts, and numerous other interpretive forms.

Artist Yevgeniy Fiks explores a similar theme, but Fiks approaches the dissemination of early modernist tenets from the other direction, critically (and humorously) examining the circulation of Communist tenets in the New York City context. Through the form of a 2011 gallery tour, Fiks explored complex relationships among Western artists, the Museum, and leftist ideas during the contentious Cold War period, deconstructing how they were leveraged by the Museum (at the time, MoMA often resisted Red Scare pressures by positioning modernism as apolitical—emphasizing individual expression independent of sociopolitical context). Fiks’s ongoing project seeks to reestablish the connections, bringing out nuanced attitudes among left-leaning Western artists and their Eastern counterparts as their works mingle in the permanent collection galleries. As seen in his reinterpretation of a printed map available to MoMA visitors, Fiks’s tour articulates leftist attitudes among and between artists whose political activities are often downplayed in Modernist narratives. For example, while Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso are readily associated with Communism, Fiks brings out less well-known artists’ relationships with leftist ideology, such as Henri Matisse, Rene Magritte, and Lee Krasner.

Another recent intervention is Maria Anwander’s The Kiss (2010). By giving the wall of the Museum’s atrium gallery a big smackeroo, the artist embodied both aggressive and affectionate attitudes toward the institution: she both kisses off and kisses up. Intervening during a point of transition in one of the Museum’s main galleries, she took advantage of the flux to make a gesture both outsized and intimate, political and personal. She marked the spot with a label, appropriately written and formatted in institutional style (reappropriated here in this institutional-style post), articulating the idea of kissing as a power dynamic:

Anwander uses art institutions as forums where hierarchical, social and economic models can be tested and reimagined. The piece is part of a series . . . which Anwander has developed since 2004, playing with the link between art institutions and the market . . . “The Kiss” was given to the MoMA without asking for permission . . . Kissing in some cultures and religions symbolizes the exchange of souls and powers.¹³

The elegance of the work lies in this contrast between the cool remove of the label copy and the visceral nature of the kiss itself—a conceptual gesture with a phenomenological jolt. We can’t help but imagine ourselves in her place, the touch of our own lips on the wall—and feel a shock similar to encountering Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936) for the first time, or to entering a steel-and-glass museum building in 1939.

The kiss up/kiss off tension of Anwander’s gesture brings us to the present and future of messing with MoMA. In particular, consider these decades of messing in light of current art world interest in participation, performance, and social practice art, in which critical intervention has been largely institutionalized. What is the nature of “messing” in the fully participatory museum? How do contemporary ideas about the social role of art museums change relationships between participant and observer, between collusive and critical actions, between what can and can’t be messed with?

I conclude with two examples that show this tension. Thilo Hoffmann’s video series 30 Seconds (2010) falls on the sanctioned end of the messing continuum. The artist initiated a practice of brainstorming and executing brief videos about the MoMA experience. The prevalence of playful behavior in these individually imagined videos is striking: visitors and staff enjoyed cartwheeling, skipping, bicycling, play-fighting, making music, and even bathing in otherwise highly controlled Museum spaces.

On the other end of the continuum are surprise visits by Occupy Museums in 2008, part of the Occupy Wall Street movement objecting to economic recklessness and inequality. Here, music-making in the galleries was considered disruptive, even as it reflected contemporary social conditions to which most gallerygoers could relate.

These types of messing are characteristic of our very participatory present. Where will they take us? With hashtags, selfies, sleepovers, kimono-wearing, and tastings the norm, where does messing sit on the participant-observer fan-critic continuum? Will the pendulum swing back toward encounters at new levels of remove, or perhaps emerge into other forms of even more intense participation not yet anticipated? I look forward to chronicling the future of “messing,” in which artists, public, and staff continue to creatively manifest diverse forms and attitudes toward the Museum and the art of our time.

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