Revelations of barbarism performed in the name of the War on Terror by those working for the United States government has breached new boundaries of selfhood in our liberal democracy. Of course, tortures have been a staple of humanity, whether performed within the public sphere of the state or the private intimacies of a domestic domain.  But the media proliferation of these acts haunts our consciousness in a distinctive 2009 way. Five years since the Abu Ghraib photographs came to light, there is another battle with a different President to release similar images that could be called Abu Ghraib Two.  Although the sources for these techniques are varied, the abuses that continue in United States prisons must certainly be one such “inspiration.” Just this past year, New York State has finally passed legislation to reduce–but not to completely eliminate–the common punishment of placing severely mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement in six by nine foot “boxes,” with the possibility of an enhanced penalty of reducing all nourishment to only a food called “the loaf,” flour mixed with vegetables such as cabbage or potatoes.  Such practices may be allowed to continue until this law takes full effect in July 2011 [1].

As the options for abuse of those deemed our possible enemies has become ever more visible in the United States, we learned in mid-May that a majority of citizens no longer support a women’s right to terminate a pregnancy.  Or so it seemed during the several day minor media blitz featuring one Gallup Poll. Whether this is a true indicator of public opinion on the sovereignty of the self for women is suspect, given that this was one poll (with a pool of some 1,000 participants) and its prominence was no doubt linked to pro-choice President Obama’s commencement speech at Catholic Notre Dame that same week [2]. A more disturbing assault of women’s bodies was the 2007 Supreme Court decision, Gonzalez v. Carhart, that deemed criminal the use of the late term abortion procedure “Dilation and Extraction,” even if it was diagnosed as necessary for the women’s health or to save her life [3].  Although D&X total only .17% of all abortions in the U.S, this decision marks an alarming precedent in that the Supreme Court places the health and life of the woman as a secondary consideration. As I prepare this essay to go to press, I have just learned that George Tiller—one of the few doctors in the U.S. who provided third term abortions for women whose life or health was at risk—has just been shot dead while serving as an usher at his Lutheran church [4].

These selective and disparate examples of assaults on the limits of our bodies and sense of self may push the boundaries of definitions of “intimacy” and “normalization of body intrusion in public space” that are the themes of this inaugural issue. But they are just several of so many such indicators that comprise what could be described as a generalized consciousness of our selves as physical, physic and emotional beings during what until recently was called the age of the War on Terror.

Given these dramatic, on-going and highly visible incursions into our intimate, personal “space,” a visit to the Museum of Modern Art offers a dramatically different experience of our bodies and our selves, one that is perhaps best described as delusional.

In 2004 the Museum opened its redesigned building, which was directed by architect Yoshio Taniguchi [5]. As a counter to what was seen by some as Frank Gehry’s hyperbolic Bilbao and a trend for “intrusive” museum buildings, Taniguchi reportedly summarized his vision with this line:

“If you raise a lot of money, I will give you great, great architecture. But if you raise really a lot of money, I will make the architecture disappear” [6].

And for most reviewers of the New MoMA, the architecture did seem to disappear, as the title of John Updike’s much read New Yorker article, “Invisible Cathedral,” attests. But despite of the glass façade facing the garden, and the glimpses of the city seen through apertures and windows, the most overpowering vista—seen in enhanced scale—throughout the building were brilliantly white walls.  The dominance of this feature secured the sense of separation of the museum interior from anything exterior to it. These massive white walls also provided a seemingly neutral decontextualized terrain for everything installed within them. This was exemplified by the predicament of Monet’s Water Lillies.  Previously installed in a domestic scale, semi-circular interior, this installation was one of the treasures of the “Old MoMA.” For the inaugural show, Monet’s masterwork was hung in MoMA’s massive atrium, and was singled out by even those who wrote glowingly about the new museum design as an aesthetic disaster–one of the more oft-quoted descriptions was that the majestic mural looked like a “big, soiled Band-Aid” [7]

What was made to disappear was not the museum building with its aggressive walls of whiteness, but all that would counter such a sanitized realm, which was matched by the museum programming. It is a generalization, but nonetheless true: the works exhibited were dominated by preference for abstraction and neutral tones. This was particularly the case with the painting and sculpture galleries, with those devoted to design offering one of the few oases of color, emotion and diversity within this desert of the monochrome. Despite the fact the United States had been obsessed by what was being called the War on Terror, there was no reference to the existence of such conflicts, except for one José Clemente Orozco’s 1940 mural, Dive Bomber and Tank installed in a hall.  The New MoMA’s inaugural installation was representative of major Manhattan museums inability to present almost any programming dealing with war for most of the past six years that we have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan [8]. At MoMA, programming has been dominated by exhibitions with innocuous themes, and one-person shows, which until recently were almost all only given to artists who are men.  The lack of diversity that marked the New MoMA’s canon was seen in the seven works squeezed into the multimedia galleries, which were to represent all the video, digital, film, and media works of the past half century.  But this lack was even more disturbing in terms of gender. Too many of the galleries had no, or few, works by women.  The famous sculpture garden included not one entry by a woman artist.

Although there have been a few shows devoted to women artists since the museum’s re-opening, and there have been some interesting departures from MoMA’s monochromatic/monographic standard by the design and architecture department [9], a visit to the museum in mid-May affirmed that little has changed since 2004.  The thematic exhibitions included such pressing concerns as:  Paper: Pressed, Stained, Slashed, Folded; The Printed Picture; Compass in Hand [10]; and Into the Sunset: Photographs of the American West. Certainly, exhibitions with formalist, vague, lacking-a-great-idea themes, such as Staged Pictures: Drawings for Performance can have a fantastic single image, as did this show, which also included several fascinating videos of  original theater performances to illuminate the drawings.  But the featured—literally “top tier”—temporary exhibitions in the large scale sixth floor galleries were devoted to a Martin Kippenberger’s show (that had just closed) and one called Tangled Alphabets, an exhibition of the work of Leon Ferrari and Mira Shendel. Given the Museum’s history and the pairing of these two artists’ work, I and another critic, who had just seen the show, could not help but wonder that if Schendel had not been a woman, and if these were not Latin American artists, perhaps they would have been assigned a one person retrospective. Finally, there was a change in the sculpture garden installation.  They added another artists work, Franz West. So there continues to be no works by women in the MoMA sculpture garden.

Despite the fact that artists have always addressed key issues of their time, with some exceptions, the Museum continues to fail to present a range of programming that is more than one person shows and innocuous thematic exhibitions. This failure to represent a diversity of art and culture is manifest in the entire gesamptkunstwerk that is MoMA.  Mirroring the bland programming and ahistorical themes that constitute the selections and exhibitions, the installations and architecture present an exaggerated version of the standard “white box” interior. The new building and installations perpetuate the modern art museum’s convention of installing artworks isolated on neutral-toned walls. But what is particularly important to this discussion is that such spaces create a de-contextualized environment not only for the works of art, but for the viewers. These displays enhance viewers’ sense of ahistorical autonomy, and metaphorically foster an experience of independence, and even “free will.” As is the case with Taneguchi’s design, since the development of these types of installations  earlier in the twentieth century, what were originally beige neutral colors have become bright white, and the scale of the walls have increased in sized.  In keeping with these developments, the New MoMA, with its immense, self-referential, ultra white interiors, and matching neutral, apolitical, non-diverse, decontextualized programming offers an isolationist, escapist, and delusionally empowering experience for viewers.

Endnotes
[1] The enactment of this law will not take effect until a special facility is built, with the latest date for enactment is July 1, 2011. For an explanation of these details see: see DOCS Today: New York State Department of Correctional Services, vol. 1, no. 3, Spring 2008, http://www.docs.state.ny.us/PressRel/DOCSToday/ Spring2008edition.pdfA (June 1, 2009). A compilation of fact sheets and articles related to what is called the SHU Bill can be found at the  Mental Health Alternatives to Solitary Confinement (MHASC) website, http://www.boottheshu.org/ (June 1, 2009).

[2] The exact figure was 1,015, see Linda Saad, “More Americans Pro-life Than Pro-choice,” for First Time,” GALLUP, http://www.gallup.com/poll/118399/more-americans-pro-life-than-pro-choice-first-time.aspx (May 27, 2009).
What was important here was the prominence of this information within the mainstream media, and the fact that related information, like the fact that one third of women in the United States have had an abortion by the age of 45 is rarely mentioned in such discussions in the mainstream press, see “Overview of Abortion in the U.S.,” Guttmacher Institute, http://www.guttmacher.org/media/presskits/2005/06/28/abortionoverview.html (June 1, 2009).

[3] Judge Ruth Bader Ginzburg wrote the dissenting opinion, which she read from the bench. This is unusual for Supreme Court justices to do so and emphasizes the strength of her dissent.  As is well known, Ginzburg is the only woman on the Supreme Court. For a discussion that references the unusualness of Ginzburg’s reading out loud, see “After Gonzales v. Carhart: The Future of Abortion Jurisprudence” (event transcript) The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, June 14, 2007, http://supreme.justia.com/us/550/05-380/ (May 31, 2009).
For case see, Gonzalez v. Carhart 550 U.S. 124 (2007), Findlaw,
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=05-380

[4] To cite just one example, see “Monica Davey and Joe Stumpe, “Doctor Who Performed Abortions Is Shot Dead, The New York Times,  May 31, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/us/01tiller.html?ref=global-home (May 31, 2009).

[5] I have written more extensive analyses of MoMA’s new design and the history of museum practices.  Several texts that related especially to this essay are: “What’s so new about MoMA?” Sunday Opinion Section: Newsday, January 23, 2005, A. 41; “Grand Illusions: The “New” Museum of Modern Art,” Curating Subjects, editor, Paul O’Neil, Amsterdam and London: de Appel and Open Editions, 2007; and “Preface”, The Power of Display:  A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art, designLocus of Seoul, Korea, Spring 2007, originally published by the MIT Press in English in 1998.

[6] This was a often quoted line in the press, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli repeated it in a New York Magazine article, Alexandra Lange, “This New House,”  October 11, 2004, http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/10057/index4.html (May 26, 2009).

[7] Peter Schjeldahl, “Easy to Look At,” The New Yorker, December 6, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/12/06/041206craw_artworld (May 26, 2009).

[8] Exceptions were the Whitney Museum’s 2003 The American Effect (which looked at international attitudes toward the U.S.) and a small 2004 permanent collection show Memorials of War.  More recently in 2009, MoMA held an exhibition in the mezzaine reading room, The Museum and the War Effort: Artistic Freedom and Reporting for “The Cause,” presenting archival materials (correspondence, press clippings, and photographs) related to MoMA’s WW II exhibitions.

[9] One such exception was Senior Curator of Architecture and Design, Paola Antonelli, with Curatorial Assistant, Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini 2005 exhibition
Safe: Design Takes On Risk.

[10] The full title is for Compass in Hand: Selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection.