rebus

s gave me an excellent present for christmas: membership to moma for the year. this past weekend we decided to take advantage of this and headed over to the museum for the afternoon.

their big show right now is "marlene dumas: measuring your own grave" (through february 16--a valentines date perhaps?) our review was mixed. her brushy, ethereal technique works well in paintings of the deceased--i pictured their souls hanging around, waiting to see what happens next. but massive canvases of little girls hanging from nooses are not really my thing; i had not seen a large-scale presentation of her work, and what can be powerful in small doses is somewhat overwhelming in total. the most interesting thing is a room of quick sketches called "models" (i believe they are studies of all of the people who stopped by the model for her over a period of a few years.) they are revealing in their simplicity, the faces distilled to piercing eyes or strong noses, everything else rendered unimportant. in an interesting twist, amongst the pictures of women of all shapes, sizes and ethnicities, there is a portrait of a snake. i think that all of her work has a sense of the dark, almost brutal, parts of life, and this room is a distillation of that philosophy.

pipilotti rist has transformed the atrium into "pour your body out" (this just closed), a large-scale multimedia installation that encouraged visitors to take their shoes off and dive into her world of sounds and sights. while the explanation invited adults to make new friends, no one around me wanted to talk about rist's swim through a menstrual ocean (why not, new friends?!), and s was too shy to sit on the iris couch with me. he was concerned about the sound in the space--it was too open, too noisy to achieve the cocoon effect rist seemed to be going for, and perhaps the experience would've meant more in a more intimate space. but i love taking my shoes off in museums, so i considered it a minor success.

our favorite show, however, was "artist's choice: vik muniz, rebus" (through february 23.) to steal from the description, a rebus is a combination of unrelated visual and linguistic elements which create a larger deductive meaning, and muniz has raided the museum's collection to put together a startlingly engaging little exhibition. each piece is taken out of context (no title, no artist), so that the focus is solely on the piece and its relation to those that precede and follow it. i enjoyed the pieces in a way that i usually do not--instead of connecting to an overarching theme, each piece is examined for its own meaning and merit, and is connected to the other pieces in new ways. "do these relate because of imagery, or material, or meaning, or is simply enough that you are here to look at this piece?" the exhibition asks. we found ourselves making new connections between pieces, enjoying them on a purely experiential level. (my only complaint: the exhibit is too short. i wanted everything we saw to be this engaging.) i think it's worth it to go to see this exhibition alone.