What’s in a name? Throughout the expansion of the

Museum of Modern Art on Fifty-third Street, off Fifth Avenue, a project that

will be completed by 2005, there may be no

construction more deserving of our admiration than the simple

combination of “museum” and “modern” and “art.” In this name

one finds no “Morgan” or “Guggenheim” or “Frick;” no

“Metropolitan” or “county” or “New York;” no “contemporary” or

“non-objective” or “American.” The Museum of Modern Art has

benefited through its seventy-two year history by staking out

only the bare minimums and by interpreting these minimums in the

broadest possible terms. Modern art, at MOMA, may mean twentieth-century art; it may

mean the art of a movement called modernism; it may mean the art

of our times. Through MOMA’s various departments, modern art

may mean alternatively painting and sculpture, architecture and

design, photography, prints and illustrated books, drawings, or

film and media.

These definitions

are so broad, and the categories and departments at times so

conflicting and contentious, that the only sure bet of what is

“modern art” is what you tend to find, simply, at the Museum of Modern

Art. That the very definition of “modern” has been fought in the

galleries of the Museum of Modern Art goes to the core of this

institution’s historical strength and reminds us of its future

responsibilities. And what has emerged over this history is a set

of divisions that has been keenly tied to the architecture of the 53rd

street site: media in the basement, design in the attic, and so

forth.

There is a lot in this name, and

a MOMA by any other name may not be as sweet. When the Modern

determined to maintain a schedule of exhibitions and to continue

displaying works from its world-renowned permanent collection

during the three-year reconstruction, it settled on a converted

Swingline staple factory in the borough of Queens as its

temporary headquarters. In order to reflect this move, the Modern

chose to add the suffix “QNS” to its famous acronym

MOMA. How “QNS” weighs against

the precarious balance of “MOMA,” and to what extent

the architecture of “MOMA QNS”

tells us about the future of the Museum of Modern Art in New York

are questions that may slowly be answered in the next three

years. The press’s first look at MOMA

QNS came June 24, and the public’s four days later on

Saturday, June 28, concluding a busy week of events. What follows

are some impressions:

• The distance from midtown MOMA to MOMA QNS is under

  three miles. Yet the psychological separation between the real

  estate of midtown and the low industrial terrain of Long Island

  City could not be greater. Much has been made of the Queens

  Boulevard location of the museum—its ethnic makeup, the

  plantain fruit stands, its access by way of the Number 7 subway

  line. Yet the cobalt-blue shell of the museum, tucked half a

  block back from the Boulevard, interacts as little as possible

  with the surrounding landscape: no windowed exhibition spaces, no

  sculpture gardens. The only indication of the museum’s new

  presence in Queens is a smart roof construction that, when viewed

  a certain way, spells out “MOMA” to approaching 7

  trains.

• MOMA QNS looks nothing like,

  and behaves nothing like, the MOMA of 53rd street. Gone is the

  vertical arrangement of that building, crystallized in the

  1980–84 reconstruction by the architect Cesar Pelli under

  the guidance of Alfred Barr’s successor William S. Rubin,

  then Director of Painting and Sculpture. The Queens site,

  constructed on a large singular ground floor plan designed by

  Cooper, Robertson & Partners (exhibition space, offices, storage

  space) and the more fussy Michael Maltzan Architecture (lobby),

  resembles a suburban Home Depot—a “big box”

  architecture with twenty-one foot high ceilings and moveable

  cubicle-style walls that may be relocated and repositioned into

  different warrens and rat-mazes as the permanent collection

  rotates and new exhibitions come and go (including “Matisse

  Picasso” in February 2003).

• There is a sensation upon

  entering MOMA QNS, through a series of

  cantilevered passages and fenced off views and do-nothing stairs,

  that the Maltzan lobby design is meant to disorient and throw the

  viewer off axis with each turn. The gift shop and coat check wind

  around you. Care to walk directly to the ticket booth and into

  the museum? No such luck. A series of videos play on the curved

  walls of this space in an attempt to distract and perhaps

  entertain, but the feeling most resembles that of waiting in line

  for a theme-park amusement.

• The Cooper, Robertson & Partners

  designed exhibition space, bordering the lobby, is more practical

  for the needs of the museum and also more in line with the nature

  of the Swingline building: a big box is not interesting space,

  and there should be no need to conceal this fact with

  architectural razzle dazzle. The preeminence of MOMA’s permanent collection should,

  moreover, be more than enough to “brighten up” a space,

  which it attempts to do—when you can find it.

• It is not altogether clear where to

  find the permanent collection at MOMA QNS (it is, incidentally,

  in the far corner of the building from the lobby). The visitor is at present more inclined to stagger into the

  “Autobodies” show of the museum’s automobile collection, and

  backwards through a large contemporary art show called

  “Tempo”,

  devoted to such themes

  as “Transgressive

  Bodies,” “Mobility/Immobility,” “Liquid

  Time,” and “Trans-Histories.” “Tempo” is

  one of the most lugubrious exhibitions in recent memory at MOMA, resembling more a show at PS1, MOMA’s tragically hip contemporary-art

  space, also in Long Island City. To anoint such art with the

  ecumenical powers of MOMA, even MOMA QNS, erodes the value of MOMA as a museum of canonization. Such art

  speculation may be best left to galleries, auction houses, Thomas

  Krens, and The Brooklyn Museum.

• It is only upon weaving one’s way

  backwards around “Tempo,” through a room of incessant

  metronomes and miscalibrated clocks called “Time

  Collapsed”, that one returns to a hallway with the painted

  title “To Be Looked At” and the subtitle “Painting

  and Sculpture from the Collection.” This is Acting Chief

  Curator Kynaston McShine’s installation for the permanent

  collection. The coy title comes by way of Marcel Duchamp’s

  sculpture To Be Looked At (From the Other Side of the Glass),

  with One Eye, Close To, for Almost and Hour (1918). It bears

  mention that in 1984, when the Museum of Modern Art opened its

  doors after its last renovation, an anxious four years without a

  MOMA QNS, the only show that caught the full ire of The New

  Criterion was Kynaston McShine’s “International

  Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture”. As Hilton

  Kramer wrote in the special Summer 1984 issue of The New

  Criterion devoted to the reopening of MOMA:

  All we can be certain of is that the show itself is the most

  incredible mess the museum has ever given us, and a show that is

  different in kind from anything the museum has done in the past.

  Reading this statement in “MOMA reopened: The Museum of Modern Art in the

  postmodern era,” an indispensible resource for anyone

  interested in the history of MOMA, we are

  reminded of the halcyon days of 1984, when a show like

  “International Survey” had the ability to alarm.

• One gets the sense from “To be Looked At” that

  McShine seeks to undermine the Barr/Rubin orthodoxy of the

  permanent collection—one might call it even the “MOMA history of art”—through mockery.

  The Duchamp title is a part

  of this. The ahistorical arrangement of this present exhibition,

  somewhat akin to the millennial exhibition

  “MOMA Starts,” has its moments of near sadistic mania: the

  fuzzy paintings go on one wall, the polka-dots go on the other.

  Even as Acting Director, McShine can be dangerous. His

  predecessor Robert Storr at least thought he was working

  in the legacy of Barr. McShine acts purposefully against it. The

  rehanging and arrangement of iconic paintings by Picasso, Van

  Gogh, et al., is already unappealing and awkward in this

  warehouse space, the least that could have been done was to

  preserve a semblance of the permanent collection as it has been

  presented at the 53rd street site. This alone has historical

  value, and McShine does a disservice to the newcomer to MOMA in not presenting it.

Some will say that the direction of McShine’s “To be Looked At”

at MOMA QNS is merely an extension of Alfred Barr’s wide definition of

“Modern.” There is an alternate concern,

however, that MOMA’s historical crisis between its own formalist canonization

of twentieth-century art, under Barr and Rubin, and its interests

in contemporary art, for example, may finally come to a head and dramatically

alter the former balance of the future museum. One ill-conceived

publicity stunt called “Projects 76” by the performance/video

artist Francis Alys, which was recorded a week before the opening

of MOMA QNS, included a mock procession across the 59th street

bridge that paraded not only reproductions of works by Pablo

Picasso and Alberto Giacometti but also the artist manqué Kiki

Smith—the manqué herself—hoisted through the middle of it in a sedan

chair as, one supposes, the queen of Queens.

What role the

permanent collection of twentieth-century art may play in the new

museum, and how it might compliment, contend with, outshine,

background, or be held hostage by new exhibtions, rehangings,

bogus curators, bad artists, or the minor arts (design and media) will determine how the

future art histories are written. MOMA QNS is a kind of

horizontal drafting sheet for the new permanent museum, and this

first draft can be chilling at times.