Haidee Wasson provides a rich cultural history of cinema's transformation from a passing amusement to an enduring art form by mapping the creation of the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art ...(MoMA), New York, established in 1935. The first North American film archive and museum, the film library pioneered an expansive moving image network, comprising popular, abstract, animated, American, Canadian, and European films. More than a repository, MoMA circulated these films nationally and internationally, connecting the modern art museum to universities, libraries, women's clubs, unions, archives, and department stores. Under the aegis of the museum, cinema also changed. Like books, paintings, and photographs, films became discrete objects, integral to thinking about art, history, and the politics of modern life.
Today the Museum of Modern Art is widely recognized for establishing the canon of modern art; yet in its early years, the museum considered modern art part of a still unfolding experiment in ...contemporary visual production. By bracketing MoMA's early history from its later reputation, this book explores the ways the Museum acted as a laboratory to set an ambitious agenda for the exhibition of a multidisciplinary idea of modern art. Between its founding in 1929 and its 20th anniversary in 1949, MoMA created the first museum departments of architecture and design, film, and photography in the country, marshaled modern art as a political tool, and brought consumer culture into a versatile yet institutional context. Encompassing 14 essays that investigate the diversity of modern art, this volume demonstrates how MoMA's programming shaped a version of modern art that was not elitist but fundamentally intertwined with all levels of cultural production.
Machine Art, 1934 Marshall, Jennifer Jane
2019, 2012, 2015-06-01
eBook
In 1934, New York's Museum of Modern Art staged a major exhibition of ball bearings, airplane propellers, pots and pans, cocktail tumblers, petri dishes, protractors, and other machine parts and ...products. The exhibition, titled Machine Art, explored these ordinary objects as works of modern art, teaching museumgoers about the nature of beauty and value in the era of mass production. Telling the story of this extraordinarily popular but controversial show, Jennifer Jane Marshall examines its history and the relationship between the museum's director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., and its curator, Philip Johnson, who oversaw it. She situates the show within the tumultuous climate of the interwar period and the Great Depression, considering how these unadorned objects served as a response to timely debates over photography, abstract art, the end of the American gold standard, and John Dewey's insight that how a person experiences things depends on the context in which they are encountered. An engaging investigation of interwar American modernism, Machine Art, 1934 reveals how even simple things can serve as a defense against uncertainty.
Between the inter-war years and 1960s, there was a radical shift in the art market status of modern art in the United States. This was not simply a matter of time. This article argues that there was ...a re-gendering of the discourse of art patronage in America, with modern art being re-presented—as never before—to the potential collector as being if not masculine then ‘not feminine’. It is argued that the Museum of Modern Art, New York, explicitly set out to re-gender collecting discourse as part of its overall aim of enhancing the status of modern art in America.
Abstract
The SKF ball bearing on display in the 1934 ‘Machine Art’ exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art is an icon referenced throughout visual culture studies but this article recognizes its ...materiality, identifying the corporate logotype and other branded markings that complicate its identity as anonymous or, in the words of museum curator Philip Johnson, as ‘plain’. SKF, Svenska Kullagerfabriken (The Swedish ball bearing factory), had a fully developed global advertising campaign that made it a more established brand name than MoMA, and pioneered the contemporary mode of speaking and thinking in logotypes—by 1934, Johnson’s claim notwithstanding, no one could ‘see’ an SKF ball bearing without seeing the company’s logo. Scholarly commentary has adhered to MoMA’s description as if the bearing were anonymous and not visibly branded. This essay describes the history of the SKF logotype and situates it as both pioneering and part of a complex corporate culture and aspect of brand standardization that intersected with globalization in unexpected ways. To delve into the commercial context and production of ball bearings is to unravel the contradictions inherent in identifying design as national or global, and the modernist idealization of anonymous industrial form as an aesthetic ideal.
Abstract
This essay examines Elements of Design, a circulating exhibition poster set produced by MoMA in 1945 and distributed worldwide. Through an examination of archived drafts, this exhibition set ...is discussed as an example of how the museum refined its educational approach through an evolving understanding of modern art and design. In particular, Elements of Design reflects MoMA’s expanding notion of audiences for modern art and design. This essay is the first scholarly examination of Elements of Design, including its archival drafts and documentation. Elements of Design was created by Robert Jay Wolff, former professor at the New Bauhaus, in collaboration with members of MoMA’s staff. Wolff merged Bauhaus–style foundations exercises with his experience developing visual instruction materials during the Second World War to create this visually engaging and instructive exhibition. This essay establishes important components of MoMA’s presentation of modern art and the pedagogy that would guide their educational activities for the next two decades: a focus on formal design and teaching aesthetic appreciation, a dedication to presenting modern art to the widest possible audiences, and an emphasis on the universality and unifying nature of modern art.
A reinvestigation of Iris Barry's work for the Daily Mail in the period 1925-30. Barry is celebrated as a critic and curator. As a founder of the Film Society in London in the 1920s and first curator ...of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1930s she is a heroine of minority film culture. This article argues that her role in mass film culture has been overlooked. While it has been acknowledged that Barry wrote for the Daily Mail, one of Britain's most popular newspapers, this article demonstrates that the number of articles she wrote for the paper has been underestimated by a factor of ten. Beyond the case of Barry, this article argues that elite institutions like the Film Society have been given undue credit for the phenomenon of 'taking film seriously.'
“Dams, roads, bridges, tunnels, storage buildings and various other useful structures comprise the bulk of the best visible things made in this century,” wrote Donald Judd in October 1964.
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