MoMA Adds a Department for 'Media'
Kate Taylor
The New York Sun
Oct. 3, 2006
http://www.nysun.com/article/40799
The New York Sun leads its article with the usual confusion of terms:
New media. Digital art. Interactive installation. No matter what ungainly term you choose, the field of artists whose work falls outside the traditional realms of photography, film, and video is growing. In recognition of that fact, the Museum of Modern Art announced yesterday the creation of a new Department of Media...
But in the next graph, the new curator, Klaus Biesenbach seems to emphasize the "gallerieness" of video and performance work.
Asked to define the kind of work that will fall under his department, Mr. Biesenbach described it as "time-based" work that is meant to be viewed in a gallery."In contrast to [film], you're not sitting and watching from the beginning to the end in a dark room with other people," Mr. Biesenbach said. "It's basically always gallery-based. It can be moving pictures. It can be beautiful sound installations, like the Janet Cardiff piece we had here at MoMA. It can be performance pieces. They're all time-based, and they're all moving in some broad sense."
Image: "40 Part Motet," Cardiff's riff on Thomas Tallis's "Spem in Alium," demonstrates how beauty can be formed from bits and pieces that in themselves are rather jarring. (By Timothy Hursley -- Museum Of Modern Art/copyright Janet Cardiff). Link
Biesenbach points out, rightly, problems with the term "new media," and the article writer states "at MoMA the creation of a new department signals that the field of interactive media art has reached a kind of critical mass," but the notion of interactivity is markedly absent from any of Biesenbach's comments, including his closing history lesson:
"Throughout the last decade, it became [clear it was] not only one season, not only two seasons it became a significant contribution to contemporary art," Mr. Biesenbach said. "There were time-based pieces and moving-images pieces in the galleries, in the big biennales, in the big collection. We are just giving attention to preserving them, conserving them, giving them a chance to be seen in the museum."
Also (thanks Sarah) New Media Department at MoMA
Randy Kennedy
New York Times
October 3, 2006
The Museum of Modern Art announced yesterday that it had created a new curatorial department to focus exclusively on the growing number of contemporary artworks that use sound and moving images in gallery installations. The media department, once part of the department of film and media, will deal with works that use a wide range of modern technology, from video and digital imagery to Internet-based art and sound-only pieces, said Klaus Biesenbach, who was named chief curator of the new department. Mr. Biesenbach, who has been a MoMA curator since 2004 and the chief curator of P.S. 1, the museums Queens affiliate, since 2002, said that works relying on media techniques and ideas of conveying motion and time had become much more prominent over the last two decades at international art fairs and exhibitions. And its even more visible now, he said. I think artistic practice is evolving, and so museums are evolving as well. The creation of the new department brings the number of curatorial departments at the museum to seven. The other six are architecture and design, drawings, film, painting and sculpture, photography, and prints and illustrated books. RANDY KENNEDY
