MoMA and Photography: a tale of two exhibitions
The first of the two exhibitions I went to was a survey of work by Christopher Williams, subtitled The Production Line of Happiness. A more accurate title in terms of the viewer experience might have been Very Hard Work: You Need to Buy the Catalogue to Understand What’s Going On. Williams is very interested in the process of photography, as well as the idea of ‘institutional critique’, or art which exposes the conventions and aims of the institutions which display it. He was apparently very involved in the form this travelling exhibition has taken, which I would describe as purposefully obtuse: the works are hung low on the walls and in no discernible groupings, there are no labels unless you want to juggle two handouts simultaneously, the fact that some of the walls in the exhibition are relics or recreations from other exhibitions is not made clear, and the thing which comes closest to an introductory text is a blow-up from the catalogue which is half covered in the wall of the shop. In short, unless you are already very knowledgeable about photographic methods and movements, you will probably find the experience of viewing this exhibition to be either frustrating or forgettable.
Downstairs I came across a second photographic exhibition, A World of its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio. Created by MoMA’s own curators, it looks at different ways that photographers have interacted with their studios, depending on their historical, cultural, artistic and financial context: as laboratories, havens, stages, or playgrounds. The works on display are mostly taken from the museum’s own collections, and strike a balance between familiar names and images, and new acquisitions and rarely seen pieces, with a sprinkling of films and videos included as well. The thematic rather than chronological hang allows for some interesting juxtapositions between different artists, but also makes it harder for the curators to keep the momentum of the exhibition going without seeming slightly repetitive. With about 90 artists and 200 works on view though, some of the pieces were a real revelation for me and have sparked further reading, including the 1860s portraiture of Julia Margaret Cameron, great-aunt of Virginia Woolf.
You will hopefully have started to build up a picture of the differences between the two presentations, and probably also know which one I preferred. In a way they were both exhibitions which examine ideas around the photographic and artistic process, but where one states its aims and leads the viewer through a progression of ideas to reach an overall picture, the other relies on the either the viewer’s prior knowledge or penchant for additional reading in order to get meaning from it. I know that I have a bias towards a certain type of exhibition, but does the fact that I found the Christopher Williams to be exclusionary and a bit tiring mean that it wasn’t good, or just that it wasn’t for me? Can every exhibition be about introducing new ideas to the widest possible public, or do some of them need to be ‘further reading’ for the initiated artistic in-crowd?
Difficult questions to answer without a lot more reading and writing, but I’m going to cheat and use a shortcut. I recently bought a game of ‘artists’ top trumps’, which assigns points to different artists for categories such as influence, versatility and top auction prices. If I was going to make a similar game for exhibitions I’ve seen (potentially a limited market, ie. me), it might look something like this*:
Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness
Viewer experience: 30/100
Academic rigour: 82/100 (including catalogue, not that I’ve read it)
The ‘talking point’ factor: 67/100
Standing out from the average exhibition: 79/100
Total: 258/400
A World of its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio
Viewer experience: 76/100
Academic rigour: 68/100
The ‘talking point’ factor: 61/100
Standing out from the average exhibition: 54/100
Total: 259/400
*all entirely made up by me just now
