Herzog Takes on MoMA

In his public discussion with the Museum of Modern Art's director, Glenn Lowry, last Tuesday at the museum, architect Jacques Herzog insisted that Artist's Choice: Herzog & de Meuron, Perception Restrained, the MoMA exhibition (closed yesterday) that he organized with his partner, Pierre de Meuron, was not intended as a critique of the museum that had hosted it, as has been widely assumed. Still, he did offer Lowry some pointed MoMA critiques (which resonated with Item 6 and Item 5 from CultureGrrl's recent diatribe).

Although his firm had competed in the charette that was part of the architect-selection process for MoMA's latest expansion, Herzog now says:

I'm actually happy not to have been the architect [in part because he had so many other museum projects to work on]....I remember, when we did the charette, [you said that] in the future you wanted to have more parallel presentation of photography together with painting and sculpture and architecture---that they would not be split or segregated. Maybe now this is less being realized than what you intended to do.

On the subject of displaying the permanent collection, he advocated creating "anchor spaces"---presentations of certain key parts of a collection in a manner that "has in itself a certain permanence." He seemed to regret (as does CultureGrrl) the lack of that kind of anchor for MoMA's succession of temporary displays for contemporary art:

I wish there was a permanent space for the Richter piece [his 15-painting Baader-Meinhof series, "October 18, 1977," now on view as part of the latest contemporary installation]....When you create three or four really very strong anchors, the rest can be more generic or more temporary in the way it is installed.

On the subject of the endlessly expanding museum (and indeed, Lowry's ambitions do extend to other properties on MoMA's street), Herzog noted that "there is no good answer" to how big a museum should be, but he also observed that once you start thinking about "a third or fourth phase, I don't say it's not possible, but...how do you experience it as one thing, and shouldn't you split it, once you reach a certain size?"

When CultureGrrl asked Herzog how he regarded Yoshio Taniguchi's built solution to the problems posed by MoMA's expansion, the audience chuckled at Herzog's deadpan reply:

I think it perfectly is what MoMA wanted [general laughter]...the idea of the modern translated into our own time. We would have done it differently.

We have yet to see the completion of the current expansion phase: The education wing, originally intended to open concurrently with the rest of the project, is finally due to debut on Nov. 28, two years after the inauguration of the new gallery wing. This will undoubtedly engender yet another round of appraisals of mega-MoMA.