>>GL!TC<H**........'''''''''''

after MoMA’s: “Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects”

The MoMA / our MoMA. It's almost irrelevant to make a visit. What once was a haven for the experimental & revolutionary has duly succumbed to the fate of every institution that makes profiteering it's primary end. It has become large, important, & stale. It's hard to even see works @ the MoMA. Whatever becomes visible there is masked by lethargic comfort  You don/t really come away w. anything resembling life. Rather..ur more impressed by the Zeitgeist that leads the European tourist there, following the siren-song of the art derived from his/her own culture, whose company fills the MoMA's belly in droves.

1 thinks of a non-physical universe..of what the world would be like if it were reduced to pure intellection, where communicative voices were cut-up into frequencies, & bodies were only images: MAps designating a face: an eye here, a nose there. a mouth. TALK 2 ME* was designed to make this $tate-of-Things explicit .////  but it lacked the parodic intent which wld have made it significant commentary on the current No-Brow quality of “High*Art” (whatever that's taken to mean). In sum = for all its gadgets & New Media wizardry, the exhibition experience remained typically MoMA ::: A Neutral Experience that neither re-imagines tradition / nor challenges the cultural Status Quo----///

///The absence of politics in large,,monied venues like the MoMA is revealing, even Apocalyptic. Whatever art MoMA displays is visibly stripped of any social character, & reified as a Moment in History, artifacts for Neo/liberal consumers::::This mystifying take on culture emphasizes individual biographies, & thus tacitly denigrates R/E/V/O/L/U/T/I/O/N/A/R/Y group activity. Thus saith our MoMA::::when u Talk 2 Me** !Revolution! is reduced to ?Revlon? & the slick appearances of forms-of-technology become extensions of a body u can never have,,because dis/incarnate & glossed over by Mediating Appliances.

our MoMA is a haunted house, a *Futureworld* occupied by sad ghosts. even @ a show as well-attended as *Talk 2 Me** & despite the interactive appearance/design of the works exhibited,,,a bodiless eroticism permeated the room & followed you down the long corridor out into the street--------the tactile inter-activity of many of the works seemed but a substitute for the loneliness & lacklove people experience in a world made 1-dimensional by Innovation-4-Profit. Cultural Histories & the reality of personal identity are absorbed by a dehumanizing MAchine, & MoMA fetishizes this failure of communication // eerily posting all-too-familiar sentinels @ the doorway-------

 

**The ATM's vending machine leads customers through the process of buying Metrocards in a manner that is efficient and no-nonsense. in a very New York spirit the MTA's vending machine leads customers through the process of buying Metrocards in a manner that is in a very New York spirit. in a very New York spirit the MTA's vending machine leads customers through the process of buying Metrocards in a manner that is very New York. efficient and no-nonsense. in a very New York spirit the MTA's vending machine leads customers through the process of buying**

Masking the crushing lack of autonomous ex/pression in *our* society,,,by appealing to the patent falsity of global Multi/cultural(ism)......touting an open-door-admissions-polic(y) that neglects giving people the requisite tools they need to communicate sincerely/truthfully--------any exploration of the ubiquity of Media(tion) can only be,,in effect, disarming/disabling. It works only 2 deprive *US* of the power 2 truly respond to the political situations of our time..& in this way be(come) authentically re/sponsible.

 

 

-Jeffrey Grunthaner