The Museum as Muse: Artists deliberate organized by Kynaston McShine The Museum of recent Art.

The Museum as Muse: Artists deliberate organized by Kynaston McShine The Museum of recent Art, New York, New York March 14-June 1 1999

The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego La Jolla, California September 26 1999-January 9 2000

The Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain March 14-May 29 2000

The Museum as Muse: Artists ruminate by Kynaston McShine New York: The Museum of recent Art, 1999 296 pp./$50.00 (hb) $2495 (sb)

Website: www.moma.org/exhibitions/muse, with links to on-line artists' schemes by Allan McCollum and Fr Wilson

"The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect" organized at Kynaston McShine, Senior Curator for the Museum of present Art (MoMA) in New York City, contains nearly 200 works through more than 60 artists, with an emphasis in succession American and European post-war work. The exhibition includes photographs of museums (eg from Zoe Leonard and Vik Muniz), personal museums by way of artists (e.g., by Joseph Cornell and Susan Hiller), work forward exhibitionary and archival strategies (eg from Marcel Broadthaers and Mark Dion), appropriative uses of museological material (eg at Marcel Duchamp) and analyses of museum ideologies (eg by way of Andrea Fraser and Hans Haacke). The works vary in their grade of involvement with the idea of the museum. an include only an incidental respect to, a museum environment or a museum-related universal while others employ a museological frame of respect as the crux of the work.

According to the pamphlet the exhibition is divided into five categories: Photographs: The butt; goal and the Museum in Use; Artist-Collectors and the Personal Museum: Natural History Collections: Questioning methods of Classification; Museum Practices and Policies; and The Museum Transformed. These headings, however, are not directly transposed upon the exhibition space itself - a curatorial decision that leaves the exhibition space undivided and, apart from wall labels, text-free While the act of museological categorization is precisely what near of the work critiques, the absence of contextualization in the exhibition unfortunately leaves the question of to what degree these works are changed by the agency of their placement in and their relation to MoMA unexamined. admitting the volume of the included material provides MoMA with an extremely good opportunity for curatorial indulgence, "The Museum as Muse" evades an acknowledged critique of for what cause museums both inspire and shape the work that they display.

Scattered from top to toe "The Museum as Muse" is an abundance of work about MoMA itself. Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler's MoMA Whites (1990) at hands the custom white wall paint preferr from various MoMA curators alongside standard manufactured whites. Each "white" sample has been poured into a glass jar onto which the exact name of each color is etched. on juxtaposing the hues of white that constitute the "white walls" of the MoMA galleries, Ericson and Ziegler demonstrate in what manner galleries are marked by the choices of their curators. "McShine White," for example, differs noticeably in tint from "Rubin White," "Riva White" and the standard "Decorator White." Thomas Struth's Cibachrome print Museum of present Art 1, New York (1994) depicts museum visitors in effrontery of a Jackson Pollock painting. by the agency of using long exposures that foreground in addition blur the visitors, Struth's photograph encompasses the viewers' relationship to the painting unlike a reproduction or installation shooter where the painting alone would command the field of vision. Komar and Melamid's spectacles from the Future: Museum of new Art (1983-84) portrays MoMA in ruins, sprawling in the middle of a pastoral landscape. Referencing Romantic paintings of ruins in pastoral settings, the sight of the novel MoMA becoming a fragment of classical architecture nonchalantly places the museum into a trajectory of history in which its part may only be transitory.

Of the works prepared specifically for this exhibition, Janet Cardiff's MoMA Walk (1999) takes visitors in succession a semi-nostalgic audio tour of MoMA's permanent collection galleries located outside the parameters of "The Museum as Muse" to bring reproach on the museum as a location of perception. Daniel Buren's To Displace, To Place, To Replace (work in situ) (1975-99) transposes a section of MoMA's permanent collection gallery into "The Museum as Muse,"' replacing it with Buren's trademark stripes engaging the artist as curator. Fr Wilson's Art in Our Time (1998) uses photographs from MoMA's archives to examine the social and racial markings of the folks deemed worth documenting for MoMA's institutional history. The mats for each photograph intentionally vary from being non-obtrusive to obscuring the photograph, literally framing the majority of the image gone out of sight. With a title that pertains to a 1939 MoMA exhibition, Wilson also calls attention to the part MoMA has had, and continues to have, in defining the field of contemporary art.

undivided of the most enigmatic arrangements in "The Museum as Muse" also remains the principally emblematic of the exhibition's discourse concerning institutional relations between museums and artists. Donald Judd's Bench #76/77 (1976-77) a birch plywood bench, faces sum of two units large paintings by Art & Language (Index: Incident in a Museum XV [1986] and Index: Incident in a Museum XXI [1987]) and four of Sophie Calle's photographs from "Last Seen" (1991) a series concerning artwork stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990