Friday evenings are free at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) so I decided to take advantage of that and went there after work today! I was only there for a little while as they close at 8pm, and only saw a little bit of the enormous, 6 floor museum. It didn’t help that I waited in the coat check line for 25 minutes to check my coat and bag (which I thought I had to check), only to find out when I finally reached the end that I couldn’t check my bag because I had my laptop in it and carry it with me. Ah well. Speaking of my bag, on the way in, the guard told me I couldn’t wear it on my back (it’s a messenger bag) and had to wear it either in the front or on the side…strange!
The small section of the museum I saw was really interesting. I went straight for the architecture section, which was pretty cool, then hit up the special galley of sculpture work by Martin Puryear, whose work was made exclusively from natural materials–wood and rawhide. His work was huge and impressive!
Afterwards I spent my last 30 minutes in the multimedia gallery which was really interesting. There was this one really interesting projection exhibit. There were two projectors…one displaying a blue background with a word; the other just displaying a word. Both words were in the same place and overlapped one another. They were different words though, making for a jumbled mess. If someone stood in front of the projector, they’d block the blue background/word, as expected. However, the other projector was angled in a way that the word still made it to the background and was now readable. Pictures show it better than I can explain it:
I was also really engrossed by this video of bottle with a whole on the side that was leaking milk. A woman was sucking the milk out from the side of it then doing something with it…swallowing it, spitting it on the wall or bottle, thelicking the bottle, etc. It was very bizarre yet very interesting. Modern Art really challenges that whole “what is art” idea. One of the things in the architecture section was a Subway sign (indicating the entrance and which lines stopped there…nothing special), something I would never think of as a work of art.
Anyways, in my short time there I got really interested in the architecture of the building itself, as seen below:
I’ll definitely be returning on future Fridays to explore more of this great museum!
I’ve also got two new things to add to my list of strange sightings on the streets of New York:
1. A man in full Santa garb walking down 5th Avenue (with a real beard and everything)
2. A school bus full of tuxedo-clad teens, all with their heads out the windows (on the same side of the bus) singing to the pedestrians as they rode down 42nd Street!
God, I love this City!
