It’s always a treat when the great monoliths of the museum world mount curatorially innovative shows to balance out the crowd-drawing blockbusters. The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today is a wonderful example of this. Housed in one of the two immense spaces on the Museum of Modern Art’s sixth floor, next to Matisse (he of the timed-ticket entry), curator Roxanna Marcoci’s deeply stimulating exhibition succeeds on the most important of levels: it introduces new ways of looking at art and understanding its history. Focused on the under-examined but long-standing relationship between photography and sculpture, Marcoci brings together artists from both mediums who have explored how photography has, in her words, ‘interpreted not only sculptures but the contexts of their display.’ Duchamp, using an elaborate and expensive collotype printing process, produced ‘authorized original copies’ of his own work, introducing fundamental questions of authenticity, originality, and authorship (questions we are still obsessed with). The photos Brancusi took of his own work are ethereal and haunting, the flashes of light inhabiting them shattering the ‘monolithic materiality’ of the sculptures. David Goldblatt’s photographs of Afrikaner monuments in South Africa explore the inherent politics of sculptural display, while Lee Friedlander’s images situate sculptures within their wider social context, highlighting the banalities of their everyday experience.
One of Marcoci’s coups in the show is to highlight the degree to which many contemporary artists work in and with a variety of mediums. Gabriel Orozco (recently a subject of a MoMA retrospective) created short-lived sculptures of watermelons and cat food cans and took their photo. All that’s left is their index. Fischli Weiss photograph playful assemblages of household objects (old woman’s heels interlaced into a spiky wheel, empty wine bottles perched precariously on wooden egg cups) that seem always on the verge of collapse, creating works that hinge on the tension between permanence and and the ephemeral. Cyprien Gaillard weaves the two mediums together even tighter, making the exhibition of the photograph itself a sculptural exercise. He arranges his Polaroids of found sculpture in undulating diamonds, insisting on the equal relationship between the print itself, as an object, and the object its image depicts.
After leaving the show I wondered at the absence of Thomas Demand’s photographs of paper dioramas, but I think that is a testament to the success of the exhibition. That I even questioned his absence meant I was thinking about his art through a different rubric, which is truly the mark of a good exhibition.
The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019
August 1 – November 1, 2010
Kunsthaus Zürich
Heimplatz 1
CH–8001 Zurich
February 25 – May 15, 2011
Photographs, top to bottom, by David Goldblatt, Lee Friedlander, and Cyprien Gaillard
