Anny
Aviram has spent more than 40 years as a conservator at the Museum of
Modern Art, often swabbing away dust and grime on priceless Picassos and
other masterpieces.
One of the most effective tools she uses is her own saliva. (Don’t worry: This practice, centuries old, has scientific backing.)
That revelation is one of several surprises in a new audio guide to the museum produced by the artist Nina Katchadourian
that focuses on a tiny topic: dust. Wall texts encourage visitors to
listen in at a dozen locations throughout the museum, including a
tough-to-Swiffer ledge overhanging four stories of the museum’s atrium.
“Yup,
my first major project at MoMA is all about dust,” said Ms.
Katchadourian, 48, while accompanying a visitor on the tour last week.
“I like coming at the big things by what‘s immediate and observable to me,” she said.
She created the audio tour, “Dust Gathering,” as part of the museum’s Artists Experiment program, which invites contemporary artists to work with MoMA educators on public programming.
Over
two years, Ms. Katchadourian interviewed staff members across every
department, ultimately realizing that they were united by their stance
against this pervasive, invisible-until-it’s-not element.
You
might expect such a tour to be as dry as … well, you know. But the
Brooklyn-based artist, who as a child dreamed of becoming a radio
journalist, narrates with a knowing, wry warmth, weaving in interview
snippets and documentary moments with MoMA staff members. It has the
feel of a scavenger hunt.
The
first stop is steps from the sculpture garden, just behind the desk
where visitors pick up audio guides: a windy microclimate that is a
magnet for more mites than anywhere else at MoMA. Ms. Katchadourian
demonstrated how to use a cellphone flashlight to illuminate, through
the white slats of an electrical closet, clusters of gray dust billowing
like tumbleweeds.
Later
in the tour she interviews an allergist on the digestive habits of dust
mites, which will appall some listeners but may appeal strongly to
certain 10-year-olds. But the soul of the audio tour is Harvey Tulcensky,
an art handler at MoMA for 42 years and an artist himself. “It’s not
about the dusting per se; it’s about the dusting of something that means
so much to me that I feel I am helping that thing,” he says with
audible wonder. “Handling the art, without wanting or trying to sound
naïve, is kind of magical.”
As entertaining as “Dust Gathering” and many of Ms. Katchadourian’s other projects may be, they are serious in intent.
“I
hate the words ‘quirky’ and ‘whimsical’ applied to me and my work,” she
said. “Joy, wonder, play, humor? All good. But I am not just making
little jokes.”
That point comes up when she discusses the work for which she is best known, “Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style,”
a series of cellphone selfies taken in airplane bathrooms in which she
poses with whatever materials are at hand: toilet seat covers, sanitary
napkins and the like. When the series went viral a few years ago, she
was upset “to see them reduced to a prank.”
But she’s no killjoy. A case in point is “Floater Theater,”
a new exhibition she created at the Exploratorium in San Francisco,
near where she grew up. The piece consists of a red-velvet enclosure
with a screen that is optimally lighted to prompt people to notice eye
floaters and watch them dance.
“Like dust, floaters are there all the time and we sort of find them annoying or boring,” she said.
“There
is a false sense that art has to be about the big stuff, when actually
every artwork is in some way a thinking exercise — mental, aesthetic,
philosophical or whatever kind of gym the artist is putting you in to
exercise your imagination.”
In
some ways, her work is about questioning what merits attention. “You
usually come to a museum and orient yourself towards the artworks,” she
said, “and a lot of things in your literal and metaphorical peripheral
vision are ruled out as things not worth looking at.”
But
Ms. Katchadourian’s work will be at the center of attention next year,
when the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin surveys her career.
Taking
her MoMA tour, you may feel silly elbowing through the crowd to examine
the dust on a ledge, vitrine or picture frame. But just as she can make
visitors to the Exploratorium consider eye floaters as art, she can
make you treat MoMA’s masterpieces as mere motes. The grand and the tiny
come together: I am the universe, and I am dust.
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