A Sort of Joy — Medium The Museum of Modern Art is full of tombstones. You’ve may have cropped one out of an Instagram photo…
The Museum of Modern Art is full of tombstones. You’ve may have cropped one out of an Instagram photo lately — they’re the small white signs that list the artwork’s vital statistics: title, artist, date, medium and provenance. Last week, MoMA quietly released their collections database, a vast graveyard full of tombstones, as a GitHub repository. Slightly more than 120,000 artworks are included in the .CSV release, all tightly arranged in rows and columns. […]
It’s 1:32pm. A woman in a black dress leans against the edge of a doorway between rooms in MoMA’s second floor galleries. Swatches of rotating light and the ting-tang of a Gamelan orchestra from the installation behind her bleed past her, out into the room that she’s facing.
“Fuck Off,” she mutters.
A few faces in the crowd turn towards her, but most either didn’t hear, or pretended that they didn’t hear. The woman continues, undeterred.
“Where’s My Fucking Peanut?”
“Shut The Fuck Up.”
“I Shit Crystals for you, David.”
Despite this impressive string of obscenity, the the gallery goers’ attention is mostly directed towards the middle of the room, where a group of five people who have just burst into song.
Over the next forty minutes, this group of six performers will speak (and sing) in a strange language — every word they say will be taken verbatim from the collections database. And yet it will not come off as if they are listing a litany of titles; instead they will engage in complex patterns of call & response, performing a combination of carefully choreographed exchanges and loosely-defined scenes, often balanced at the edge of chaos and absurdity.