Page 16 - WOA9-eMag

Installation view of Energy, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2019 The
Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Heidi Bohnenkamp

gallery in New York features Janet Sobel’s 1945 painting Milky and new synthetic fibers in industrial production, through to
Way, which once hung in Guggenheim’s gallery. the emergence of a more sculptural approach to textile art
On the Museum’s fourth floor, in the Taniguchi-designed in the 1960s and ’70s. Textiles and the adjacent practices of
Rockefeller Building, Architecture Systems investigates the architecture, painting, drawing, and sculpture have long had
increasing preoccupation of architects and designers with a close affinity, especially in the 20th century, when there was
the concept of systems. The highly varied cast of characters a concerted move to emphasize the underlying unity of all art
invested in exploring the potential of this idea includes forms and to connect modern art with industry and daily life.
Buckminster Fuller, Konrad Wachsmann, and Ludwig Mies van Woven artifacts appeared at the forefront of ongoing debates
der Rohe, among others. Rather than focusing on the design around abstraction, the total work of art, and the fusion of art
of unique buildings and objects, they sought to reimagine with technology, challenging the widespread marginalization of
the built environment as an ever-expanding interaction of textiles as “women’s work.”
components that would allow for change over time. Virtually Many of the pioneers in this narrative have been women,
every aspect of the built environment, from furniture to chief among them Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, Florence Knoll,
load-bearing structures, living spaces, and even whole cities, and Sheila Hicks. Also featured will be recent acquisitions
was reimagined as a combination of rule-based systems. by Monika Correa (India), Aurèlia Muñoz (Catalonia), and
Paradigmatic of this logic is a fragment of the original, unitized the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, making clear the
curtain wall system of the UN Secretariat Building in New York, medium’s global relevance.
which has been recently restored and will be presented at
MoMA for the first time. 3 Building Citizens, located on the Museum’s second floor,
in the Taniguchi-designed Rockefeller Building, explores how
Taking a Thread for a Walk, located in The Philip Johnson architects have generated new ideas about the way spaces are
Galleries on the Museum’s third floor, looks at how successive occupied, how buildings are visualized, and the materials with
generations developed new material and constructive which they are fabricated, in an effort to address the needs
languages from the 1890s through the 1970s, highlighting the of diverse sets of individuals. During the societal upheavals
flexibility of textiles, a medium that continues to defy easy of the 1960s, architects and urban planners had a profound
categorization. The installation “takes a thread for a walk” role in shaping how populations lived. Yet friction between
among ancient textile traditions, early 20th-century design architects’ visions and their clients’ needs at times resulted
reform movements, adventurous combinations of natural in the construction of buildings that, while initially critically

16 WORLD of ART