In late 1971, Yoko Ono announced an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art — a one-woman show titled Museum Of Modern (F)art. When visitors arrived at the museum, however, there was little evidence of her work. Outside the entrance, a man wore a sandwich board stating that Ono had released a multitude of flies and that the public was invited to follow their flight within the museum and across the city. Now, over 40 years later, Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 surveys the decisive decade that led up to that unauthorized exhibition at MoMA, bringing together approximately 125 of her early objects, works on paper, installations, performances, audio recordings, and films, alongside rarely seen archival materials.

The exhibitions is organized chronologically, with thematic currents, providing multiple ways for visitors to navigate the exhibition. It brings together works that invite interaction, including Painting to Be Stepped On (1960/61), and Ono’s groundbreaking performance Bag Piece (1964), together with her earliest works, which were often based on instructions that Ono communicated to viewers in verbal or written form. At times poetic, humorous, unsettling, and idealistic, Ono’s text-based works anticipated the objects that she presented throughout the decade, including Grapefruit (1964), her influential book of instructions; Apple (1966), a solitary piece of fruit placed on a Plexiglas pedestal; and Half-A-Room (1967), an installation of bisected domestic objects. The exhibition also explores Ono’s seminal performances and films, including Cut Piece (1964) and Film No. 4 (1966/67). At the end of the decade, Ono’s collaborations with John Lennon, including Bed-In (1969) and the WAR IS OVER! if you want it (1969–) campaign, boldly communicated her commitment to promoting world peace.

“Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971″ is curated by Christophe Cherix and Klaus Biesenback and will run until 7 September 2015.

What was modernity and how can we understand it today? Can modernity even be firmly located in the past? If we consider architecture and design, the disciplines’ modernity inevitably encompasses a wide range of practices, many of which responded to similar theoretical frameworks – rejection of the past and utopian visions of the future, self-consciousness, progressive belief in human power to shape their environment through rational experimentation, knowledge and technology – yet took on entirely different forms. Modernity escapes narrow definitions and limited geographic and temporal frames; in fact, the elusive nature of modernity allows for varied iterations and shapes, which are not represented by how it has been theoretically approached. Turning to the discourse on architecture and design, modernity – broadly paralleled to International Style – seems to conform to a monolithic view of the period, inevitably West-centric and not at all international.

With the attempt of broadening the understanding of modernity in architecture today and defying such a limited view of the discipline’s past, the Museum of Modern Art in New York takes an in-depth view at architecture of South America with a new exhibition: “Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980”. Opening 50 years after MoMA’s last survey of the continent’s architectural practice – Latin American Architecture since 1945, held in 1955 – the exhibition curated by Barry Bergdoll, Patricio del Real, Jorge Francisco Liernur and Carlos Eduardo Comas, takes on a quarter of the century of architectural history, tracing its most significant developments, ideas and protagonists. Far from a view of Latin America’s architecture as a playground for European architects or a showcase of its already well-known stars (such as Oscar Niemeyer or Lina Bo Bardi), the show is structured around five central themes: “Urban Laboratories”, “Cities in Transition”, “Housing”, “Export” and “Utopia”. Each of these sections shapes a unique architectural discourse, specific to the continent, while also highlighting its connection to wider modern developments and modes of thinking.

Latin America in Construction, an incredibly revealing and thorough exhibition, brings together more than 500 original works that have largely never been exhibited: from architectural drawings and models, vintage photographs, and films from the period collected from architecture and film archives, universities, and architecture offices throughout the region. “I was stunned by how Latin America had been systematically not part of my own historical education in architecture—despite the fact that I have three degrees in art and architectural history,” says Barry Bergdoll, the lead curator of the show. “Most history books on modern architecture in the English language assign a subordinate role to Latin America, and I was intrigued if it might be possible to see whether, in the postwar period, the region had been a full actor in a transatlantic development along with North America and Europe. Not simply as a place where the pupils of Le Corbusier went to build, but a place of origins of ideas.” In fact, this exhibition comes as a signal of a wider effort to read modernity as a period and space of thought defined by pluralism of ideas that deserve to be understood, than by canonic interpretations of theory and styles.

“Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980” runs until July 19th 2015 at the MoMA in New York.

From March until June, the Museum of Modern Art puts on display an exhibition dedicated to the (most) famous Icelander – the composer, musician and singer Björk. The exhibition draws from more than 20 years of the artist’s daring and innovative projects and her eight full-length albums to chronicle her career through sound, film, visuals, instruments, objects, and costumes. Spread out throughout the museum’s building, the exhibition provides a visual as well as acoustic immersion into the work of this great artist. Starting from the lobby, instruments used on Biophilia (2011) — a gameleste, pipe organ, gravity harp, and Tesla coil — play songs from the album at different points throughout the day. On the second floor, two spaces have been constructed: one is dedicated to a new sound and video installation, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, for “Black Lake”, a song from Björk’s new album Vulnicura; and the second is a cinema room that screens a retrospective in music videos, from Debut (1993) to Biophilia. On the third floor, Songlines presents an interactive, location-based audio experience through Björk’s albums, with a biographical narrative that is both personal and poetic, written by the acclaimed Icelandic writer Sjón, along with many visuals, objects, and costumes for a complete and comprehensive outline of the musician’s career.

Music and design—art forms that share aesthetics of rhythm, tonality, harmony, interaction, and improvisation—have long had a close affinity, perhaps never more so than during the 20th century. Radical design and technological innovations, from the LP to the iPod and from the transistor radio to the Stratocaster, have profoundly altered our sense of how music can be performed, heard, distributed, and visualized. Avant-garde designers — among them Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Lilly Reich, Saul Bass, Jørn Utzon and Daniel Libeskind — have pushed the boundaries of their design work in tandem with the music of their time. Drawn entirely from the MoMA’s collection, Making Music Modern gathers designs for auditoriums, instruments, and equipment for listening to music, along with posters, record sleeves, sheet music, and animation. The exhibition examines alternative music cultures of the early 20th century, the rise of radio during the interwar period, how design shaped the “cool” aesthetic of midcentury jazz and hi-fidelity culture, and its role in countercultural music scenes from pop to punk, and later 20th-century design explorations at the intersection of art, technology, and perception. Making Music Modern will run until November 1st 2015 at MoMA in New York.

The word design has infinite meaning. We witness it every day while we shop for our groceries, drive a car, use the computer or buy our clothes and furniture. Every single object we touch has, to a certain level, been designed. That is what makes design so interesting, because it impacts our lives in deep, yet almost invisible ways. Nevertheless, its meaning and usefulness have for so long been publicly distorted. Hence, we often confuse design for styling, for a superficial quality which can be applied to an object to our choice. But this conception of design is completely wrong, since without this silent practice we wouldn’t even have those objects we interact with daily.

As Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA puts it: “We were able to realize that design artists are the ones that transform the great revolutions into small gestures. Scientists and engineers produce disruptive inventions but designers are the ones that transform those innovations into objects that we can all use.
 Without them, there would be no progress in our lives; we wouldn’t have microwaves to heat up our food, we would not be able to use the Internet, we wouldn’t be driving cars with such ease. I could go on because the list is long, and the same goes for all the different types of technology. So design artists therefore play a fundamental role. If you compare society to a digestive system, design artists play the part of enzymes because it’s thanks to them that society is able to digest the inventions it receives.”

It is exactly this approach to design that the current exhibition at MoMA, “Applied Design” curated by Paola Antonelli and Kate Carmody, tries to highlight. It testifies the amazing diversity of contemporary graphic design and all the different forms it can take, from interface and interaction design, dynamic visualizations, products, furniture, 3D printed chairs and bowls, emergency equipment, and biodesign. Hence, you can see mine detonator by the young Dutch/Afghani designer Massoud Hassani to a bowl made by transforming desert sand into glass using only the energy of the sun, together with 14 video-games that the museum has recently acquired with the idea of pushing the boundaries of common preconceptions about what design is, or should be.

As the wider public, through bombastic design weeks and posh magazines, is being falsely induced in thinking that design should only be beautiful, almost as a piece of art you can just sit on, it is the work of curators like Antonelli and shows like “Applied Design” that we should all be more aware of since as Gui Bonsiepe states: “Design still is in this transition period, in which it is often considered a kind of external extravagance, which you can do or not do. For this reason, the notion of design as ‘added value’ is so misleading, because it presumes that you can have an object that is without design, to which you can ‘add’ something. But no, it is design by itself, whether it is bad design, this is another question.”

“Applied Design” is on show at Museum of Modern Art in New York until the 31st of January 2014.

While everyone is finishing their ‘best’ and ‘worst’ of 2012 lists and while we are slowly becoming more aware of the fact that yet another year has past, we thought that the best way to fight melancholia and resentment in not meeting our 2012 goals is setting a new list of those for the upcoming year. Well, here is a short list of exhibitions that shouldn’t be missed in the new 2013 year.

Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things
The end of January welcomes the first of our beautiful 2013 shows. With quite a geeky design title “Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things” this exhibition at Design Museum in London aims at unveiling the key designs that have shaped the modern world, tracing the history and processes of contemporary design. This exhibition should run for two years offering a comprehensive view on design and includes furniture, product, fashion, transport and architecture alongside a selection of prototypes, models and films.

Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth

This February will see the opening of a retrospective of Dieter Roth’s particularly dense print work at our beloved MoMA in New York. One of the fathers of the contemporary artist’s books ‘genre’, Roth has through the years (and this show is particularly focused on the period between 1960 and 1975) created numerous works that played with the idea of books as objects. From book-sausages filled with paper instead of meat (Literaturwurst) to pieces dipped in melted chocolate or a series of postcards, this exhibition tries to gather all of his major book-works among which a particular relevance is given to the book Snow. This is the show many of the contemporary publishers trying to delve in the artist’s books world should really look up to!

David Bowie Is
As the year marches further, even the shows get spicier! Hence, this March, precisely March the 23rd, will see another grand opening: the already much talked about David Bowie retrospective. The V&A has been granted the exclusive access to David Bowie Archive in organizing a truly amazing show that will explore “the creative processes of Bowie as a musical innovator and cultural icon, tracing his shifting style and sustained reinvention across five decades”. More than 300 objects, including handwritten lyrics, original costumes, fashion, photography, film, music videos, set designs, Bowie’s own instruments and album artwork are bound to reveal almost everything about this amazing artist and on of the greatest icons of the 20th century.

If these shows don’t amaze you and are not worthy of your 2013 list of goals, please make sure you anyhow manage to squeeze some art and design in it, it should make your life a bit better!

“Children are the future and our most valuable resource,” is an overly heard saying whose meaning we don’t take quite seriously. That is why a soon opening exhibition at MoMA, taking design as its maginfying glass, should open our eyes to the infamous saying and make us reconsider the position of a child in our society. 
Titled “Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-200”, curated by Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor. The exhibition departs from Swedish design reformer and social theorist Ellen Key’s book “Century of the Child”. The book, written in the 1900, tries to emphasize the importance of children’s well-being as an interest of utmost importance to all society.

The paradigm of children’s prosperity was taken throughout the 20th century as a paradigm for progressive thinking and the renewal of the modern society. As a consequence, designers and artists have produced work that often involved childhood, but as such, has even more often been disregared in design cycles. Hence, many of the objects (around 500) exhibited in the show, even though created by famous figures of design and architecture history, have remained almost unknown. For their authors, the design projects have functioned as a sort of escape, particularly during the avant-garde, from the roughness and routine of everyday life.

The exhibited works include Jean Prouve’s School Desk, a glass desk designed by Gio Ponti, children’s chairs by Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto, and Kit Nicholson, LEGO building blocks and the Slinky, Charles and Ray Eames’ projects, Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photograph Pioneer Girl, Roald Dahl’s The Gremlins, to name but a few.

If we are fond of believing that design has a fundamental role in our society, and that children are its future, then this exhibition showing years of prolific designers’ work on the theme can only confirm it.

“Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900 -2000” will be on show from July 29 – November 5, 2012 at MoMA.

In our everyday life we never actually ‘think’ about the language. While for most the language is often invisible, some are more attracted to its visible form – the letters.

Significantly, graphic designers sometimes get lost in this tangible form of basic human expression, often considering the visible part as an abstract form, thus ignoring its meaning. But they are not the only ones who work with material qualities of language. Since Apollinaire and concrete poetry movement, artist and poets have been handling language as a physical structure.

It is exactly this kind of approach that MoMA is trying to investigate in its latest exhibition entitled “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language”. The curator Laura Hoptman has decided to take an insight into material qualities of language explored by artist working with a wide range of media.

The exhibition provides both a historical look (even though some of the artist could still be considered contemporary) through the works of Carl Andre, Marcel Broodthaers, Henri Chopin, Marcel Duchamp, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Giorno, Kitasono Katue, Ferdinand Kriwet, Liliane Lijn, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner and others.

While these modernist experiments are being presented through a timeline, in order to get a broader historical view of the phenomenon and tell the story of concrete language in visual art, the contemporary part of the exhibition focuses on the new ways of investigating the concrete language phenomenon. Hence, the ratios has become not only a poet but also writer, graphic designer, performer and publisher working with a contemporary mix of the available media.

Thus, the fact that among the impressive list of contemporary artist we can find designers like Experimental Jetset, isn’t a pure coincidence. Since graphic design has become an evolving collaborative approach, more than a defined discipline, this exhibition sheds some light on these kind of practices, that both open the discipline to contaminations from other fields as well as free it from the duties of (commercial) communication.

The exhibition, opening the 6th of May and running until 27th of August, will be accompanied by a catalogue curated by Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt from Dexter Sinister. If you actually manage to miss the exhibition, you must stay tuned for their Bulletins of the Serving Library where concrete language goes digital.

How much are you willing to pay to see Kraftwerk? The question loomed large on the 59,280 distressed minds who’d uniformly failed to get tickets the morning of February 22nd. “You are waiting in the queue,” the screen repeated for hours on end. “You do not need to refresh, this page will automatically redirect you when it is your turn to purchase tickets.” For the 99%, that turn never came. No surprise―the legendary electronic pioneers retrospective eight night stint at MoMA only had room for 400 people per night, and a quarter of those tickets went to Volkswagen to give away in raffles and promo plugs. The rest were shuttered to the Craigslist gutters, where the cheapest ticket would set you back a month or two’s rent.

Kraftwerk have been called many things: the Beatles of pop, the godfathers of hip-hop, the founders of electronic music, etc., but they’re also very funny, though you’re likely find water in hell before you see Ralf Hütter laughing. Are they trying to be? For a bunch of humans bent on disappearing into the technology they embrace, not bluffing is very important. “This show will be performed by robots and no one I know will attend!” one fan whined, and he was right. No one knew any real humans who were going, just like how no one knows how Kraftwerk makes the sounds they do, especially in a live setting. The aura that surrounds the music is almost as mysterious as the men who make it.

But there is something deeply ironic about four Germans making funky music while standing stoically behind pods, tinkering with computers, synthesizers and, according to one MoMA employee, iPads. They’re pop stars, yet their hips don’t shake, and I’ve never seen their eyes blink. Their attention to detail is astonishing, kind of like watching a master mechanic pound out a five-cylinder engine from sheet metal, only Kraftwerk’s engine is responsible for churning out some of the best pop singles of the last 40 years: “The Robots,” “The Model,” “Autobahn,” not to mention entire albums: Trans-Europe Express, The Man-Machine, Radio-Activity. So yeah, they work like robots, all day in night in their legendary Kling Klank studio just outside of Düsseldorf, but the music that comes out of it continues to be strangely warm and innately human.

Cindy Sherman has played many parts over the years, Hitchcock lady, horror victim, Madonna, Monroe, low-brow actress, ageing socialite, and sun-burnt Beverly Hills do-nothings among them. A lot of what she deals with identity and gender, but a lot of it is also deliberately abstract and multi-faceted, which is why it’s always been somewhat difficult to keep Sherman pigeonholed in one camp or another for too long. She simply refuses to be pinned to one thing or another. It’s also why she’s so popular.

What has never been revealed is the real Cindy Sherman, and you’re certainly not going to find her here. Her expansive, brilliant retrospective at MoMA should instead be viewed in part as an exercise in mass identity contortion. Though you can see that iconic face in nearly every shot, at 58 she remains an elusive figure as ever.

Sherman has long been in the business of deception and illusion, ever since she blew up with her Untitled Film Still, a brilliant 69-picture series from the late 70s that showcased many of the themes she would spend the next four decades exploring: gender roles, identity, voyeurism, exploitation, and consumerism. She executes in one frame what most filmmakers couldn’t dream up with three hours worth of tape. It’s impossible to tell exactly what you’re looking at. If born 100 years ago she probably would’ve been a rabbit-wielding magician in competition with Houdini, but in an era where media images are cropped and manipulated beyond recognition she is instead a modern trickster who utilizes photography as a way to showcase the unreliability of identity. Contrary to popular belief, the camera does lie―hers does, anyway―and often does so with an eye winking in the audience’s direction. The first thing you see off the escalator at MoMA are four 18 foot pictures of women dressed in what look like homemade Viking costumes, their facial features photoshopped just enough to make you cock your head. It’s funny, but not in a laugh-out-loud kind of way.

Artifice and irony have always bled through even her most serious portraits, though a large chunk of the opening afternoon crowd seemed to miss the inherent humor in her work. “That is disgusting!” remarked one young woman, notebook in hand, when she saw one of Sherman’s “LA women” staring at her, her tanned and sagging breasts all but dripping out onto the floor. Others could hardly stomach her late 80s work, one of the rare times Sherman stepped out of the frame and instead filled it with raw meat, cookies, vomit, and sunglasses to make some sort of comment on the AIDS epidemic (Untitled #175). A few people laughed when they saw Sherman playing Caravaggio playing Bacchus, wryly eyeing the camera with fresh grapes between her fingers.

How could you not?