This weekend an exhibition opened at MOMA by Francis Alys that does not include a brilliant artwork I assume because it explores the meaning of the division of Jerusalem.
MOMA’s exhibit includes three works. It does not include “The Green Line,” likely the most prominent work in the Tate National Gallery’s exhibit of Alys’s work last year, which features discussions by Israelis and Palestinians as a soundtrack to the image of the artist walking through Jerusalem carrying a punctured can of green paint. It is brilliant and brings out ways the artist’s work attends to social and cultural issues with poetry and surprise. (A video based on the work and featuring a conversation between Alys and Moshe Dayan’s son is above.)
In the installations at MOMA and PS1 much of the work stems from linear trajectories such as the artist pushing a block of ice through Mexico City. The Green Line would significantly enrich viewers’ experience of the artist’s wide ranging endeavors.
Based on Tony Kushner’s experience this week, I wonder if the curatorial team does not wish to provoke the museum’s Honorary Chairman Ronald Lauder and other possible Likudniks on the board of trustees.
The film and accompanying installation of objects was installed at the Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea in 2007. This is from the press release:
“…a film in collaboration with Julien Devaux as well as a map of Alÿs’s journey, photocollages, paintings, drawings, and a group of sculptures, was exhibited in part at The Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2005. The film, which revisits the artist’s 1995 work entitled The Leak, shows Alÿs carrying a dripping can of green paint along the armistice boundary that Moshe Dayan marked on a map with green pencil after Israel’s War of Independence ended in 1948. The piece questions the physicality and cultural relevance of the Green Line, its function as a social and spiritual division in the city of Jerusalem, and its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
It was good enough for The Israel Museum but not for MOMA. Astonishing!
