PTA Meeting Minutes, January 18, 2017 Mini-Grant Proposals (see PPT for all details) Vote on Mini Grant Proposal Items All proposals pass with no objectionsPaola AntonelliSenior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.Where her office isMy office is on the fifth floor facing 54th Street. It’s a great site. I have a delightful view. I see a glimpse of my favorite building in New York, which is 9 West 57th Street. No illusionsI have my own office, and I am lucky to have it. It is better to have privacy, but if I were to choose between a cubicle and completely open space, I would choose open space.The illusion of privacy is worse than no privacy. It’s like listening to someone talking on a cellphone. It bothers you, when a conversation between two people wouldn’t bother you at all. 1. The collector’s eyeOne of the first objects that I acquired for the collection was an example of the chair that I sit on. It is an Aeron chair.
I actually saw it being developed by the designers. I was sneaking into their garage in Los Angeles. 2. Bona fide beanbagThe Sacco chair is the original, authentic beanbag. It is Italian and was designed in 1968. It is the first. It is the real thing and it is red. We have one in the collection, but this one is to sit on. Design is to be used. I would never have it just to contemplate it. That would be an aberration. Ready for nap timeI have a really great pillow, because sometimes I take naps in the office. I believe in naps. I won’t do it every day, but sometimes I do take the so-called power nap. It was a gift from the architect and designer David Rockwell. It is a pillow covered with the softest wool. I keep it clean and tucked away for when I want to use it.Not a neat freakI am stunned by very neat desks. It always amazes me that people can be that neat. I admire it, but I could never do it.3. Hug the robotI have a little robot designed by my assistant, Shayna Gentiluomo, based on a project by the artist Raphael Abrams.
She made this big, fuzzy worm that is a robot and wiggles and expresses love if you hug it. It is a huggable robot. I really, really love it.4. What you lookin’ at? I love my Al Pacino doll. It was a gift from my husband. I have no idea. It is Al Pacino from the movie “Scarface,” and it has a button in the back. When I push it, it says Scarface aphorisms in an Al Pacino voice.I also have a CPR dummy. For some reason I am obsessed with CPR. I need to save the people around me. It is deflated right now, but I inflate it sometimes.You be the judgeDesign can be excellent or really bad. But it is always there and it is made for us. What I want to do as a curator at MoMA is to let people see what they would normally miss and give them the critical tools to judge the design around them and take it or leave it. 5. Most overlooked designThe paper clip. It is one of the simplest, most useful and enduring inventions. It has been there forever and it hasn’t really changed. There have been many versions, but the original version is the one that is still enduring.
A symbol for the agesI love the @ sign used in emails. It is a masterpiece that no one thinks about. It is a symbol that has existed since the Middle Ages. It was used by monks who were copying manuscripts to write the Latin preposition “ad,” which means in relation to. It was appropriated by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, when he was creating email.Early riserI wake up at 6 a.m. and read news and answer emails and tweet and take it easy. Then I go to the gym. So I have worked by the time I come to the office at 9:30 a.m. I will often have meetings and phone calls. I spend the day here without a set routine. We work on exhibitions, on the collection, on a blog post. Happily retroI am happy with my BlackBerry. I don’t have any problem with it. I love texting, which is why I have a BlackBerry. I love to be retro in a way, and I love the keyboard.Making a nestThe American office has dominated office design worldwide for good and ill. What is important is that whatever kind of office people work in, they have the chance to customize their space.
People must make their nest.Every which wayMy handle is @curiousoctopus on Twitter, and the reason is that I reach out in many directions and grasp everything, bring it back and digest everything. That is what my office says about me. It says there is enthusiasm and apparent chaos, but in truth an inner order.Alex Bag and Patterson Beckwith , , , and Team is pleased to present a collaborative installation by New York-based artists Alex Bag and Patterson Beckwith. Entitled Cash from Chaos / Unicorns & Rainbows, the exhibition will run from March 29th through April 28th, 2012. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, between Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor. Concurrently, our 47 Wooster Street space will house a one-person exhibition of new paintings by Stanley Whitney. The work in Cash From Chaos / Unicorns & Rainbows consists of footage from Alex Bag and Patterson Beckwith’s legendary late-night public access programs, from which the exhibition takes its title.
The shows were twenty-nine-minute long weekly cablecasts, aired on Channel 34 at 2:30 a.m. on Wedensday nights between 1994 and 1997. The total running length of the project, some 60 hours in duration, has been edited down by Bag and Beckwith to a slighly more manageable eight hours, stored on hour long DVDs fed onto eight dedicated monitors. These Sony cubes are arranged somehwat haphazardly in a kitschy communal environment cobbled together from materials bought at various home decoration centers. Visitors can lounge on bean-bag chairs, swing from ceiling-mounted hammocks, or recline on shag carpeting, while choosing which monitor to watch – a white-cube approximation of channel surfing in the mid-90s. A great deal of the material on view is determined by the medium, both its constraints and allowances. The artists filled their timeslots with prank calls, surreal, decontextualized clips from other programs, and cock-eyed tours of stranger parts of New York City. Television here is both the subject and medium: while it might be an outrageous sendup of broadcast media, it is itself a TV show, and a highly entertaining one at that.
The viewer’s pleasure watching the work is a constant reminder of television’s sinister seductive quality. Each episode of Cash from Chaos opens with Bag and Beckwith destroying the previous week’s program, housed temporarily on the predigital age’s VHS tape. The artists burned, melted, and smashed tapes — once even taking a cassette to a shooting range for use in target practice. This destructive act epitomizes the artists’ fast-paced, in-the-moment approach to the shows, which demanded that they provide twenty-nine minutes worth of new material each week. This time constraint forced them to act on quick impulses in developing each episode’s idea, rarely allowing the luxury of thorough consideration. The work is volatile and highly personal, and showcases the raw, unfiltered conceptual creativity of two young people. The show also acts as a document of a specific New York City, one both individual and totally foreign to the two artists. Some episodes follow them meeting with artists and friends or visiting galleries, giving the viewer a sense of Bag and Beckwith’s milieu.
In others, they become tourists in their own city, using television as an excuse and enabler for activities they either would or could not otherwise take part in, such as a helicopter ride over Manhattan or a visit to a sheep farm. Their roles as “television producers” allowed them myriad opportunities, and always free-of-charge. As Bag explained in a 1996 interview, “people take you very seriously when you tell them that they or their business can be on TV.” Cash from Chaos and Unicorns & Rainbows turn TV against itself, punk-rock satires of the most pervasive form of mass media. The artists, however, recognize their own complicity in both its consumption and production. In one segment, titled Cable Theft Today, Beckwith explains in detail how to steal cable, conceding the omnipresence and even necessity of television in contemporary American culture, while at the same time subverting the corporations and establishments responsible for it. At another point in the show, the two artists visit a fortune-teller, who gives a tarot reading of the show’s future: “I can feel that you guys are into questioning authority,” the psychic deftly intuits.