«OH, ART IS TOO HARD»

If you feel a giddy rush of nostalgia at MoMA's new show, then you were probably around (and conscious) in the '60s and '70s. It was a time when current events -- war, social unrest and creeping gentrification -- found their way onto canvas, and folks such as Robert Rauschenberg, Yoko Ono and Robert Mapplethorpe were thinking way out of the box.
Those three and nearly 60 others are represented in "Contemporary Art From the Collection," a show that's, by turns, provocative, poignant and stupefying.From the 150,000 or so objects in MoMA's collection, curators Kathy Halbreich and Christophe Cherix have plucked 130 works dating from the late '60s to the present. Many, either for lack of space or context, have languished in MoMA's storage lockers for years.So it's thrilling to see, say, Kara Walker's 50-foot-long installation with a title nearly as unwieldy: "Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart," a slyly subversive take on Victorian-era silhouettes, suffused with sex and violence

New York Post
July 2 2010