The Warm Up MoMA PS1

Emmanuel:
Yeah.
Alrighty. Hi!
Lizzy:
My name is Lizzie.
Bobby:
Bobby Pache.
Andrea:
Hi, my name is Andrea.
Emmanuel:
Emmanuel Santos.
Emily
Emily.
Emmanuel:
And I worked with the Visitor Engagement team.
Lizzy:
Here at MoMA PS1.
Emily
So the VE team is our Visitor Engagement team. And we're here to answer your questions and talk to you about art and have fun conversations.
Bobby:
You know, talking every day, being charming, et cetera.
Andrea:
It has shown me how long I can stand for one period of time.
Emmanuel:
I'd like to be in the coat room, having a nice place to sit while I draw, and then having people come over and bring their stuff, but then also notice me drawing and just like, "oh wow, you're an artist!" I'm like, "yeah, I am."
Emily
So we're going to go on a tour together through the museum to look at some art, but also some really special spaces.
Lizzy:
Some spaces that are special to us on the VE team.
Bobby:
Cool.
Andrea:
Nailed it.
Emmanuel:
Perfect.

Emily:
All right. You want to walk over with me, you can. This is a fun, creepy corner that people are very afraid of. So we're standing in the boiler, the old boiler room of MoMA PS1 right now in front of the large boiler that was set down here in 1902. That was then gold leafed by Saul Melman back in 2010 as part of our greater New York show.
Bobby:
And you have this massive furnace...
Emily:
It's the original boiler of the room. And then it was like abandoned and not used anymore.
Bobby:
Oh, so this is a Relic. It's very old. It's still very beautiful.
Emily:
It's fun. Because it's one of the only pieces you could also like totally interact with. So like you're allowed to open all the doors. I always touch the parts that are just old and grimy and not covered in gold leaf, just because gross.
Bobby:
And if you keep on looking at it, you obviously see that it's about halfway covered in gold leafing. And this is the work of Saul Melman. You can see gold a lot in Catholic artwork around deities and it's always associated with life. So with this piece, he wanted to bring the boiler back to life. So he used gold leafing to cover the surface and he also worked as a surgeon in the emergency room. So they think that "Central Governor" got his name because of that relation. "Central Governor" means the heart.
Emily:
He named the peace "Central Governor" after this kind of idea that the boiler was the heart of the building.
Bobby:
So, well by reinvigorating the heart you can kind of bring back to life, this museum. And that's what I think he was trying to do in some way.
Emily:
The gross fun details of this piece is that he didn't use any sort of like traditional glue or water based kind of like adhesive.
Bobby:
All the gold leaving was applied with his bodily fluids. That includes sweat, blood and urine.
Emily:
He used blood, sweat and tears, like literally.
Bobby:
I would say that this is definitely one of the visitor favorites.
Emily:
If you walk over to the piece and you look at the center where you see some lights, you'll notice these test tubes filled with a white liquid.
Bobby:
There's two vials. I don't don't know what they were used for, but Saul Melman has repurposed them and inserted his semen in it.
Emily:
People have gasped. People just will like give you blank stares. People just will kind of explode in laughter.
Bobby:
Yes that sounds weird, but there's this association with life.
Emily:
I think it kind of kicks them off into a good point of understanding how many strange things are here.
Bobby:
So, many people might think it's funny, but to me it kind of makes sense. It's outlandish, but once I look at the artwork as a whole, I feel like I understand it and appreciate it.

Bobby:
My favorite piece from the museum is by Richard Artschwager, and I like it because the story behind it.
Lizzie
Before we get into the piece, I want to back up real fast and give you some history of PS1. The building we're in is almost 130 years old. It was originally a public school building, the first public school in Long Island City.
Bobby:
This school only lasted for about 60 years.
Lizzie:
It functioned as a school until the mid 20th century when it closed, because it was sort of falling apart, and there was low enrollment in Long Island City at the time.
Andrea:
And that's when Alana Hies came along with the groundbreaking idea to use these abandoned public spaces, to present contemporary art exhibitions, which would focus on the newest art trends and promote new and emerging artists.
Lizzie:
So if you can imagine the building has been abandoned for quite a few years, it's in terrible shape. The paint is peeling.
Andrea:
Rooms still have seats in them. Some had desks, some had standing water.
Lizzie:
Flooded it in different places.
Bobby:
There was dust everywhere.
Andrea:
I mean, it was that bad.
Lizzie:
The first show that opens at PS1 is called Rooms. Rooms was an opportunity for artists to kind of create within the architecture of the museum and using that as their canvas.
Andrea:
That was the architecture of the building was as important as the work, or they were equally entwined. There's really not separate. And it's because they're meant to live in the building and age with the building and be the building.
Lizzie:
But there was a very short window of time before rooms opened. It was only about six weeks from when the firm, when Allana Hies the founder signed the lease on the building to when rooms opened. So she hired, or sort of begged a lot of the artists who were in the show to help with this cleanup process. And so they were really involved in sort of getting the building clean and up to code. The museum gets noticed by city council that they won't be able to open unless they have five marked exits throughout the entire building. Richard Artschwager went back to them and said, "One of the main sort of theme of this show that we're trying to do is that you really can't tell where the art begins in the building ends and vice versa. Having these illuminated exit signs would totally take the visitor out of that space".
Bobby:
And they were like "No exit signs, no open to the public".
Lizzie:
And so he said "Fine, you want your five exit signs here they are".
Bobby:
He was like, okay, I'll give you five exit signs. So he took five light bulbs. If you look up to the ceiling, you can see them. And right now we have three on display, exit, exit, exit, and they're right after the other. They're not spread out through the museum. So this is why I find it so funny instead of spreading them out, he decided to line them up in one hallway, leading to a wall, that's not even a proper exit.
Lizzie:
And he called it one of the art pieces in the show, 'Don't fight city hall'. I really liked that story because it really speaks to sort of the good humor of the like original artists who were in the room show.
Bobby:
And I like it so much because it's petty, it's humorous. And I find that very humane. I'm a Spanish man and petty runs in our veins.

Andrea:
Now I'm going to take you into the lobby and show you a little something that you probably would miss. Most grownups normally miss this installation, but the children usually always see it. Maybe it's because they're lower to the ground and that's one of the reasons they see it, or it just could be because their heads aren't as cluttered with information as adults. But this piece can be found after you enter the front doors, if you turn left, it's between the front door and the windows. So the artist that I'm going to talk about is Pipilotti Rist.
Well, this installation, it's a little teeny tiny little video in the hole in the floor. Well, now it's really interesting because so many people when I try to point out, I don't think that they get that I'm trying to show them there's actually something installed in the floor. Now, usually it would be busier in a lobby and it would be loud and it would be hard to hear that. Where now, since it's quieter, you can hear it. And now I see more people where they're walking in and they're hearing this and they can't figure out where they're hearing the sound's coming from or the soundtrack. And you never think to look down on the floor, so I just usually like to go over and they're like, Oh" They're so surprised and it's really fun to watch that.

Emily:
Okay. Cecily's on the other side and I was like, where is she? We're standing in front of Cecily Brown's piece on the second floor in stairwell B.
Emmanuel:
I refer it to like, as a mess, but like in a really good way, like it's a really nice mess on this wall in stair B.
Emily:
The more you spend with it, the more little details you see I'm going to want to use, I always use the word orgy. Am I allowed to use that word on this?
Emmanuel:
Massive orgy of naked bodies, like a literal orgy.
Emily:
You'll notice different bodies kind of intertwined and inter tangled in each other. Predominantly these male bodies, nude, kind of interacting at interesting angles and some not the most flattering.
Emmanuel:
Whenever I talk about that piece after the Torah has had its Gables. I talk about John Berger's the Ways of Seeing. He's a big art critic, and one of the things he speaks about is the difference between nudity and nakedness. The difference between nudity and nakedness is that nakedness is like a sort of like unawareness that people are observing you while you're without clothing. And nudity is the sort of this choice of wanting to be without clothes. So like, I like to imagine that honestly, Cecily Brown was going for that sort of nudity. The figures that she's painting, they are acknowledging that they're nude, they're enjoying their nakedness. They're enjoying being observed, essentially.
Emily:
She's really interested in previous art movements like abstract expressionism and kind of the idea that those are always such male centered practices and kind of movements within the art history canon. And so she's really kind of interested in taking that kind of male gaze and that aggression that's in them and kind of flipping it on its head. So it's kind of her opportunity to take a chance to say to these abstract expressionists artists that anything they can do, she can do better and kind of using them and their bodies themselves as the stepping stone to do that. Kind of using them as her own subject matter and treating them how they've treated women in the past.

Lizzie:
So my name is Lizzie. I've been a Visitor Engagement Associate here for almost two years. My first experience at PS1 though was about four years ago at the Art Book Fair. It was still really warm, it's in September every year. And I just have this one memory of sitting out in the courtyard and air conditioning water from the window units in the offices on the third floor was like dripping on me because it was the only little square of space I could find. And just like people watching the massive crowds and I just moved to New York so I felt very cool. And so that's what I've always really loved about PS1. That's like in its bones and its history is this like alternative space. Yeah. It's a really fun place to visit and then maybe even more fun to work here.