NEW YORK — Want to add some excitement to your annual spring cleaning? Don’t forget that you can donate old clothes, books, and trinkets to the Museum of Modern Art — at least for a few weeks. The New York institution is accepting second-hand items from the public that will be sorted, displayed, and sold this fall in the museum’s atrium by artist Martha Rosler. The endeavor is certainly useful for museumgoers with a tendency for hoarding — but exactly what does “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale” have to say as an artwork?
“It is, in a way, a huge, collective readymade,” MoMA curator Sabine Breitwieser told ARTINFO in an interview. “A museum is a repository of our culture through artifacts, but our lives are also defined by everyday objects. Duchamp already showed us that the everyday can become an art object when shown at a museum.” “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale,” Breitweiser explains, takes Duchamp’s idea and pushes it further — items chosen by the viewer, not the artist, become the artwork.
The exhibition, running from November 17 to 30, will be Rosler’s largest garage sale to date. She staged her first sale at the University of California, San Diego, in 1973, and has since recreated it several times. (Over the years, Rosler has kept particularly special discoveries, like a cache of intimate family slides, for herself.) To participate, art lovers are invited to drop off unwanted belongings at MoMA and MoMA PS1, respectively, on June 2 and 3, as well as a on few to-be-determined dates in July. (The museum also accepted donations from the public over the last two weekends, and has collected objects from museum staff and trustees.)
Rosler herself stressed the importance of public participation in the artwork. “I wanted to bring the garage sale model to an art space, where the question of worth and value, use and exchange, are both glaringly placed front and center and completely represented and denied,” she states in an interview on MoMA’s Web site. “I wanted the work to engage the visitors not as observers but as participants, ones enacting the impulse to possess and to get a bargain.” As in previous installments, MoMA will photograph visitors with the objects they purchased; earlier photographs of happy shoppers taken at other garage sales will be projected on a wall in the museum.
As many devoted MoMA-goers have noticed, “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale” is the latest in a series of participatory installations in the atrium. “The museum is embracing performance now,” says Breitwieser. After formal, staged performances like Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present” and a recent concert series by the electro-pop band Kraftwerk, the curator says she sought to find a performance that “deals with the everyday.” In addition to reflecting the ordinary, Rosler’s garage sale will take on a life of its own, transforming as objects are bought and sold. “For two weeks, as things come and go,” Breitwieser said “every day we will have a different exhibition.”
To donate objects to Rosler's garage sale, check MoMA's Web site for collection dates and locations. Recent donations will be posted online via the museum's Facebook and Twitter.