EXPRESS YOURSELF.(Here Is Elsewhere, at the Museum of Modern Art, in Queens)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 09-FEB-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

I've been thinking about "Here Is Elsewhere," a group show that just closed at the Museum of Modern Art, in Queens. It was selected from the museum's permanent collection by Mona Hatoum, a Lebanese-born (to Palestinian Christian refugees), London-based sculptor and installation-maker who has been ubiquitous in international exhibitions since the early nineteen-nineties. The show consisted of sixty works by twenty artists, most of them dating from the past fifteen years, and all bearing some affinity to Hatoum's own art. I was slow to gauge its importance, beyond agreeing with Roberta Smith, of the Times, that it affirmed the value of having artists curate shows from museum collections. Seeing art as artists see it--through a play of sensibility rather than a filter of ideas--cuts against the deadly pedagogy of much current curating, especially at institutions of contemporary art. Strikingly, "Here Is Elsewhere" featured the very kind of art that is most typically accompanied, in museum shows, by didactic, moral-pointing wall texts. Eschewing these, Hatoum submitted topflight examples of such work to a fair aesthetic trial. The perhaps not fully intentional result was revelatory: it enabled a viewer to look at the era of politically rhetorical postmodernism as history....

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