Sometimes, you can tell all you need to know about a show just by looking at the title. It would be bad advice unless, of course, it wasn’t habitually true, such as in the case of Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture, the latest exhibition to go on view in the third-floor galleries at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). This is curator Pedro Gadanho’s third and last show at MoMA, after two previous efforts failed to live up to their politically aware agendas. Luckily, this one opens with a less loaded premise: to consider the single-family home and its archetypes as an expression of “cultural exchange” between architects and artists—beginning with a titular project by Frederick Kiesler, the lesser Modernist who died 50 years ago.
This isn’t a large space by any standard, and the artifacts, all of them pulled from the permanent collection, feel like they were shoehorned into an unwilling narrative. They are divided into three categories: a prototype, photographs, and drawings of Endless House; archival documentation of other interdisciplinary architectural proposals; and architectonic experiments in a variety of media from painting to video. Each could be the basis of its own stand-alone show. Near the entrance is Kiesler’s design, which uses organic geometries to create an elastic environment “animated through a synthesis of painting, poetry, dance, theater, and sculpture.” (In his hands, even reinforced concrete looks vaguely gynecological). How this would work in practice is unclear, but this is besides the point, since Kiesler is mainly here to serve as a lede.
If this feels like déjà vu, that’s because we’ve seen the formula before, in Gadahno’s MoMA debut. That exhibition, about “political stances in architecture and urban design,” brought together the likes of Koolhaas and Eisenman with artist-dissident Ai Wei Wei and apartheid photographer David Goldblatt. (His second effort, on “tactical urbanisms for expanding megacities,” took politics underground by reframing it as planning for the subaltern.) This time around, Gadanho has dropped the socially conscious routine but kept the curatorial approach, which is summed up nicely as “putting the cart before the horse.” Naturally, the current show suffers from many of the same problems that plagued the prior two: awkward and unresolved displays, arbitrary or forced thematics, a bad-faith attempt to neutralize the unsavory aspects of contemporary architectural practice by placing them within an obsolete historical framework.
Yet the real sleight of hand occurs at the level of rhetoric. “Intersection,” after all, is a word career ideologues use when they want to sound theory-ish but non-ideological. To get the critics off their trail, the curatorial team has spammed the press release and wall texts with this and other Pomo shibboleths: “juxtaposition,” “synthesis,” “collapsed boundaries,” “blurred distinctions.” If nothing else, the art world’s abuses of the English language will always be a good punch line. But what Kiesler and his contemporaries originally meant by this idea is not how Gadanho and his staff have chosen to interpret it. Where the former was an applied, collaborative process, the latter amounts to a kind of co-branding, through which each side sponges up the prestige of the other as a means of upping its own share in the experience economy’s race to the bottom.