They look a bit like tourists in their own city. Many actually might be tourists from somewhere else. What they seem to have in common though is their s otherness. At least on the 33rd street station of the 7 train in Queens. They are visitors to the MoMA QNS. It is a bit as if this large institution landed here with little warning. There is only one diner on the corner, and there is only one Hotdog stand. Many of the buildings around here seem to be a work in progress. MoMA is blue. Big blue building has landed. It is a factory building that has been re-purposed to now to present works of art so incredibly familiar that they now seem like old friends on vacation. The space is temporary. The entrance is through a large branded glass door and then over unexplainable ramps, on odd angles. The flow of visitors is funneled through several channels that unite and then separate again. There is a glimpse at some of the art we know. Then there is darkness again, we need to give money, or at least pick up our free tickets. Above all this, in bright , the store, suspended, , beautiful. I want to buy something now, something that marks my presence here now somehow, I want to leave a mark, sign something, and be it a credit card receipt. We never get to the store. We walk past a last barrier. Our tickets are checked by a man who is connected, via phone-wire, to the ceiling, the dark big ceiling, the night sky over all of what we will see. The intimacy of the galleries never sets in. There is no intimacy. It must be the subconscious perception of this space that makes me feel part of a trade show maybe? Are we looking at a car-show maybe? There they are, the cars, indeed. Auto-bodies. Less than 10 cars, beautiful, united in a room. This works. I am in a large hall with a concrete floor, and there are the cars. There are footmarks all over the "do not step here" marks on the white car presentation trays.
We move on, away from here, back to the narrow space, into a brighter gallery, the Van Goghs are here and the Braques and the Picassos and the many visitors who came here to see them in their new temporary home. And it must be the sound, or is it the color of the high ceiling that extends above it all, indeed like a sky, that gives a feeling of work in progress. Are we in a camping museum under an artificial sky?