Two interesting shows at MOMA

Artists from Joan Miró and André Masson to Robert Gober and Louise Bourgeois to Nicola Tyson and Mark Manders have all distorted and disoriented our most familiar of referents, playing out personal, cultural, or social anxieties and desires on unwitting anatomies.

In a collaborative, chance-based drawing game known as the exquisite corpse, several Surrealist artists subjected the human body to distortions and juxtapositions that resulted in fantastic composite figures. A new exhibition, entitled ‘Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration’ at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, considers how this and related practices - in which the body is dismembered or reassembled, swollen or multiplied, propped with prosthetics or fused with nature and the machine—have recurred in art throughout the 20th century and to the present day.

If art history reveals an unending impulse to render the human figure as a symbol of potential perfection and a system of primary organization, these works show that artists have just as persistently been driven to disfigure the body.

On the other hand, recent acquisitions are featured in a reinstallation of highlights from the design collection covering a century of dramatic aesthetic and technological innovation - from the late 19th to late 20th centuries in a show, called ‘Shaping Modernity 1880–1980’.

Diverse types of modern design representing various geographic origins and styles are organized around period-specific themes: The International New Art 1880–1918; Metal and Glass 1920s–1950s; and Out of the Box: Italy 1960s–1980s.

The installation reveals new acquisitions, including an interior design for a fireplace wall (1901) by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald; a fragment of an exterior relief frieze from the Susan Lawrence Dana House in Springfield, Illinois (1902–04), by Frank Lloyd Wright; a modernist Czechoslovak table lamp (c. 1930) by Miroslav Prokop; a Silver Streak Iron (c. 1946) manufactured by Saunders Corporation; and a Shiva vase (1973) by Ettore Sottsass.

Another highlight is the large purple Tuttuno all-in-one living environment (1971) by Internotredici Associati, displayed for the first time at the Museum since the landmark exhibition ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972).