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"Out of Time," the third annual reinstallation of the rehoused Museum of Modern Art's capacious contemporary galleries, is a mixed bag of works from the past four decades, with a trenchant and, considering MOMA's history, somewhat melancholy theme. Here is a museum, the museum of the twentieth century, whose founding idea was a time line: the march of modernization. That story disintegrated in the nineteen-sixties, when minimalism rejected the framed and pedestalled suggestiveness of historical painting and sculpture in favor of the droning presence of taciturn objects and arrangements. (The epoch called "contemporary" grows longer year by year, as the era that minimalism instituted bids to be eternal.) Since then, a great deal of ambitious art has espoused, or, at least, countenanced boredom--the forced consciousness of passing time.
The exhibition starts with a projected segment of Andy Warhol's baleful film masterpiece "Empire" (1964), an eight-hour static view of the Empire State Building, and climaxes with Gerhard Richter's great, sepulchral suite of fifteen paintings about the lives and, mostly, the deaths of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists, "October 18, 1977" (1988). In the middle comes "Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off" (2000), by the British artist Martin Creed: an empty room in which light and darkness alternate at five-second intervals. Everything in the show--paintings and drawings, groups of photographs, sculptural and video installations, and ad-hoc oddities--can be taken, if sometimes tortuously, to illustrate a possible meaning of the phrase "out of time": time regarded with detachment, as sheer phenomenon; or employed, as a kind of material. Another sense occurs to me: "too late"--game over, pencils down. The show crystallizes a recurrent suspicion that, at present, high culture inhabits an interminable aftermath of lost or broken purposes. The poetic tone of today's most vital art tilts toward elegy.
The show's young curators, Joachim Pissarro, of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, and Eva Respini, of the Department of Photography, have grouped works by formal or notional affinity rather than by chronology. Some juxtapositions are inspired. "Empire" is flanked by Philip-Lorca diCorcia's "Head #10" (2000), a starkly flash-lit color...