Photographs in MoMA’s Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection. Photo: Paula Court.

The Museum of Modern Art launches post,
a participatory digital platform for global research

post.at.MoMA.org The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is pleased to announce the launch of post: notes on modern and contemporary art around the globe, an online initiative for collaborative research and artistic exchange. post grows out of C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives), a cross-departmental research program begun in 2009 to facilitate a museum-wide study that reflects the multiplicity of “modernities” and histories of contemporary and modern art.post is a site for encounters between the established and the experimental, the historical and the emerging, the local and the global, the scholarly and the artistic, the formal and the informal. Adapting the attributes of an online journal, archive, exhibition space, and social-networking platform, post uses the non-hierarchical characteristics of the Web to spark in-depth explorations of the ways in which modernism is being redefined, and to link those topics to the ways in which artists and institutions are working today.

post is an open forum for sharing research and circulating works in progress, offering a platform for critical response and an instrument for increasing expertise through exposure to ideas from around the globe. It is a place for conversation and debate, for building a nuanced understanding of the histories that shape our present. As a Web platform, post provides an alternative to the model of a unified art-historical narrative. post instead allows a malleable, layered understanding of multiple notions of modernity to emerge over time, as more people from more places participate.

Emerging out of research undertaken at MoMA, post develops a network of partners and users whose complementary research and concerns will shape future approaches and content. Starting with a specific thematic focus, the site regularly releases essays, interviews, reports, reflections, archival materials, and artists’ commissions, ensuring that new voices are constantly entering the discussion. The site is designed to encourage active participation; users and institutional partners are encouraged to upload their own findings and share their questions, together gaining broader exposure and expertise. In time, and depending upon the interest of the partners, post will broaden its focus.

Committed to investigating artistic practices that have historically been overlooked in MoMA’s collection and exhibitions, post initially explores sites of experimental practices in regions that are the focus of C-MAP research: East Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Upon its launch, post will present its first case study, in partnership with Keio University Art Center, featuring the archival materials of Sogetsu Art Center, an epicenter of avant-garde artistic experiments in Tokyo in the 1960s that hosted an exciting, rapid-fire series of programs in experimental music, jazz, and cinema. The initial presentation features essays, interviews, and works by artists related to Sogetsu Art Center—Shiomi Mieko, Yokoo Tadanori, Matsumoto Toshio, andYamaguchi Katsuhiro—and artists who have been the subject of C-MAP research—Geta Brătescu, Chim↑Pom, and Jikken Kobo, among others.

About C-MAP
C-MAP research questions the judgments that grow out of the assumption that artistic modernism is or was determined solely by Western European and North American narratives of early-20th-century avant-gardes. The aim of C-MAP is to understand more fully the historical imperatives and changing conditions of transnational networks of artistic practice, and to seek verbal and material accounts of histories that are little known outside their countries of origin. C-MAP forges new relationships and partnerships and undertakes collaborative research in order to develop new expertise, share what has been learned, and, ultimately, inform the development of exhibitions, publications, educational programs, and MoMA’s collection for the benefit of scholars, curators, educators, students, critics, artists, and the general public.

The Museum of Modern Art’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Age Initiative (C-MAP) is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

Additional funding is provided by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Adriana Cisneros de Griffin, and Marlene Hess.

post was designed and developed by TC Labs. Creative direction by Caleb Waldorf.