Amy Sillman talked to Artforum about curating “The Shape of Shape,” a gallery stuffed with art about form > shape > shadow at The Museum of Modern Art, and it is riveting:
The instinct to keep wanting to make things is partly recuperative. You find a way to make an object that holds together your sense of self in crisis. Tenderness and intimacy are required for this, as well as a bristling diagram of wild unrestricted visual intelligence, one thing leading to the next chaotically. But in this room I didn’t want to “recuperate” some idea of greatness or modernism: I just wanted you to come out fucking LOVING painting and modern art, to recognize it as a form of wrestling with content, grief, justice, to recognize the complexity of our current situation in it, to love the art both in spite of and in addition to having politics, problems, and questions. I want these things to be posed within modern art. My show is about love and it’s also about trembling with anxiety.
I am trembling with anticipation.
Amy Sillman discusses “The Shape of Shape” at MoMA [artforum]