Doug Aitken at MoMA - Sleepwalkers
It’s good to live in Hell’s Kitchen, so close to MoMA – and especially, now that we’re finally having a bit of real cold and there’s a major piece of public art to go and see.
That would be Doug Aitken’s “Sleepwalkers” – which is screening all over the walls of MoMA (around the sculpture garden and around the museum exterior) and shows five New York workers dragging themselves out of bed and off to work in a depressed zombie state. And then some. There could and should be more diversity among the characters (four out of five New Yorkers are white?), and we could skip the repetition of round shapes after a while, but the performances are compelling for the most part. I liked the older guy and the electrician particularly.
If you’re not already a fan of watching life when almost nothing seems to be happening, you might be after this.
You don’t even need to buy museum admission to see it. It screens from 5 – 10pm every night (through February 12) on exterior walls of and around MoMA on 53rd Street, 54th Street and in the empty lot between them. It’s best where you see more than one sequence at a time (the sculpture garden screens five at a time).