SCREAMING AT MOMA: MARILYN PENN
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Screaming at MOMA
By Marilyn Penn (bio)
Determined to revive one of the most sophomoric ventures in the history of performace art, MOMA has reprised Yoko Ono’s 1961 “Voice Piece for Soprano†which consists of instructions for passers-by to scream into a microphone. Currently installed in the second floor atrium, the screams can be heard throughout the entire second floor (and elsewhere), so if you are at the museum to enjoy the Picasso exhibit, you will be startled and alarmed by the periodic male and female screams piercing a hushed gallery. Most people are frightened or disconcerted by these sounds as there is no warning at the ticket counter or anywhere else that this will punctuate your museum experience. In my own case, I rushed out of the Picasso to see what violence was happening outside. Once I found out that this was only Yoko Ono’s conceptual art, I wondered how she could still find this amusing after John Lennon’s murder or after Kitty Genovese’s tragic, unheeded screams for help. One would think that she would abashedly insist that this piece be buried along with her 60’s naievete in the face of a much darker reality that supplanted it.
A yearly study conducted at the University of Michigan since 1979 claims that today’s students are 40% less empathetic than their counterparts in the original sample group. The steepest decline in empathy came after the year 2000 and many theories have been proferred ranging from the violence of video games to the anonymity of the internet. To these one can add the change in our post 9/11 vulnerability and the increase in acts of terrorism here and throughout the world. A coping mechanism for dealing with the resultant anxiety is to distance oneself from emotional affect and to deaden oneself to other people’s misfortune and grief.
The salient question is why an art museum would want to contribute to inuring people to tolerate the intolerable. The screams go on throughout the day, for as long as anyone is there and eventually, you are forced to accommodate to them and accept that this is something acceptable. A guard I spoke to shrugged his shoulders, shook his head disgustedly and walked away. I watched people jump with discomfort and then giggle with nervous embarrassment. For those who paid an admission fee, there was no recourse for asking for a refund because of this abuse. The people who step up to do the screaming remind me of those who participated in ratcheting up the pain inflicted on the subjects in Stanley Milgram’s 1974 experiment on obedience to authority. They remind me of the ordinary people throughout Germany and occupied countries during World War 11 who quickly became desensitized to the barbarity they witnessed or assisted in and rationalized it instead of opposing it.
My own opposition to what MOMA has chosen to inflict on its patrons will be to not renew my longstanding membership. I hope that others who agree that the current administration of the museum has become increasingly perverse will see fit to do the same. There’s no reason that tea should be restricted to political parties when there is so much muckraking to do in our temples of culture.
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