Black Mask’s MoMA shutdown pioneered conceptual art as political theater

Evidence

With Death of the Mind installed on Second Avenue and Chelsea Girls drawing record crowds to the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, an entity called Black Mask sent out a press release on Monday, October 10, at 12:30 p.m. The release announced that they would close the Museum of Modern Art, explaining that this action, taken while America embarked upon a “path of total destruction,” signaled the opening of a new front: “WE SEEK A TOTAL REVOLUTION … LET THE STRUGGLE BEGIN.” Obligingly the spooked museum shut itself down. Ben Morea, his Group Center cohort Ron Hahne, and the poet Dan Georgakas simply showed up and affixed a stenciled message that read MUSEUM CLOSED to MoMA’s entrance and distributed a leaflet (“DESTROY THE MUSEUMS—OUR STRUGGLE CANNOT BE HUNG ON WALLS”), thus providing the first great example of Conceptual Art-cum-Political Theater in the ’60s. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 931

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The stenciled MUSEUM CLOSED act—three people scaring a major institution into shutting down—supports the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s theme of symbolic acts carrying real institutional weight, and the conceptual-art-as-politics frame parallels the trees-as-infrastructure argument about marginal acts working through indirect channels.
• SHARE: For someone into institutional critique art history: the MoMA shutdown is a canonical ancestor of artists closing museums, worth flagging.
• STORYSTEM: The image of a major museum closing its doors because three people sent a press release is a compressed study in institutional power illusion—fertile for fiction about how much power symbolic threats actually exert.