Word: ammi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...within five days of each other but 3,500 miles apart. The American Museum of the Moving Image, in New York City, and London's Museum of the Moving Image, on which Prince Charles raised the curtain last week, are as informal and user friendly as their acronymic nicknames, AMMI and MOMI. Splendidly begauded in perky colors, stocked with playful film fetishes and interactive exhibits that look like video games, the new museums are not mausoleums of modern art. They are more like theme parks, urban Disney Worlds...
Aiming to embrace the media's aspirations to high art as well as their roots in vaudeville, AMMI serves up film and television history in two strengths: straight up and with a shot of circus-clown seltzer. But even the serious exhibitions provide the tang of astonishment. A display of 58 machines -- from the 1835 thaumatrope to tomorrow's Sony GV-8 Video Walkman -- pulses with the gimcrack genius of those anonymous technicians who gave artists the tools to dream with. The spirit of Philo T. Farnsworth, boy pioneer of TV, rides again...
That bracing ingenuity marks many of AMMI's exhibits. Nam June Paik's video installation is an automobile frame on which are mounted 65 screens, each strobing scenes of Bonnie and Clyde or Abbott and Costello or any of a hundred other images. AMMI's apex is Tut's Fever, an Egyptian-style movie palace conceived by Artists Red Grooms and Lysiane Luong. Grooms' impish sculptures staff the theater: Theda Bara sits in the box office; Mae West sells you candy; Mickey Rooney is the usher; a sarcophagus creaks open to reveal the late James Dean. In the theater auditorium...
...dialogue of a TV commercial or movie clip. Browse through the media memorabilia of a zillion middle-class childhoods: the Cisco Kid coloring book, the Partridge Family lunch box, a Donald Duck board game, the Welcome Back, Kotter paper-doll set. And when you need a rest, stop by AMMI's two state-of-the-art theaters and catch a full-length movie. Later this fall, AMMI will mount a Jerry Lewis retrospective. Henri Langlois must be pleased...
...AMMI exudes the comfortable musk of a neighborhood Bijou miraculously restored, London's MOMI has eyes to play the Palladium. Not that the two institutions have radically different means or ends. Both occupy about 9,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space. Both display a Nam June Paik piece, clips from the compilation film Precious Images, and a model of a drive-in theater. Both have been ages in the planning, though MOMI's 1978 prospectus preceded AMMI's by three years, and a trace of bantering rancor shows through the Brits' geniality toward their upstart colonial rival. Perhaps because MOMI...