http://moma.org/exhibitions/2006/eyeoneurope/
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Eye on Europe: Prints, Books & Multiples/1960 to Now (2006) was a Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition featuring works by European artists using commercial printing techniques. Prints and multiples gained huge popularity in the ’60s as the objet d’art went from being exclusive and expensive to mass-marketable and cheap. For the web design to accompany the show, creative director Anh Tuan Pham found inspiration in Yves Klein’s featured work, Dimanche, a faux newspaper mimicking a popular French weekly.

“As a nod to the ironic stance employed by the artists in the show,” says Pham, “we thought it made sense for the Eye On Europe site to be a kind of mock newspaper of a mock newspaper. The newspaper as a symbol seemed ideal for the show itself, as a common, everyday, mass-produced and printed object. Each exhibition section is treated like a unique newspaper, with each headline being the title of an artwork and bylines replaced with artist names.” The typographically treated “headline-titles” take visual precedence over the preview images when navigating through the site. Noticeable titles such as “How the Dictatorship of the Parties Can Be Overcome,” “Fright” and “Artist’s Shit,” as Pham points out, compete for attention with the ubiquitous “Untitled” works—with amusing results. “Having the user confronted in each section with a strange yet engaging set of artwork titles,” he says, “created a differentiated way to navigate the exhibition that—in our opinion—resonated with the subversive and ironic tone of much of the show’s artwork.”

Compelling as MoMA projects always are for Pham and his team, the main challenge in building this website (using Flash 8 with data fed from XML files) was the relatively large amount of information involved in the exhibition.

The site is divided into six sections, each containing 15 to 30 works of art, with each work of art consisting of a series of images and a synopsis. The site includes almost 200 bios of artists and publishers, a pop-up glossary of key artistic and historical words used throughout the site, and a site index that allows users to cross-reference the artworks by artist, publisher or format—all of it linked back to the individual artwork pages.

“MoMA continues to feed us challenging and thought-provoking projects that test our capabilities in terms of technology and design,” says Pham. “Working with inspiring and intellectually stimulating subject matter like the works in the Eye on Europe exhibition rekindles the original reasons why we became designers in the first place.”
Dana Rouse