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 The recent Gehry exhibition at the Guggenheim obliterated the line between sales pitch and show. October 2001
But the Gehry show (organized by guest curator Mildred Friedman and the museum's associate curator for collections and exhibitions, J. Fiona Ragheb) is less about the architect whose work is on display and more about the institution. It is about a museum that has in recent years broken away from the "non-objective" art that was its original mission and become a showplace for popular spectacle--The Art of the Motorcycle, Giorgio Armani--and, moreover, a developer of museums as Donald Trump is a developer of luxury high-rises. The Guggenheim has become a brand that transcends Wright's coiled edifice. Perhaps the fact that the Gehry show was installed uphill and counterclockwise suggests that the museum is moving beyond its deterministic phase--moving forward hand in hand with a nondeterministic architect. If you start at the bottom, as you're supposed to in this case, what you get at the outset is a sales presentation for the 500,000-square-foot, Gehry-designed museum complex that the Guggenheim wishes to build at the foot of Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. It's a 40-story-high fantasia of form, a big bundle tied with shiny metal ribbons, something at once marvelous and slightly pointless. Whether or not this massive complex should or will someday rise on the East River is not, however, a subject for this review. Suffice it to say that what is greatest in New York architecture is always a blend of humanity's best and worst impulses, a potent mixture of magnanimity, ego, and greed. The Guggenheim proposal is no exception. The problem is that when you view the show from the bottom up, as its makers intended, it is hard to get beyond the notion that you have stepped into the suite of some time-share brokers, seen the model and floor plans, and are about to head out to visit the tennis courts, the golf course, and the spa. What you get is an exhibition that is not Gehry's work presented for the pure pleasure of seeing it, but rather his portfolio. "Look," this exhibition seems to say, "how brilliant he is! How can our city not build his museum? How can we, the citizens of the greatest city on Earth, continue to be deprived of our very own Gehry?" So, ultimately, it was a stroke of good fortune that I dashed into the museum and obeyed the wishes of the old architect, because I was able to coast my way downhill through Gehry's oeuvre, from the monumental titanium-coated Bilbao Guggenheim to the little corrugated and chain-link-clad house in Santa Monica without having to grapple with anyone's agenda besides my own. For me, the most powerful elements of this exhibition were the ones illuminating process, demonstrating the intuitive approach that this 72-year-old Pritzker Prize--winner takes to a profession still deeply bound up with the semiscientific posturing of the original Modernists and their imitators. The pen sketches of Disney Hall, designed in 1987 and finally under construction in downtown Los Angeles, are lovely. They provide beguiling clues to the emotive nature of Gehry's process. Likewise, the arrays of wooden chunks that Gehry used to experiment with form on buildings such as the Bilbao Guggenheim and the waves of tissue paper he used to play with the shapes of metal fins on the proposed New York museum complex are wonderful to see. The pure, elemental physicality of them is inspiring. But as I moved down the spiral, I kept asking myself, What exactly is the point of seeing a living architect's work in a museum setting? Do all the didactic curatorial tools--the photos, the models, the wall text--do justice to the qualities that make a building great (or, for that matter, awful)? The meaning of certain architectural exhibitions is clear. There are shows that open a window to a lost past, like the Czech Cubism exhibition of 1990, or those that attempt to codify a specific moment, such as MoMA's 1995 Light Construction show, or those that focus on unbuilt projects such as the Wright show mounted by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 1996. These events offered the viewer knowledge and ideas that would otherwise have been unavailable. But the museum exhibition as architectural monograph seems less about understanding built form and more about paying homage to a given architect's stature. As a rule, the only way to truly see or understand a building is to experience it. The intangible qualities of buildings generally do not photograph. (Although it can be argued that Modernism succeeded to the extent that it did because simple rectilinear forms translate relatively well to two-dimensional reproduction.) Gehry's work, as concerned as it is with defying our expectations of architectural form, is particularly ill-served by photography. Models have their uses, and occasionally have artistic value of their own, but they are also less than satisfying substitutes for the real thing. I remember how silly the Vitra Museum, built to house the furniture manufacturer's collection of chairs, seemed in pictures. Then I visited it and saw how it sat surrounded by a field, transforming the space around it, the sun and shadow moving across its skewed white volumes. My pilgrimage to the Vitra campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, completely changed my opinion of Gehry for the better (and architectural photography for the worse). Then there is Bilbao. The power of the Guggenheim there has everything to do with context. It sits on the banks of the Nervión River as a symbol of well-organized defiance, the product of a local campaign to prevent the region's capital city from being destroyed by the demise of its industrial economy and demoralized by the violence of the Basque separatist movement. The museum is the most extravagant component in a sophisticated campaign of redevelopment and reinvention that included a Norman Foster--designed subway system and a Santiago Calatrava airport. It is an audacious challenge to Bilbao's troubled history and a brave declaration about its intended future. Gehry's otherworldly titanium forms somehow relate to their surroundings in a way that is completely unexpected and exactly right. It is a one-time phenomenon, impossible to replicate, but it's also a very seductive piece of work. Perhaps the problem with Bilbao is that it does photograph well. The success of Bilbao is overwhelming, and, naturally, everyone wants a little of the magic for themselves. If this exhibition conveys one message clearly, it's that those mighty Bilbao forms don't necessarily have the same meaning or impact on the Bard campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, or at the foot of the Space Needle in Seattle--or, for that matter, on the shores of the East River in Manhattan. So, inevitably, even though I didn't hit the sales pitch until the very end, I found myself thinking about whether New York needs it's own Bilbao. Would the original Guggenheim be as powerful an icon if some other city had built one first? Should New York be claiming its own Gehry Guggenheim as a shopper would claim her own Prada bag? Although the Gehry show, backward or forward, provoked any number of troubling questions, it was not without moments of undiluted sensation: I enjoyed the room full of Gehry's furniture, in part because it was full of actual things, not photographic representations or models. And I was especially thrilled by the way that the prototypes of Gehry's cardboard furniture from the late sixties through the early 1980s revealed hitherto unknown aesthetic value in a previously unsung material. And, somewhere in the middle of the exhibition, I found myself transfixed by a napkin drawing of Der Neue Zollhof, a trio of office buildings along the Rhine waterfront in Düsseldorf. These squat, asymmetrical buildings--one clad in red brick, one in stainless steel, and one in white plaster--look like three drunks leaning on one another for support. This one small, casual line drawing redeemed the exhibition for me. Because suddenly it was not about the boundless ambitions of Guggenheim director Thomas Krens and his cohort, or about the lofty position Gehry occupies in the architecture world. Rather, it was all about the fact that there exists an architectural office with the skill to transform these frenetic squiggles into actual buildings, that it is possible to go from ink on napkin to precast concrete panels to completed buildings. The fact that Gehry could accomplish such a thing--and that developers would pay him to do so--seemed to me like a genuine miracle. The napkin sketch, for me, was the spot where Frank Gehry, Architect truly began. Karrie Jacobs, editor in chief of Dwell magazine, served as writer at large for Metropolis for six years. |
