TAKE ME HOME

November 22, 2020 by Nalina Moses

Countryside: The Future, on view now at the Guggenheim, doesn’t feel like an exhibition. It feels like a textbook projected onto the museum’s iconic curving surfaces.

Working with graphic designer Irma Bloom, curators AMO, Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal Bantal have taken many bytes of research, analysis and opinion, and printed it on curtains hanging along the museum’s outer wall, and, directly, in vinyl text running along its ceiling and guardrails. It’s a whole lot of data and a whole lot of Helvetica.

Typically visiting the gallery on a Friday evening is the perfect dinner party pre-game; the scene is chic, poised, knowing. Last week the crowd, diminished by pandemic restrictions, was listless, reading wall texts dutifully, but ultimately, as they reached the top, worn out. They wanted a show and got a lecture.

True confession: I didn’t read everything, I didn’t even look at everything. But what was apparent was a nostalgia for the pre-digital and pre-technological. The first wall text, at the base of the ramp, juxtaposes a photo of three rosy-cheeked teenage Russian farm girls from 1905, standing and offering plates of food, with another of contemporary workers inside an industrial hothouse. It reads: The countryside is a stable environment where everyone—man, woman, child—knows their place. There is a pride in costume and products… The sentiment is comically retrograde. One of the last images of the show, at the top of the ramp, is a poster of Koolhaas standing with group of men and women in dark suits, surveying an enormous spread of farmland, possibly pitching ideas. It’s a tired image of the modern architect as cultural savior, particularly sad because Koolhas began his career in sly opposition to it.

The strongest shows at the Guggenheim engage the sculptural drama of the architecture. Giacometti’s figures, Frank Gehry’s architectural models, and Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture all shone within the gallery’s curving walls and tilted floors. At Countryside there are some small objects on stands along the ramp but almost all the material is, both literally and metaphorically flat; it doesn’t provoke. There are some small objects (a drone, a satellite, and bale of hay) hung in a single cable above the ground floor pool, but they’re swallowed by the monumental space. If Rem Koolhaas wants to turn back to a world that is more primal and richly physical, why didn’t he give us an exhibit that is?

Photograph © AMO

ILLUMINATED

The Menil Collection in Houston might be the most finely-executed building I’ve visited. Its designer Renzo Piano is now a starchitect, the go-to guy for museum projects internationally, but when he completed the Menil in 1986 he was relatively unknown, and the building glows with a beginner’s passion and, very literally, sunlight.

Its design succeeds at every basic level: landscaping, circulation, scale, materiality, and detail. It’s an intimate structure, modeled after the house that Philip Johnson designed for John and Dominique de Menil, and where their art collection had been originally displayed. The one-story museum sits at the center of flat, grassy lot in a gracious residential neighborhood with manicured bungalows and century-old trees. It’s planned simply, with a string of galleries along one long side, a string of support spaces along the other, and a tall corridor along the spine. Outside, its horizontal wood siding is broken with slender steel columns. Inside, its high white walls are set off by dark wood floors. Some of its larger galleries are interrupted with small interior courtyards crammed with lush, jungle-like plantings.

The building’s signature elements are its long ceiling baffles, that curve gently in profile like razor clam shells, and that cover the hallways, galleries and exterior walkways. They seem to scoop light inside, giving each space a dreamy glow. The baffles are both complex and naive, mechanistic and natural. At first glance they seem heavy, as if they’ve been sculpted from plaster or bone, and then, at the next turn, immaterial, like tissue. On the afternoon I visited there were intermittent rains and, from one minute to the next, the rooms dimmed and brightened, until the clouds passed and they were bathed with sunshine. In drawings and photographs the baffles seem heavy-handed, calculated, as if Piano were more interested in angles (which he studied) and hardware (which he also studied) than light. But as installed at the museum the baffles are natural: entirely exposed and inconspicuous. Through their effects, the building achieves a state of grace.

June 19, 2016 by Nalina Moses

September 22, 2011 by Nalina Moses

Can you build a building without a program? The Guggenheim’s summer pop-up inside the park along Houston Street at Bowery, designed by Atelier Bow-Wow, comes tantalizingly close. It’s a spare steel frame wrapped in metal mesh, stuffed with A/V equipment, and furnished with fold-out chairs. When I visited last weekend there was a trio of hippie chicks singing, and then a documentary about the politics of Central Africa. A small crowd had assembled, mostly passersby who were interested and stopped to find out more.

The space, the BMW Guggenheim Lab, is carefully programmed each day with socially-relevant performances and presentations. But what I liked best about the Lab is how porous it is, both literally and figuratively. It fills an empty lot between two existing, anonymous buildings, and opens onto both Houston and First Streets. People enter from both sides, sit down for an event, and then spill out into the park, where there’s a temporary cafe, and hang out a bit more. In a city that’s become riddled with empty storefronts, co-opting them seems like a perfect strategy. What if we mapped all the unoccupied spaces in New York and handed them over to artists, activists and performers? Their work and their noise would fill the city.

May 24, 2011 by Nalina Moses

The Memphis motel where Dr. Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, along with the rooming house from where James Earl Ray shot him, have been converted to the National Civil Rights Museum. Inside the buildings compelling, expertly-compiled displays give accounts of the civil rights movement, the work of King and his followers, and the killing itself.

The museum is educational, inspiring, and morbid. The entire site has been preserved as it was the moment of the assassination. The interiors of King’s motel room have been recreated, as have Ray’s bedroom and the bathroom from which he fired the fatal shot. The museum is undergoing an expansion now, and when I visited there were construction workers and equipment crowding one end of the parking lot. Two huge vintage cars there, part of the recreation, were wrapped in protective shrouds. Their muffled forms expressed a sadness that was entirely missing from the museum displays.