Back in the 1980’s when the art world was awash with loose money and names and reputations were being made on a daily basis by the mere opening of arriviste designer handbags, and considering the art that was achieving success and renown, mostly works executed overnight in East Village cold water flats in shades of day glow orange and chartreuse, with nary an indication of draftsmanship, or, if so, the worse the better, so it seemed to me, I made the decision to remove myself from this too, too heady environment. Thus I have missed knowing first hand almost all of the history of what has come to be known as Contemporary Art. Reading in a recent New York Times article that a New Museum of Contemporary Art had opened I thought I should wander down to one of my old stomping grounds, The Bowery, to check it out. Doing some research on their web site I was astonished to learn that the museum has been in existence, in one setting or another, some thirty years.
The photographs of the new building were rather impressive and the Times had many nice things to say about the venue. But that made me somewhat wary as I have discerned of late that the Times has something nice to say about every art venue in the City. It has made we wonder if perhaps they have joined the tourist industry alliance known as the CVB, The Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, one of which every self promoting American city now has. (When times are tough the tough hang together for those Yankee dollars.) On the other hand the present crop of Times reporters might very well be the sons and daughters of those moneyed art collectors of the 80’s and perhaps they simply don’t know any better, even with the overlay of their many MFA’s.
From the outside the museum is a stack of rectangular boxes shifted off-axis around a central core, the elevator shaft. In silhouette it looks like a generic, vertical slice of the New York skyline. Whereas the museum guide states that this off-axis provides a variety of open and fluid galleries, the three galleries are in fact each like the others but in different dimensions. From the elevator one enters each rectangular gallery in exactly the same way and sees in each a polished cement floor and soft off white standard museum walls. Because this area of the Bowery is the center for the restaurant supply business, the origin of the High Tech look of the seventies when neighboring SoHo first took off as the art center in New York, acknowledgement of that industrial presence has been made…there are no fine materials here, nor is there any designer chic.
The interior of the elevator is chartreuse. It is a rather jolting surprise when the doors open. But because the rest of the building is so conservative and so “old style” in the standard new museum vernacular, it made me want to laugh. If the management is so fond of chartreuse, I was sorry they had not hired Rem Koolhaus. His Seattle Public Library is one of the great buildings in America. It is twelve stories high; it has no walls, no doors, and no windows. (Only Rem Koolhaus could figure that one out and make it happen.) As in this building, all of the fittings in that building are standard supply house issue. There is no opulence in the material or the in impression created. But where he uses red the red is used as both design and decoration. Where he uses orange the orange is both design and decoration. And where he uses chartreuse the chartreuse is both design and decoration. It does not shock, it celebrates: Rem Koolhaus is a man who knows what to do with chartreuse. Needless to say I found a cement and off white building with a chartreuse elevator extremely pale by comparison and, as I have said, laughable, with mirth rather than derision.
The exterior of this building is covered by a mesh that looks to be stainless steel somewhat reminiscent of a chain link fence. Rem Koolhaus draped a diamond lattice of 2 by 6 inch I-beams over the whole of his space, (his library is not a building but a defined space), twelve stories high by one block square at ground level. This museum building creates the impression of coolness and soft reverence: Koolhaus throws caution to the wind. This building has settled into place…on the Bowery. At The Seattle Public Library the future has arrived.
As with the new Morgan Library and Museum I am once again perplexed why so much time and work would go to making a building that has such limited gallery space. There are only three here in a building with seven floors. (Because museum floors have high ceilings, this translates to about fourteen stories.) The gallery showing the work of Tomma Abts has fifteen painting each 15 by 18 inches. They almost fill the gallery and I cannot image that much more work than this could have been displayed, or that many very large works could be accommodated. The public spaces on the street level are small, minimalist and comfortable, and I am happy to report that the coffee bar has, for a museum dining experience, less pretension, thank goodness, than the average SoHo eatery just a few blocks west.
The most interesting and exciting architectural moment at this museum is in the stairway leading from the fourth floor gallery to the third, or vice versa depending on your route of travel. Every new museum of art being built these days has one area, usually the atrium, in which the architects are allowed to develop a space which is a statement of pure architecture. I understand architecture as an intellectual discipline in which three components, form, scale, and proportion are employed to define a space, that space generally understood to have a function which the form then follows. When the atrium is not the moment, it is sometimes a stairway, and that stairway is not always on the main path, as were the Grand Staircases of the museums of the Beaux Arts era, but a private moment tucked away for the adventurous visitor and the exploring mind. The best of that lot is a stairway at the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art: rising in a straight run in six stages it is all elegance all the time.
In this museum the stairway is only about three or four feet wide in two long flights with one landing. In keeping with the low income working class character of the neighborhood, the steps are cement, the walls are painted white, and the railing is standard industrial pipe railing. As with all great architecture this is wonderful because of the dimensions and the proportions. Here the proportions are exquisite made all the more exciting by the narrowness and the pitch. Giving it a sudden and unexpected moment of bliss is a large window on the landing with a frank and open view onto the roof of the commercial/industrial building next door…a standard New York City tar papered rooftop. The contrast of that to this white interior space is delightful. Seeing it, I thought how wonderful it would be to pass this window and to see the people who live in that building sun bathing in the nude, in the sense of being a living tableau. It made me aware that in New York City one is able to live an anonymous life but that one has no privacy whatsoever. (That does not, however, stop some New Yorkers from sun bathing nude.)
The architects are Sejima + Nishizawa/SANAA. A nice exhibition of their work and working method is shown at the back of the street level floor behind the café. It appears that they have embraced the rectangular box as their signature shape and their work shows a preoccupation for arranging the boxes in various configurations, both horizontally and vertically, as attached or separated entities. Considering that for the last one hundred years reinforced concrete has made it possible to make buildings in any shape whatsoever, I am always mystified why architects continue to think…inside the box. I am also perplexed why an architect would make a building that blends with its neighbors when those neighbors are industrial suppliers and skid row flop houses. (And so obviously en route to being eradicated by the visibly rising wave of the next generation.) At the beginning of the twentieth century architects were shouting: “Come! Let me lead you to the future!” Recently built American museums indicate that architects have become the Uriah Heeps of the corporate sponsors.
If museums of modern and contemporary art want to impress the public with their modern and contemporary sensibilities I would suggest that they start by commissioning buildings that look other than as if they had been Made Yesterday. To that end I suspect that they will have to educate their corporate backers, those rigid guardians of the discrete and conservative architectural utterance, to an awareness that architecture can be, and should be, something more than merely an inoffensive, nondescript rectangular box, whether at attention, in recline, or askew.
http://www.newmuseum.org/about/new_building/
Compare the “new” museum to this old Seattle Library.
http://www.spl.org/images/slideshow/slideshow.asp
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