Guggenheim Rotunda. Photo by Robert C, c-monster.net
I have often found myself in front of a museum canvas – a Titian, an Ingres, a Pollock, what have you – deadly thumbing the vibrant band of beads around my neck, which only moments before had given pure delight. All senses vanquished. Just numb.
Or dumb?
Why can’t I be moved? Why doesn’t this priceless work captivate me? Where has the damn luster in my necklace escaped?
This art is better than I am. It knows more than I. Other people feel it, get it. I know it’s worth more than I could ever amount. The auction records say so! It’s in a museum.
And here I say this, hailing from an educational and professional background that would assume otherwise.
Today, at the Guggenheim Museum, I learned just why I don’t get it. Why sometimes others may not get it, though don’t propose to confess.
On participation (not view) is a conceptual work by Tino Sehgal. The entire Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda has been stripped bare of all material works. In its place, Sehgal has hired and trained area youth and adults to interact with museum visitors on a purely verbal plain. There is nothing concrete to have, nothing one can buy.
You become the work. You create. You matter. You become the matter.
This is how art moved – moved me ~
Mise en scene: I enter museum rotunda and begin the slow, spiral journey upward. Enter Eric, an 8-year old boy. He is abrupt and stuns me.
Eric: What is progress?
Me: What? Ummmm. Hmmm. Well, okay, to me our view of progress is troubled. Is progress always moving away from something, assuming that the next thing is better? What’s the proof? What if it were progress to go back in history and live like farmers? But that’s not how I’ve been trained to think of progress.
Eric: (He’s been listening intently). Let me see if I understand? (He repeats what I said, seeming to process its meaning).
(Eric is approached by a young girl named Fatima. She’s in middle school. Eric tells Fatima what I said. Eric leaves and Fatima continues to walk with me around the rotunda.)
Fatima: I’ve not heard that view of progress before. I get it! I really do! Is progress what Government is doing today by bringing back Roosevelt’s New Deal tactics? Is it good to reissue methods used during the Great Depression today?
(Fatima is met by Mark. Mark is tall and skinny, probably in his early-30s).
Mark: Is it bad when preferences become rules?
Me: Oh my God, that’s a great question. I guess preferences quickly become defense mechanisms, shutting you down?
The dialogue continued onward to the rotunda dome. I was exhilarated, moved, scared, alive! As I made my way slowly down the rotunda ramp, I shouted to Mark, “This is progress!”
I didn’t feel art-alienated anymore. I mattered. I made “matter.” I feel the same way when I craft.
I’m ready to go back to the museum canvas.
Similar art ailment? I could be alone.
24 Responses to “At the Guggenheim ~ Museums and Art Alienation”
Why haven’t you written a best-selling novel yet?
Katie Stephenson´s last blog ..february’s master bedroom art wall is live!
I should. I will.
But I have this funny feeling they’re longer than 500 words. Girl, that’s a lot of black and white.
I will definitely keep the suggestion close. In the meantime, let’s co-author. I’ll write the first half until I lose my mojo; you can wrap it up with an artful bang!
Lydia, Clueless Crafter´s last blog ..At the Guggenheim ~ Museums and Art Alienation
I’m still stuck on the 8 year old asking what progress was! What made him even ask that??
…or non fiction?
Diana Strinati Baur´s last blog ..Gratitude? Really?
Here’s my two cents, for what it’s worth: Every creation is not meant to move everyone. Each piece speaks to a specific person(s). As a fiber artist myself, I do not expect that every piece I make will be admired and loved by all people. Some may hate it. But that’s the beauty of art – even if it inspires “nothing” that says “something.”
Been to the Guggenheim several times and I, myself, have trouble seeing the inspiration and feeling from it. My boyfriend, however, admires this stuff to no end and could go on and on about it.
Love the blog!
Brianna´s last blog ..TUTORIAL: Picot Trellis Stitch
I’d be curious to hear what your boyfriend derives from Tino Sehgal’s piece then.
Since part of his work in addition to being interactive is dance-based, I’d suggest you wear some of your fiber art (that wrap, perhaps?) and weave your own narrative into Sehgal’s. I think that would feel mighty awesome.
Lydia, Clueless Crafter´s last blog ..At the Guggenheim ~ Museums and Art Alienation
Sounds fascinating, I love museums!
Scientific Housewife´s last blog ..Science Sunday: Woman Harvests Transplanted Trachea in Arm
I get that reaction when I’m looking at art I’m “supposed” to like. But when I stood in front of a Van Gogh, I was first stunned at its small size, then immediately got a lump in my throat. The colour, the brushstrokes – I was surprised at how moving it was.
I’m not interested in an artist’s reputation, I’m interested in the art. Sometimes I’ll shrug something off if everybody’s raving about it, but I’m contrary that way.
The experience at the Guggenheim sounds wonderful. Sometimes all we need is to stop taking things for granted.
Stacey Cornelius´s last blog ..Rule your online domain – make your website work for you
Oh I’ve been known to shrug off something that’s touted to be the best. There are 3 reasons why I do this~
* I like to be a contrarian;
* It doesn’t capture my eye;
* I don’t understand the work, seems too complex to read about and am afraid to admit it. I relegate it to rubbish.
That’s not too responsible!
Lydia, Clueless Crafter´s last blog ..At the Guggenheim ~ Museums and Art Alienation
first of all, i love your writing style…i agree, you need to start writing a book! and secondly, what a great topic. so true and i think what makes art so subjective. something you find moving may not stir anything in me or vice versa. i have to say though that i love an 8 year old boy asking you “what is progress?”!!
piper @ one sydney road´s last blog ..{find + seek…xoxo}
Before that 8-yr old asked me such a profound question, I would have certainly assumed I knew more about the world. He turned the tables on me, an unsettling feeling and one I was not prepared for.
Lydia´s last blog ..At the Guggenheim ~ Museums and Art Alienation
You don’t have to be responsible about it – it’s art. You either get it or you don’t – I think it is a rare person who is never moved by any art. But I would find it hard to believe that anyone person is moved by all art. Eye of the beholder, as they say.
Stephanie @ La Dolce Vita´s last blog ..another place I must see
What Stephanie said.
Art hit the problem of unmediated expression in the 20th Century, so sometimes you need a little background. But it shouldn’t feel like work. Besides, you can always come back to it later, one way or another.
Stacey Cornelius´s last blog ..Rule your online domain – make your website work for you
Look no further than The Maximalists {winkwink}
“the spiritual experience of the artist in the process of creation as a self-contemplation outside and beyond the artwork itself…These artists pay more attention to the process of creation and the uncertainty of meaning and instability in a work. Meaning is not reflected directly in a work because they believe that what is in the artist’s mind at the moment of creation may not necessarily appear in his work.”
BTW: I agree wholeheartedly with the whole you should be writing a book thing. xxABCD
It would be a downright shame to look any further! Thank you for this excerpt. How appropriate!
Lydia´s last blog ..At the Guggenheim ~ Museums and Art Alienation
The Guggenheim holds a lot of powerful emotion for me. When I was little, we, on rare occasions, made our way over from our two front-two back walk up (with the bathtub in the kitchen!) in Midtown to the museums. Since the east side at that time was still highly ethnic (where Cathedral High School is located was St. Johns the Evangelist Elementary School, which was the center Northern Italian life of Manhattan – not surprisingly, the ghetto for was geographically north of Little Italy), we lived and breathed East 56th street, stringing laundry across to our cousin’s apartment on the other side of street. Things like museums were not in the normal vernacular of our day to day. Special occasion meant a walk to the park at the end of 58th Street to see the Queensborough Bridge or, heavens, a bus ride down to the United Nations. I was in my mid thirties before I climbed the Empire State Building. Such was life growing up in Manhattan in an immigrant neighborhood.
Which is why the Guggenheim held such promise for me. As a young girl, it stands much higher in my memory than the Met. I remember how the neighborhood changed, walking from our tenament through the 70s, over to Madison and then finally onto 5th Avenue, and then north, north, north to see the curve of the Wright building peek out from the profile of the other buildings. The thought of it today still gives me goosebumps. It was so different. I dragged my mother there a few times during adolescence, taking the bus from the Poconos, long after we had moved out of the city and 56th Street became another expensive outgrowth of Sutton Place.
As far as the art goes. I never pretend to understand art like other people seem to, regardless of its genre. I do feel most drawn to the Blue Riders, and would imagine that I would actually fly to NYC if I heard that the Guggenheim was having an exhibit of those paintings. Many years ago I enjoyed a max ernst exhibit at the Guggenheim -my mother’s furled eyebrows, trying hard to see something in the canvasses, stands as a sweet memory for me. The last thing I saw there was a Nam June Paik installation ten years ago. By the end of all of the TV screens I was starting to feel a little ill and end the installation with the full blown flu. I would like to go back and blot out that memory.
Anyway.
The 8 year old probably would have freaked me out sufficiently that I might have left! I get overwhelmed easily by those kinds of direct questions. I loved reading your response and how it developed.
Just one more note. I struggle with progress in my own life. I struggle to decipher what is really my own personal taste in my own work and when I have let the work or opinion of others influence a piece too much. Usually after I have made a piece which copies some aspect of a piece I have recently seen, I realize it’s not mine and I have smashed a few ceramics pieces because of it. But maybe down the road a little bit of those elements comes out in another piece or work. That ’s when I feel have have reached personal progress. Not absorbing and replicating, rather absorbing and transforming.
I better stop. I need to get out of my PJ’s and go to a goat cheese tasting on a farm in the moutains.
Diana Strinati Baur´s last blog ..Inspiration
Diana, I wander the peripheral streets of New York frequently and often wonder what lives were lived in the remaining tenements and brownstones of ethnic enclaves like yours. Your memories are exactly what I’ve wanted.
You experience the true New York experience, the one full of promise and protection. The insularity of neighborhoods like yours, the tight bond of families swinging from one cultural background to a newly burgeoning one is something that my generation knows little of.
Yet, I share a sentiment with you. When I walked up Fifth Avenue after taking the M86 bus crosstown, I too caught a glimpse of the Wright rotunda looming large, then larger. I got a chill. It is a magnificent structure, even more so now that it has been repainted to a brilliant white. Wright was right when he created this space, a curvilinear experience of the visual that is a far cry from the white box spaces of today’s galleries. It’s experiential and transformational, a perfect place for Sehgal’s conversations.
I can see your mother with furrowed brow, perhaps incredulous of these modern works. They must have been alienating, eons away from the narrative and figurative canvases that she would have been familiar with.
It’s quite a proclamation to smash one’s own art! But I see your reasoning. You didn’t like its derivative nature; you were trying to harness the formal qualities of a technique but imbue it with original thought. I often feel that when writing. In fact, I want to smash a lot of what I write.
Let’s have an art chucking party. I’ll throw my words at your discarded ceramics and we can feel just a little bit better, a little more at peace with our crap?
I think I will go over to your old haunting ground by the Queensborough and take a bus ride.
Lydia, Clueless Crafter´s last blog ..At the Guggenheim ~ Museums and Art Alienation
I would’ve been thrown for a loop by his question!
Lindsey´s last blog ..Selective Memory Lapse
Lindsey, I quite literally was! At first, I wanted to run down the spiral ramp and out of the doors. That 8yr old knew he had taken me off guard, and he quite liked it.
Lydia, Clueless Crafter´s last blog ..At the Guggenheim ~ Museums and Art Alienation
It was at the end of 57th St, the park, Lydia! Not 58th Street. I realized that today as I was petting the goats. All the way down past York Ave and all of those doormen! My favorite little end of the street park in the whole world. The thought of you being there and looking at the bridge makes me feel very warm.
Diana Strinati Baur´s last blog ..La Luna Buona
I am most curious about the 8 year old boy????
Kathy G´s last blog ..Healthy Addictions
Dear Lydia, i love your writing style too and i totally agree with everyone that you should write a book! :) Really interesting topic, art is really so subjective. Love it when a little one asked you “what is progress?” :) Have a lovely merry happy day and love to you!
jacqueline´s last blog ..Happy february
Oh girl! You amaze me!! Well, you are gorgeous, so I shouldn’t be surprised!
Anyway, WRITE that book already. You really know how to make every subject utterly fascinating.
And that kid? It seems that the little ones get their smarts younger and younger.
Angie Muresan´s last blog ..on beauty
This all sounds very interesting. I bet you were amazed at the beginning … “whattha heck is going on… qu’est-ce qui s’est passe, hein?!”
I love art being surprising and inventive like this. But I also fathom that some people might not fancy it at all, like my dear hubby. He needs substance, and that’s respectable too.
I’ve started planning our NY trip next June and Guggenheim is definitely on my list. I wonder if you’d like to go there with me… on verra, huh!
Susu Paris Chic´s last blog ..My Blueberry Nights