The ARTHOLE Is Back!

I wrote the entry below last January fully intending to continue my sporadic contributions to this blog. I am well aware of the fact that in the two plus years I’ve posted to this blog I have consistently missed the point of the whole format which is to quickly spew out commentary. Though anally and orally expulsive by nature, I have chosen to interpret this most logorrheaic of forms in a completely tight-assed manner. Like an idiot I chose to edit my work!

Despite how tightly I grip onto my words, I never intended this nearly yearlong gap to ensue. That was another matter. The key to the break, and my almost near complete abandonment of art writing, lies in my ultimate response to the new New Museum as explicated below. I was dispirited.

The cause of that dispiriting is flushed out as specifically as I could manage below. My reaction to the space was so negative that I thought it had to be me and so I held off printing it. However, my one visit to that museum is something I replay over and over in my head, and so I have come to believe it means something.

What I believe my response to the museum means, and why I believe it is worth publishing [and resuming writing] is because I have managed to find a nugget of cultural and artistic relevance in all this. Even if most culture has ceased to resonate for me and even if I have become yet another burnt out art writer, there is something emblematic in the failure of the institutions that were responsible for the creation of the museum and the failure of the institutions whose job it was to receive that creation that makes the phenomenon resonate beyond the reality of it being one more crappy contemporary museum. These institutional failures function as the one truly cultural gesture embedded in the whole painful affair. They echo the litany of disasters our think tanks, government and press have perpetrated on the world at large in the past 8 years with precious little, if any, retribution. SANAA keeps designing. Fukuyama keeps publishing.


Bad Museum



For all the bullshit written about architecture, all the journals and magazines and newspaper articles, for all the conferences and talks and symposiums, for all the fact finding missions and juried contests, for all the seminars and lovely scale models and computer animations, board presentation and board reviews and for all the MONEY spent on all these things all in the name of architecture, why is it that none of these a-wipes know fuck-all or give fuck-all about a simple little thing called flow?

The MOMA re-do is infuriating. In a one billion dollar boondoggle swipe of his tidy hand, Tanaguchi managed to bind Prometheus—and in so doing shackle the greatest collection of modern art in the world. The Rose Center is simply annoying—critics love it because it looks good from the outside, but let’s say you actually want to, uh, go from point “A” to point “B” within the structure. Try it; it’s fucktarded. The new New Museum is something else entirely. The new New Museum is…dispiriting.

It took me a moment to find the word. I am normally fairly glib, but I could not find the word. I could not find the word because it was not a word I usually feel. Especially when I go to museums.

I have been to folk museums in tenements in Lublin and in white washed villages in Bulgaria. I have been to too many Holocaust and Concentration Camp Museums. I have been to children’s museums, craft museums and science museums. I have been to the Tolstoy museum and admired the leather wheels on the bicycle he took up riding when he was 70. I have been to museums tucked away in ancient synagogues, cathedrals and mosques. I did the Hermitage in one day: long story.

My first museum was the Brooklyn. I loved it for its large slowly unraveling charm, the giant totem poles, Aztec temple models and American paintings. I loved it for the treasure hunts it offered: my mom and I would track down a list of items tucked away in paintings and sculptures and amid period rooms. It taught me to look in an active way. We did this while my sister took art classes. I was too young for classes. I was 4.

From then on and within the scores of other museums I subsequently visited and revisited, I have felt every range of emotion. I have wept and mourned in museums. I have fallen in love and been heartbroken in museums. I have become abject, inspired and even redeemed within the walls of the world's museums great and small. Even when museums were bad or pathetic, I could find some perverse humor in them, some poignancy or bittersweet pain. Something. Never in my life have I been dispirited. After descending from the 5th to the 2nd floor galleries in the New Museum, I was at last dispirited.

Why?

In the past decade or so, something has been creeping into the equation of museum going. That something else has involved the complicity of the architect, the museum board and the various institutions that revolved around them. There are and have been many new museums and museum expansions that took place prior to this last decade. But never before were so many of these projects so intrusive and obstrusive. Never before had they promised so much, seemed so aware of their tasks, created so much bullshit and bullshit literature ululating their projects, and yet ultimately delivered so little. Never before had these projects so consistently failed to deliver and on such grand and depressing scales.

In spite of all the missions statements and douche bag verbiage generated around museums, especially contemporary museums, as they blather about community and education and environments, all museums have pretty much the same mission: to exhibit whatever it is they want to exhibit in the best manner possible. It doesn’t matter if your purview is Etruscan Art or middling contemporary art with political/global leanings: you put the shows up, write the wall texts, stock the the gift shop and open the fucker up.

I’ve seen enough contemporary museums to know and resignedly understand that most contemporary architects hate most contemporary art and find it a nuisance even when building spaces for it. Consequently, my expectations were low when I went to the New Museum. However, I was suspicious of my suspicion of star-chitecture. Perhaps I was just jealous? Perhaps I was merely overreacting to what my insecurities perceived as a spate of over-hyped, overfunded public works that failed to function for the actual living, breathing public despite all the lip service that was paid to said public.

Not wanting to let my overarching bitterness color my judgment [yet again], I walked up the Bowery with an open mind.

From a distance the building’s outer skin brought to mind the fences on roof gyms in schools across New York City. As I drew nearer though, it brought to mind less chain link fences than speaker covers, in fact the whole thing could be pass for an oversized overdesigned iPod dock. That’s ok. What's more, the thing sits fairly well on the street, though the big glass opening with the art nerds hanging out in front not smoking seems like an open wound in the street—a gash infected with arties such as myself. Not wanting my self-loathing to overwhelm me, I kept an open mind.

The lobby was fine if too small: open, and all done up in grays and whites and blacks. Someone’s LED boxes crawled with second generation Holzer style platitudes. Very New Museum – they’re entitled. It’s their purview.

I wanted to start at the top and work my way down. The three elevators are an increase on the available elevator space at the far larger and even more appallingly laid out MOMA, and still we waited. The very top was reserved for offices. The 5th floor, the highest floor open to the public, is the site for the obligatory study center. [What, if not study, are we meant to be doing on the other floors?] The center consisted of some photos of the neighborhood the museum was in the process of paving over and a very nice reading room that lead to some very tony looking offices. The exhibit proper started on the 4th floor and featured an assortment of new sculpture mostly based on crap and crap assemblages, again all very New Museum and that’s fine—it’s their purview.

The room itself was very tall and fairly big and all on one side of the elevator banks. Not wanting to wait for the elevators again, never wanting to wait for the elevators again, I ducked into the unmarked stairwell the runs down the off center of the building. A couple below me were stopped half way down the grand height of the next floor because they were unsure whether the stairs opened onto the 3rd floor or only onto the lobby. There was no signage hung on the already cracking cement that comprised the stairs.

With a little encouragement, I got us all to the next floor: another big fluorescent bin with a little more to it because of its stair feature. Starchitects don’t design well formed and functioning spaces; they design features. Think about it: what newish structure doesn’t have a skin- or glass- or water- or stair-feature? This stair-feature is long and thin and runs all the way down to the second floor behind the enclosed and unmarked un-featured actual staircase. Nevermind that halfway down the feature a speaker droned out a voice so nasal and annoying that you automatically wanted to disagree with everything it said. Nevermind that: at least at last some flow! A way to get from one floor to the next without waiting or opening up a door into a blind stairwell! The stair-feature also had a light-feature—extremely self and, no doubt, energy conscious incandescent style fluorescents that stuck out perpendicularly from the wall. Both these lights and the overhead lights in the galleries proper cast such a harsh hue that I pity the paintings that will ever have to hang here [as of my visit the wall collages that were to be part of the crap show were not yet up]. I’m hardly a lighting expert, but even I know that there are warm fluorescent options available. If only there were some neighborhood in New York City where a person could go and explore lighting options…

Done with the third floor I pinned all my hopes on the 2nd floor grand gallery. The 5th through 3rd floors of this BRAND NEW museum were distinctly nothing much. I’d already had enough of the stunted basement at the beginning of my visit. If there were any hope that this museum, after all the time and all the hype, would not be joining the ranks of the other overhyped and flowtarded, money wasting, shitbag museums and museum expansions that have infected this city---if there were any hope it lay in the second floor.

I went around the gallery bin on the 3rd floor to resume the long stair and take it down to the 2nd floor. But no monsieur. I had forgotten. The long thin stair being a stair-feature was unburdened by such pedestrians matters as, well, pedestrians. Where it should have continued, the stair feature merely ended. The space beneath the stair from the 4th to the 3rd was a vast narrow wasted space with a packing crate leaning against one wall—and to make sure that no one attempted to activate the space, it was roped off. Roped off dead space in a urban micro museum?!? Children with blocks make better use of space in buildings they intend to destroy by chucking action-figures at them. Children with blocks have more consideration for the placement of said action figures in their sweet doomed structures then SANAA had for us poor sap, sucker, pant-shitter, momma boy visitards.

So it was back to the blind stairwell, and, at last, clutching what feathers were still left un-plucked of my hope, I burst onto the grand 2nd floor. And at last: another even bigger bin! More fluorescents!! And this time instead of stair feature or a psyche out stair feature on the other side of the elevator bank, there was an long narrow gallery featuring actual art work!!!

And that was it. There was nothing else to be had of it. Millions of dollars and millions of words and all we got, pretty much, was three big rooms improperly connected.

Dispiriting isn’t it?

Does anyone who writes about, designs or selects these things actually visit museums?