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by HERBERT MUSCHAMP
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Ever since the Guggenheim Museum opened
in 1959, critics have said that the building is a terrible place to show
paintings. Some have suggested that it would be best to take away the
art and leave the museum as a monument to its architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.
It’s true that Wright’s design often doesn’t display
art to excellent advantage. But occasionally a show comes along in which
art and architecture reinforce each other, creating the unified experience
Wright envisioned. For me, the Guggenheim’s current retrospective
of paintings by Ross Bleckner is such a show. I found the whole experience
very moving, not least because it prompted me to reflect on how a viewer’s
personal history and emotions effect the response to visual art.
The show dredged up memory from my adolescence,
when I imagined that I faced a choice. It seemed to me that there were
people who let themselves feel things, and others who didn’t, and
I wanted to belong to the first group. Did I really have a choice? Or
was I just discovering who I was? Suffice to say that I was born in Philadelphia
and grew up in a social milieu where inhibition was mistaken for character.
My struggle with that milieu has a lot to
do with why I write about art, why I’m drawn to the work of certain
artists. If George Balanchine was the artist from whom I learned the most,
that is partly because of the tension between the extreme formality of
classical ballet and the intense emotion Balanchine brought to it. Some
found Balanchine’s choreography cold. They missed the fairy-tale
plots of Romantic ballet. But who needs a plot when every step has been
conceived by an artist who once declared that “everything a man
does he does for his ideal woman.”
Frank Lloyd Wright’s romantic ideal
was Frank Lloyd Wright, but at least it can be said that the architect’s
profound devotion to his love object never wavered. What sucked me into
several years of immersion in Wright’s work was the extraordinary
passion Wright injected into an art form at a time when other 20th-century
architects were trying to turn buildings into machines. You sense Wright’s
passion most deeply in his houses, with the pinwheeling spaces that prevent
one from fully leaving the warmth of the hearth. But the Guggenheim also
grips you, some say uncomfortably, in its joyous but tightly coiled embrace.
I first visited the Guggenheim as a teenager,
when the building was barely four years old. It is so much a part of my
history that I can’t claim to have any distance from it. If I later
imagined New York as a place where I could feel at home with my feelings,
that was partly because this was a city that could build such an exhilarating
building.
What impressed me initially was the novelty
of Wright’s design and the sense of freedom it imparted. Later,
I came to see it in the context of Wright’s ideas. Here, in this
urban setting, Wright could not rely on the landscape to express his ideal
organic architecture. Instead, he conveyed it with the continuous ramp,
which he described as “an unbroken wave,” and with the visual
unity of interior and exterior that the spiral helped create. Wright also
conveyed the organic idea symbolically, with the seed-shaped pool on the
ground floor, from which the ramp shoots upward, creating, in effect,
the world’s largest Art Nouveau tendril. Or one could see the form
as a gigantic sperm. Either way, it stands for life.
The Guggenheim, which is often viewed, not
unfairly, as an expression of Wright’s ego, also represents the
Romantic idea that art should not stand at a discreet distance but rather
envelop the viewer, as nature does. Where most museums, even the most
modern, embody an ideal of detached contemplation, the Guggenheim pulls
you into a vortex, a whirl of space that keeps you off balance, as art
itself can.
Walter Pater, the Victorian writer, advised
that what a critic needs above all is not an abstract definition of beauty
but rather “the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful
objects.” The key word is power. The artist is not the only powerful
person in the room. Viewers have power, too: an active, not a passive
force. But not everyone welcomes the loss of distance that empathy requires.
Frank O’Hara once wrote about a conversation he overheard after
the premiere of Balanchine’s “Don Quixote.” A man demurred:
“I was moved right out of the theater.” Denby replied, “That’s
where you belong, then.”
People often complain that the Guggenheim’s
ramp is too narrow to allow adequate distance to view the art. This may
be a flaw, but it is also a philosophy. The contraction of distance, the
reinforcement of unity between artist and viewer, is what the design seeks
to achieve. And whenever I start up the ramp and pass along that pool
of water, I recall how long ago, Wright’s idea took root in me.
Though the building was shaped by the power of Wright’s vision,
it was my awakened sense of ambition that prompted me to flip a Life Saver
candy into the pool and resolve that I’d come back.
I’m glad I’m not an art critic
and don’t have to appraise Ross Bleckner’s paintings, for,
like the Guggenheim, Bleckner’s work is so bound up with my personal
experience that I have no distance from it. I can’t say what this
work means to art. But I’d feel like a dope if I didn’t try
to work out what it means to me.
I came late to Bleckner’s work, with
the 1986 show at the Mary Boone gallery, an exhibition featuring paintings
described as the artist’s response to AIDS. Some paintings depicted
trophies or wreaths honoring the dead. Dots alluded to Kaposi’s
sarcoma lesions. Lunar light shimmered across black canvases. But I found
it hard to accept these paintings as statements about AIDS, because I
didn’t regard the disease as being only, even mainly, about death.
Since only the living would see these pictures, wasn’t Bleckner
prematurely burying those who were desperate for a ray of hope?
But the work hardly left me cold. I was
dazzled by its shrewd synthesis of glamour and morbidity. To me, the blackness
stood less for death than for guilt, for the feeling of inadequacy that
may overcome us as we reach out to seize happiness, fame, sex, power and
other things that glitter. And Bleckner’s frosty, campy images-
of chandeliers, banners, flowers, pulsing lights- evoked the way I sometimes
viewed gay life in the mid-1980's: death and night life, the kitsch sublime,
the erotic Frigidaire.
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My
response to the work shifted to a more acutely personal plane a few weeks
later when my partner was discovered to have AIDS. In the months that
followed, I felt immense gratitude toward Bleckner for painting those
trophies. When you live with someone who has a fatal illness, it’s
shocking that the world goes on. Why don’t things slow down? Why
are they still playing those cheerful tunes on the “Today”
show? Why must the culture pound out these incessant primises of infinite
self-improvement, while so many of us are looking for ways to reckon with
our inevitable decline?
Those affected by AIDS had to award ourselves
trophies. Nobody else was handing them out. Yet I also came to appreciate
that Bleckner’s shamelessly sentimental paintings were more than
a protest against the indifference of what was euphemistically called
“the general population.” They were also a response to his
own ostensibly more sophisticated social milieu: the hip world of art
and fashion boast a virtuosity of inhibition a Philadelphia boy never
dreamed of.
By the time Bleckner’s next show went
up, my partner was dead, and I was too numb to pay attention to the work.
Actually, I resented it this time: more AIDS paintings, more shows, no
cure in sight. The day I stopped by the gallery, Bleckner was there, standing
by a painting of stripes accented with hummingbirds. When I went up to
say hello, he shuffled his feet in a little dance, and the squeak of his
soles on the polished floor resembled birdcalls. I envied Bleckner his
levity, hated him for it.
The show included a painting called “Remember
Me,” which I thought I would quickly forget. Red, black, and white
stripes on a canvas shaped like a Victorian picture frame, with the title
spelled out across the surface in three-dimensional trompe l’oeil.
I’d heard that it was inspired by the breakup with a partner and
was irked by the juxtaposition of such a casual loss with death. But when
I saw the painting again, at the Guggenheim, it was like seeing a familiar
face in a crowd of strangers. I stopped to chat. Yes, I do remember you,
remember where I was emotionally when I last saw you, several turns of
the spiral ago. You’re looking fine. Me? I feel great.
The distance of time brought me closer to
the panting. Loss is loss, the rejection of love can be more painful than
death, and this time the painting did not strike me as an expression of
grief over a personal loss. It looked, rather, like a statement about
art as a magical means to arrest time.
In a generation Bleckner may be forgotten.
His paintings will be banished from places of honor above the sofas of
wealthy collectors to their children’s dusty attics. But then years
later perhaps someone poking around one of those attics will wipe the
dust off that funny shaped object in the corner and notice something red
and throbbing beneath the grime. Remember me?
An artist once made a drawing of the Guggenheim
in a state of ruin, it’s concrete cracked and choked with weeds.
And in that dilapidated condition, the building appears even more vividly
a memorial to Wright. No stranger to rejection, Wright saw New York as
a symbol of the architectural establishment that in his view, had failed
to pay adequate tribute to his genius. Here, he paid an unforgettable
tribute to himself.
Attraction, rejection, fear of longing,
fear of exclusion: an intense emotional chemistry bubbled through Wright’s
building at the show’s opening, and only part of it flowed from
the paintings. A lot of it came from the glamorous opening-night mob,
with its large contingent of scary boys: the young good-looking men who
loiter expectantly on the sidelines of fashion and entertainment, hoping
to be plucked from the crowd and offered a modeling job, a condo, a car,
or perhaps just a week in the sun.
The cool, predatory frenzy of opening night
was distant indeed from the folksy picture ordinarily evoked by Wright:
the prairie house, the family hearth, the landscape stretching in all
directions. And yet, scary boys and all, the scene couldn’t have
been truer to the spirit of growth celebrated by Wright’s building.
The gay subculture, increasingly visible within the larger culture it
has long covertly fertilized, has become a flourishing cultural strain
in the decades since the building arose. Bleckner’s show is part
of that flowering. So is the hyped-up party atmosphere Bleckner generates.
I can’t tell how much of my response
is provoked by Bleckner’s paintings, how much by the building and
how much by the experiences they bring to mind. And I’m not sure
that I trust the impulse to sort these things out just now. If there’s
an idea embodied in Wright’s building, it’s that the connection
between art and life is at least as important as the separation between
them; that connecting things, in fact, is art’s business.
It’s a utopian idea. Even Wright couldn’t
pull it off, and certainly not here. The Guggenheim, after all, is a museum,
not a nightclub, a hospice or a Seventh Avenue showroom. The building’s
walls, its idiosyncratic shape, define it as a place apart. But to insist
on that sense of apartness once you’re inside the building is to
overlook what kind of place this is. It’s a place to unlearn the
rules of perspective, to give distance a little rest.
Given where I’m coming from, it wasn’t
a stretch for me to lose perspective on this show. And museumgoers generally,
not just critics, need distance as well as empathy to see art in the round.
It’s the oscillation between these positions that gives contemporary
art its shimmer. I expect to go around the spiral myself a few more times
before the show comes down, not because I feel any need to settle the
question of its ultimate meaning or value, but because I want to keep
the question in play.
HERBERT MUSCHAMP |