HERBERT MUSCHAMP
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. 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.