Museum Architecture + Renzo Piano

I don't have a ton of knowledge of architecture, but I do try and stay current on who is building interesting things, especially who is building new and interesting museums!
Seems like to be chosen to design a museum building you have to be a special combination of artist & architect in you.  Someone that has this unique combination and has built a significant amount of museum buildings in the last 15 years, is Renzo Piano.  His architecture doesn't always amaze me initially but it seems to be something like an onion; the more you view  it, experience it, walk around inside, see different sides of it, the more you see how truly genius it is. 
As I researched Renzo Piano's work, I realized that I've seen it a lot more of it then I thought over the years.When I visited Atlanta in 2007, and saw the expansion of the High Museum, I was seeing his architecture.  Their website says this about his 3 building addition to their space: "Often called the "master of light," Piano's sculpturally inspired buildings meld seamlessly with the High's existing light-filled Richard Meier structure.  Piano's design of the new Wieland Pavilion and the Anne Cox Chambers Wing features a special roof system of 1,000 light scoops that capture northern light and filter it into the skyway galleries."  Without knowing this roof was design by Piano especially to let natural light into the galleries, I took this picture.  I remember being completely enthralled by a roof that was so unique.    

 My favorite is his design of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.  Home to a great host of modern and contemporary art.   

Charles Ray, Hinoki

So I'm heading off to the Art Institute of Chicago tomorrow with one of my best friends from college who is visiting me!  I'm so excited, especially to go to this museum with someone who was an art major with me back in college. 

So with that on my mind, I thought I'd share thoughts I had on one of the pieces I enjoyed the most featured in the galleries of the new modern wing.
The piece called, Hinoki, by Charles Ray, is carved out of Cyprus wood and occupies an entire gallery in the modern wing, and rightfully so.  It is a gigantic sculpture of a broken tree trunk.  Sounds simple, in fact I'd say I saw a lot of people glance at it then determine they didn't want to look closer and left that gallery.  It's true, at first you think it's just a broken tree trunk.  You might think, as so many people do, why is this art?  But then as you look closer, you see the details, the shapes of the limbs, see how it hollow in the center, then suddenly you realize you're looking at something that's man  made!  I love it when art surprises you like that.  I remember physically stepping back because I was taken aback almost.  Love having that reaction to art, I think Ray would appreciate it too.

Richard Serra - My Favorite, Part 2

So, as established before, I love Richard Serra.
Recently (in 2007) he had a 40 year retrospective of his work at MoMA which pretty impressive for someone to have while they're alive. MoMA produced a few videos to accompany this exhibition called Serra Sculpture: Forty Years.   This one is my favorite, it's him talking about the sculpture designed specifically for a space.  It really is fantastic.  It gives you a feeling for just how much work and innovation is put into his pieces, but also how well thought out things are.  One of the things I dislike most is when people think a piece of art isn't good becaues it looks simple or easy.  We can often fall into this with Serra's work because of its simplicity, but this video proves it is anything but. 
 

Here's Richard Serra in front of one of the same type of sculptures, if I had to guess I'd say it was at the Bilbao Guggenheim. For the opening of that museum he was commissioned to create sculptures to fill their largest gallery.

Here is an aerial view of the same gallery.  Beautiful.

Tara Donovan

[Tara Donovan, Untitled, made from paper plates]

The first time I experienced Tara Donovan's work, my jaw literally dropped.  You've probably inferred by now that I enjoy contemporary artwork that is surprising, affecting and unusual or new and innovative.  Donovan's work goes fits right into all those categories, and I would add a description of whimsical as well.  Donovan's work is usually made up of mundane, everyday objects like scotch tape, finish wire, styrofoam cups and drinking straws to name a few.  She transforms these objects (and I don't use the word transform lightly, trust me) into amazing sculptures and installations.
Its fun to interact with her artwork, especially those sculptures that you can walk under or inside.  Like this one which I've seen covering an entire gallery ceiling at Ace, as well as the entrance ceiling to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

I love her process which usually involves the help of a large amount of people working together.  This one is made out of fishing wire, it always baffles me as to how it looks so blue.  I suppose that fishing wire has the tiniest tint of blue and when multiplied by thousands, will look very much that color?

 Also one of my favorites is this (close up image) of a sculpture made of scotch tape.  Knowing how frequently I get frustrated just dealing with small pieces of tape, I can appreciate the amount of work and patience this must have taken.  Love her work!

Richard Serra - My Favorite, Part 1

I love Richard Serra's artwork.  I think it's a tie between him and Andy Goldsworthy for the title of 'my favorite contemporary artist', but I tend to shy away from statements like that in fear of contradicting myself at some point.  
When I worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, we were in the process of opening a new building.  Quite a process, but one of the upsides was that we commissioned Richard Serra to create and install a piece in the outside space of that new building.  As a result of him coming to install this piece I had a chance to watch how he works to install his work!  A truly amazing and meticulous experience, here's a shot of him collaborating with his chief engineer.

But let me back up, Richard Serra is known primarily for his works which challenge gravity and become very physical to the viewer.  Their breathtaking size and assumed weight of the pieces, for me have been some of the most fascinating and physically affecting works of art I've seen. 
The first time I saw a Serra piece in person was at the Dia:Beacon museum in upstate New York.  One of his lesser-known works, perhaps, was my first encounter.  Union of the Torus and the Sphere, pictured below.

This sculpture which is two long and narrow pieces of steel, mirrored, then connected on either end, was shoved into a skinny hallway of a gallery.  Being my first time at this museum, I didn't know of another way around the museum so I scooted by it.  Its amazing, the genius of putting that sculpture in that small space!  (I'm not certain, but I have a feeling he created it specifically for that room).  At first I attempted to get by on the right side, but as you can see, it's pretty tight.  At one point I felt like the sculpture might fall over on me. I then went back and got by easily on the left.  But what an experience, as you can probably tell, I'm hyper fascinated with art that gets in your face and invades your space! 
More later, but one last gem.  At that same museum, I saw Serra's Torqued Ellipses for the first time.  There are 3 right next to each other in a giant gallery space.  As viewers we're invited to explore inside the ellipses which are gigantic, very tall plates of manipulated steel, really a feat of engineering. The fact that these sculptures defy gravity doesn't seem to keep people out from them, but for me there was definitely hesitation.  Do I want to risk it, to enter this sculpture?  I thought about it and I'm sure other people do as well.  The Art:21 website says this about his torqued ellipses: "...bent and curved, leaning in and out, carve very private spaces from the necessarily large public sites in which they have been erected."  That to me is another way the pieces affect you.  As I was exploring, I felt almost as though being inside the piece, I was alone, it was private, a place where I could relax, be myself.  Because of the sheer volume of the work you really do feel isolated from the outside when you're within them.  Unfortunately you can't take photographs, but I bought this postcard as a memento of my first experience with Serra's work, and a hope of more to come!

Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917

I just got the Art Institute membership magazine in the mail yesterday and there is a Matisse show coming!  It opens on March 20th and it sounds like it will be an extremely focused, but really exciting exhibition.  The works that will be on display are only from a certain time in his career (1913-1917).  Sometimes I feel like this dissuades me from attending an exhibit, but in Matisse's case I think it will be fascinating.  More about it here.

 

Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread is one of the artists I learned about in my very first art history class.  I can still remember how I felt when I first saw an image of her piece, a cast of the interior of a row home in London's East End, called Home.

This piece is so fascinating to me, yet so sad at the same time.  It feels almost forlorn is the best word I can think to describe it.  Whiteread is now known for her castings in resin and plaster of familiar objects and the spaces they surround.  By showing us what the empty space looks like as an actual form, it changes our perspective.  It also has an ephemeral quality to because by looking at it, you understand that the place it was cast from had to be destroyed in order for it to be made (at least that's the assumption I always made, I could be wrong).

The first piece of hers I saw in person was this cast of stairs at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Seeing this sculpture in person is highly disorienting.  My eyes were drawn the logical part first, the cast of the stairs going upwards, then to the inverted stairs.  It actually took me a while to realize that the stairs that looked to me like they were the 'right' way, were in fact the part of the sculpture that had been inverted!  Its the part that looks upside down that truly is the cast of the stairway.  Amazing, I really loved seeing this piece. 

She's done casts of stairs before, one sculpture is in the collection of the Tate Modern.  About these stair sculptures she says "When I was first thinking about making [it] I didn’t necessarily want to illustrate it as a staircase ... I wanted to try to do something a bit less literal. I wanted to change the way one might think about how you walk around or through something ... when we first put the staircase work up in the studio ... I was struck by the sense of physical disorientation it gave me."
(Quoted in Transient Spaces, pp.50-1).  Very cool, I always love hearing what artists have to say about their own work.

What prompted this post is that I read that the Museum of Modern Art recently re-installed her piece Water Tower on their roof.  

Water Tower is described by MoMA as "a resin cast of the interior of a once-functioning cedar water tower, chosen specifically for the texture this type of wood would impart to the surface."  I love that its cast in resin instead of cement or another opaque material.  Since it is slightly translucent it not only references the water that these structures usually hold, but tranfers qualities of the buildings and sky around it to the viewers.  Excellent piece, I hope to see it one day soon.

Monica Bonvicini—Light Me Black

I saw this exhibition back in November 2009 and, as it goes sometimes with contemporary art, it stuck with me for a while.  I've thought about that exhibition rather frequently and am just now feeling like I understand what the artist was conveying and have some thoughts to share.  
Here's a shot of the installation in the Modern Wing of Art Institute.

 This shot really doesn't do it justice because what you can't see very well is that as you're walking around the outside of the gallery, to avoid the massive florescent light bulb sculpture (very flavin-esque) in the center, you're forced to reckon with the large holes in the gallery floor. 

This makes me think about the interaction of the museum space with the artwork itself.  I would say the majority of the time, artwork being displayed in a museum has nothing to do with the museum space itself.  Most it simply hangs, sits or exists within it.  But with Bonvincini's piece here, it instead takes the museum space and changes it, creating what feels like a disorienting affect on the viewer.  Instead of being able to simply shuffle around the square gallery, you have to do more.  This installation becomes very physical all of a sudden when you begin to interact with it, noting where you're stepping, watching that you don't bump into something etc.  I like what the Art Institute's website says about the piece that it can "provoke an acute awareness of the physical and psychological effects of institutional, particularly museum, architecture."

The piece was created specifically for these galleries in the new Renzo Piano designed addition to the Institute.  The largest hype I heard about the Modern Wing Piano was designing was all the natural light it was going to afford the galleries.  And it is true, this wing is full of beautiful light coming through the floor to ceiling windows.  Playing off the Modern Wing's greatest asset, the piece in the center (made up of 144 custom made light fixtures, wow) references the architecture in a very recognizable way. The Institute's website also says "Bonvicini’s project brings together three works that directly engage the Renzo Piano–designed building both formally and conceptually."  I agree, and I really enjoyed the exhibit.