Tuesday, 24th o March 1998
Guggenheim Bilbao
From Ancient Caves to the Guggenheim Museum
I'm not sure just how much you know about this magnificent building, but it was recently finished under much international pomp and circumstance. The Guggenheim in New York sought and found a city that would undertake the newest task of supplying a location worthy of housing the greatest modern art treasures of the world.
That city was Bilbo, Euskadi (BILL-bo, eww-SKA-dee) (Basque spelling of "Bilbao" (BILL-bow) as in bow wow (dog bark)). In a city still trying to overcome the difficult times of industrialization and civil war, civil strife, and national identity, it is difficult to imagine what the Guggenheim means to them. It is certainly a mark of national pride. Critics in the community of Basque artists are quick to point out that the museum is nothing more than an American icon dropped like a big golden arch ontop of an already repressed culture... call it McArt.
Whatever the case, it has brought a lot of attention to a city that is trying to define itself apart from Spain and Spanish noteriety. They have done it by building the building that was said to be unbuildable. Basque engineers and contractors designed many firsts, from types of I-beams to special suspension techniques to pull off a great coup for the Basque People.
So we went through the galleries, as of now not that great a collection, but it's getting there. Once they (Guggenheim) get beyond the dumping of art from their basement in New York to fill space here, and start putting together a unique collection that has a personality all of its own, then we'll see some great things from Bilbao. I have to say that among all the works in the Museum, I enjoyed the most the works of contemporary Basque sculptors and painters. In all honesty, I found their work more relevant than most other things, like American pop icon Andy Warhol, and some of the various modern art competing for eyeballs alongside fire extinguishers, hoses, and stairwell exits. I swear one time I actually mistook a fire hose connector as a piece of art. It was placed at the same eye level as the rest of the works, and when I didn't see a placard next to it, I figured out what it was. I had a good chuckle about that one. There are other pieces worth mentioning too (if only for their irrelevance), a teenager's room enclosed in glass with books and clothes strewn over an unmade bed, to the giant billboard sized (actually about three stories) that had was just one word. You know, I can't even remember what it said... it was nothing important, even though it was trying so hard to keep everyone's eyeballs. There was the ballpark style billboard with the rotating shutters that had three messages. First a picture of a jar of vaseline and a cucumber, later the words "the problem with relationships" and later a peach and a hammer. I'm sorry, but this just doesn't make much sense. It seems out of place in most settings excluding any California art school.
There were the paintings that were only white, there were painting that were only red, there were paintings that were only blue. Notice a trend. I wonder if it's patriotic brainwashing or something. Anyway, they are mostly about color, attempting to understand art and the world better through only one color. What is red, yada yada yada. We've been through it folks. How much merit does it have. I don't think they built the Guggenheim to house canvases of red, white, and blue on a McSesame McBun.
Of course there were bright spots. Laura loves Joan Miró for his abstracted language, use of symbols, and extremely empathetic portrayal of the dark years in Spain this century (during the civil war and under Franco). For many he was a voice... er rather gave voice to the emotions and the tearing and confusion that existed at that time. It was his art that better than any other served as the hieroglyphs of the middle portion of this century, what we felt, who we were, and where we were going. Andy Warhol by comparison was but fifteen minutes of that time, perhaps while Miró was on the toilet or something.
It's worth a visit if you get a chance to go by there sometime. I'd like to take another look in a few years to see how it's developing.