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Unwrapping the Bowery: The New New Museum

Sanaa's New Museum of Contemporary Art (photo by FrontInc., 2007)

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John Haber

John is an arts writer and textbook editor living in New York City. A native New Yorker, he studied physics at Princeton and started writing about art in 1994. His own website now has articles on more than 700 artists and critics, from the early Renaissance to contemporary art. His interests include art and science, art and politics, old and new media, and the future of art. haberarts.com

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New Yorkers have been waiting for a museum like this. The New Museum of Contemporary Art even looks like gifts waiting for someone to open them. Its seven stories rise casually over the Bowery like boxes stacked under the tree. For those who prefer a secular holiday, they come without gift wrapping in the cool grays of winter rain. They look past the white stone of older institutions or the glass of condos rising left and right.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim Museum's broadening spiral as a challenge to New York City's "boxment." The New Museum's structure manages to do just that while embracing the box. But will it offer a gift to contemporary art, though, or will it defer to the buzz of the Lower East Side and the latest Chelsea trends?

FROM ARCHITECTURE TO EVENT

At the New Museum, a glass lobby front allows just a peek inside, cut off by the winding metal back of the bookstore shelves. A slim row of windows at the fifth floor gives the museum's tiny education center a view down Prince Street. They offer much-needed relief from the room's low ceilings.

Otherwise the blank, cantilevered shapes pay wry homage to Marcel Breuer's Brutalist design of the Whitney. The gray mesh siding may hint, too, at his aluminum and steel Bauhaus furniture, and similar materials add decorative notes within. The pile also has fun with a modern museum's proverbial white cube. At the same time, its plainness, damaged concrete floors, and warehouse interiors fit right in for now with its disappearing industrial neighbors.

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In other words, the New Museum sends more mixed messages than an interview with Andy Warhol. It can look austere or ethereal, one of a kind or a tribute, the end of an era or the seed of the Lower East Side's future. It can look spacious, dramatic, or too cramped even to allow seating. No wonder the word got out, and anyone looking for the old New Museum in any of its incarnations will be in for a surprise. Call it the new new New Museum.

Marcia Tucker founded the institution in 1977, in private quarters in Tribeca. At its first real home in Soho, starting in 1983, it offered a rebuke to its art world neighbors as much as an invitation. It showed women artists and political art when formalism or male expressionism reigned. It even showed abstract artists such as Richard Tuttle when they had gone out of fashion. In its temporary Chelsea space, it kept a balcony for new media all the time, while other museums still could not catch on—only the terminals kept freezing, with staffing too low to reboot.

The December 1 opening of the brand new building, by the Japanese firm Sanaa, ran thirty straight hours. Tickets sold out in advance, and when I got there the following weekend lines still stretched out the door. The museum itself seemed caught by surprise. The lines might have moved more quickly if the staff had mastered selling tickets and checking coats.

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