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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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John Haber
MIXED MESSAGES
And no wonder New Yorkers were waiting, but is the New Museum really so new? It arrives on the Bowery with the names of donors on everything from the bathrooms to the standard-issue water fountains. It promises to anchor Lower East Side galleries, already numbering more than thirty. Yet it literally turns its back on them, with its face toward Nolita's fancier stores and brunch spots. Perhaps it imagines itself as the official gatekeeper to the hip. One looks for the velvet ropes.
One gets a glimpse of the younger crowd from the New Museum, but only on weekends. A top-floor observation deck then allows fabulous views of the industrial fabric south and east. From the cramped basement to the soaring fourth floor, each exhibition level has a higher and higher ceiling, as if the building itself were flying upward. Yet the main halls, although twice the old building's floor space, amount to just three rooms.
Okay, who wants more room for yet another of the art scene's insanely sprawling group shows? The promise of more haunts the building all the same. The Whitney, for one, has a larger and more intelligent bookstore, with room for more exposure to contemporary art and ideas than the museum's own publications and coffee mugs.
The staggered boxes allow narrow skylights above each gallery. Yet they let in little sun compared to the sunken ceiling grid of steel and fluorescent lights. More thin, narrow light tubes serve as punctuation down the service stairs.
A thrilling stairwell (named, of course, for a donor) ascends the fifty feet from the third to fourth floors. Along the way, a tiny alcove allows a pit stop and perhaps even some art. Yet its four-foot width makes it hard even for two people to pass. On the busy first few weekends, mismatched couples had plenty of chance to fail. Otherwise, one has to wait for the elevator, with its cattle-car interior and the acid glow of a translucent green ceiling.
The opening show, "Unmonumental," already suffers from the undivided boxes. The New Museum's architects, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, must have begun with a vision of the museum exterior and its site, but did its interior and its role as a museum come only as an afterthought? Will the buzz of an evening on the Bowery wear off once that starts to matter?
Account Removed
2 months ago
Abstraction, realism and conceptual arts are traditional disciplines of visual art and are not subject to going in or out of fashon. Choosing a covered building to write about is typical of a postmodernist writer as the visual aspect of the subject is diminished leaving plenty of room for fantasy writing.. This proffering also shows there is no closing of the silly season for the few longing for the collapse of values expressed by the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museums in NYC. Abstractions are many in Art Bistro, why choose a writer that is always demeaning to the vast majority of members?
brokencolor
about 1 year ago
10822 comments
Thanks for the concise article. The writing gives me a feeling for the place. As you say it does seem to send mixed messages as an exhibit space. Sounds like an interesting design, but also possibly flawed. I have visited the new de Young and the Museum Of Modern Art in San Francisco. They have had mixed reviews, although I think they are superior for art viewing than what preceded them, with good sense of space..