Hearts of the City by Herbert Muschamp

Author:Herbert Muschamp [Muschamp, Herbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-27324-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

THE MIRACLE IN BILBAO

If you want to look into the heart of American art today, you are going to need a passport. You will have to pack your bags, leave the U.S.A., and find your way to Bilbao, a small, rusty city in the northeast corner of Spain. The trip is not convenient, and you should not expect to have much fun while you’re there. This is Basque country. A region proudly, if not officially, independent from the rest of Spain, it is also bleakly free from Spanish sophistication. Oh, and by the way, you might get blown up. Basque country is not Bosnia. But it’s not Disney World, either. History here has not been sanitized into a colorful spectacle for your viewing enjoyment. People are actually living history here, punctuated by periodic violence. Those who visit Bilbao, however, may come away thinking that art is not entirely remote from matters of life and death.

Bilbao has lately become a pilgrimage town. The word is out that miracles still occur, and that a major one has happened here. The city’s new Guggenheim Museum, a satellite of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, opens on October 19. But people have been flocking to Bilbao for nearly two years, just to watch the building’s skeleton take shape. “Have you been to Bilbao?” In architectural circles, that question has acquired the status of a shibboleth. Have you seen the light? Have you seen the future? Does it work? Does it play?

Designed by Frank Gehry, the Bilbao Guggenheim is the most important building yet completed by the California architect. The miracle taking place here, however, is not Gehry’s building, wondrous as it is. The miraculous occurrence is the extravagant optimism that enters into the outlook of those who have made the pilgrimage. What if American art has not, after all, played itself out to its last entropic wheeze? What if standards of cultural achievement have not irretrievably dissolved in the vast, tepid bath of relativity, telemarketing, and manipulated public opinion? Has it even become possible, once again, to think about beauty as a form of truth?

Ring-a-ding-ding.

Frank Gehry, who is sixty-eight, has been an important figure in architecture since 1978, the year he completed the remodeling of his home in Santa Monica, California. An extensively overhauled version of a generic Dutch-roofed suburban house, the building employed an original vocabulary of crude industrial materials: chain-link fence, plywood, galvanized zinc, cinder block, exposed wood framing. These he arranged into a composition of lopsided cubes, exposed-stud walls, and other unruly shapes. In the past five years, Gehry has completed such major buildings as the University of Toledo Center for the Visual Arts, the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, the American Center in Paris, an office building in Prague. These projects not only represent an enlargement in architectural scale. They have also extended what seemed a purely private, idiosyncratic language into the larger dimension of public meaning.

Gehry’s own house was a tour de force, but it was, after all, an architect’s home.

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