The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is capping the 50th birthday festivities for its Frank Lloyd Wright building with some navel gazing. Still, there are worse navels to consider. Wright’s spiral rotunda, in fact, could be thought of as the greatest belly button in modern architecture: an innie and an outie all in one.
Contemplating the Void The show features works, like this one from Saunders Architecture, that re-imagine the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. More Photos »
The rotunda is the inspiration for a frolicking, mostly feel-good show called “Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum,” for which more than 200 artists, architects and designers were invited to redesign or repurpose the space. “A self-reflexive folly” is how the project was described in the letters sent out by Nancy Spector, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Foundation, and David van der Leer, assistant curator of architecture and design at the museum. Participants were free to propose anything, since none of the proposals would be built.
Whatever they sent in has been included in the show: computer renderings and posters, drawings of all sizes, a few written proposals, a model or two. There are architectural elevations and cross sections, nearly abstract charcoals, collages and Conceptual teasers. Some works are exceptionally beautiful, as with Matthew Ritchie’s radiant watercolor that re-envisions the museum as the point of origin of the imaginary cosmos at the center of his work. Others are pointed jokes, like Josephine Meckseper’s digital print of an oil rig floating in water that fills the rotunda’s base — a reference, perhaps, to the Guggenheim’s involvement with Abu Dhabi, where a branch of the museum is scheduled to open in 2013.
This is the kind of low- budget, few-frills exhibition that major museums need to try more often, and it is not surprising that the Guggenheim, the smallest of New York’s big museums, should set an example. The proposals are installed off-ramp, cheek-to-jowl in the museum’s two fourth-floor galleries, unframed or in rudimentary vitrines. There are no labels. Instead the numbers beside each work match entries on a complimentary newsprint checklist available at the show’s entrance. There’s also not much in the way of text panels. Some proposals are instantly understandable, some incorporate written explanations, some remain mysterious. In all, the crowded display is a good foil for the Guggenheim’s Tino Sehgal performance exhibition which has rendered the adjoining rotunda devoid of art objects and all the more easily contemplated.
The participants’ imaginations have run wild, or at least wilder than usual, although they often travel in packs. Certain ideas recur, among them bridging the rotunda’s gap, hanging things from the skylight and painting the interior or lining it with mirrors or chrome. Some of the most successful of these gestures achieve evocative transformations without adding much: Martha Rosler’s rope bridges, for example, succinctly conjure a world before cast concrete, while Karen Kilimnik proposes a layer of silver glitter inside and out, which seems both decadent and girly.
The rotunda is also depicted more than once as an Edenic forest or a post-apocalyptic jungle, a conceit that almost always impresses. Saunders Architecture, from Bergen, Norway, contributes “FLW in His Element,” which shows Wright in a stand of mighty redwoods, evoking his greatness, his love of nature and the Guggenheim’s own longevity as an art space. A digital print by Sou Fujimoto Architects of Tokyo, in which pines soar deliriously overhead, captures the museum-as-national-park feeling with particular grandeur. The artist-team of Elmgreen and Dragset achieve a similar perspectival thrill — from the other direction — by adding so many rings to the ramp that the rotunda floor is just a speck.
Atmospheric effects achieved with lighting, diaphanous or ephemeral materials or lasers, and fiber-optic cables lend the museum a runway glamour. The Dutch designer Ted Noten proposes a constant shower of Swarovski crystals shimmering down from the top of the rotunda, to be recycled like water in a fountain. Anish Kapoor wants to release red smoke that would slowly be sucked up and out of the top of the building, although his digital images also suggest red powder or dry pigment streaming down from above — even less breather-friendly.
Such decorative schemes — many of them realizable, thanks to new technologies — are reminders of how slick and generic large-scale installation art has become since it first emerged. One of the earliest instances of it, which was designed for the Guggenheim itself, was shocking enough to be canceled: an enormous piece that Daniel Buren proposed for a sculpture survey in 1971 so outraged other proponents of installation art like Donald Judd and Dan Flavin that they threatened to pull out. Mr. Buren intended to install a wide banner of his signature stripes extending the full height of the rotunda — a scheme that has many echoes here. Julien De Smedt Architects of Brussels, in particular, evokes the Buren with an orange, curtainlike net that would spiral up through the space and that visitors could climb.