Berkeley Art Museum & Bruce Nauman, too + Tara Donovan
On my last trip up to the Bay Area, as mentioned in my previous post, I made an unplanned visit to the Berkeley Art Museum to see their new show, A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s. I’ve never really given much thought to Nauman’s work, primarily associating him with his many neon-text pieces. But enough about Nauman, for now. I’m really more interested in talking about the building that houses the Berkeley Art Museum, itself.
The Berkeley Art Museum Building
I’m in love. I’ve had a lot of disappointing experiences in museum design lately. I’m still having trouble excising the disaster that is the Portland Art Museum out of my mind. I continue to be disappointed by the De Young Museum. Unlike bad art, bad museum design can’t be so easily undone, or stashed in the basement. Once you’ve built it, you’re stuck with it, you’re bound by all of the narrow minded board decisions that shaped it, the design by committee, whatever went wrong, it’s there, edified in polished concrete and whatever novel material was the flavour of the day, for the gristmills of generations of complainers.
Back to the love. I love this building. I love every part of it, from the lower level entrance where they very smartly installed GRAPEFRUIT, to the amazing interior space that gives me curatorial envy like nobody’s business. Just thinking of the potential of the space makes me quiver somewhere deep and arty. It’s even better looking than most museums when seen from orbit.
I’ve been playing a lot of Metroid Prime & Metro Prime Echoes lately, and the interior of the space immediately resonated with me as a video gamer. Coming into the main space of the museum, you are confronted with a vast, auditorium like space, with the main exhibition areas being a series of open platforms that practically cry out for Cremaster 3 style intervention from aspiring video game character Matthew Barney. It’s just so easy to picture him wearing a pair of Powerizers and trying to jump from floor to floor, preferably while dressed as General MacArthur, but I’ll take a satyr costume if that’s all he can dig up.
The beauty of the museum is the platforms. Because they have open ends, all of the exhibition spaces are free of the tiny rooms phenomenon. They’re much more receptive spaces for installation art or performance, and you never feel like you are in a rat warren, which is all to common in facilities housing the permanent collections of fine art museums. Basically they’re a series of white box galleries with about 1/3 of the walls removed and replaced with a four foot high balcony area. The platforms are connected by both access stairs and some very wide ramps (certainly wide enough to accommodate the movement of major artworks - very well thought out), and walking up or down the ramps provides a little breather in your art viewing experience. I know that gallery visitors are always bitching about places to sit and chill out, but I really would rather see more non-art spaces that break up the tedium of what can sometimes be an endless series of objects, and the ramps kind of provide that function, by making the spaces connected by what function as hallways with vistas, as opposed to doorways. Re-reading that last sentence makes me realise that I’ve spent far too much time in museums lately.
Although I’ve never been to the Guggenheim, the platforms strike me as Guggenheim-esque kind of operation, an attempt to take a building with a conservative footprint and create the illusion of space. The Berkeley Art Museum is a big success, as it somehow manages to avoid the pitfalls and traps that plague museum design. Every space you are in seems bigger than it is, and you are never, ever in a tiny room.
A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s
To me, Nauman was a take it or leave it artist before I saw this show. I’ve never found his text work as interesting as everyone else seems to, and I have trouble being interested in what seems like a career built upon a desperate search for attention and recognition. This competes, however, with my sympathy for artists who use their self or their body as a jumping off point for their works, which Nauman certainly does.
Much of Nauman’s sculptural work bores me to tears. I just cannot become involved with it. Some part of it seems like he’s just fumbling around, searching for novel ideas. Some of it arouses my interest, though. Mold for Modernized Slant Step, a piece created as part of the 1966 Slant Step show at the Berkeley Gallery, draws my interest, if only because it exists as part of a body of responses to an enigmatic and largely useless object, a footstool with slanted steps that was found in a junk shop.
What I did enjoy most from the selection of Nauman’s work were the videos and the sound piece, Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room. Nauman’s 10 minute films, which I was wholly unaware of before entering the building, immediately realised themselves as the direct antecedents of Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint pieces, and really made me startlingly aware of how “not in a vacuum” those pieces came to be. Seeing them for the first time, as someone born in 1978, they appear as “performance video pastiche”, almost a comical look at the much mocked meaninglessness of performance and video art in relation to the outside world. They are the kind of material that makes up the source vein of ironic mockery of performance art itself. And they’re beautiful for it, and I spent a lot more time looking at them than I do most video art that’s out there. The bulk of it just bores you to tears while it dousing you with pretension.
Nauman’s not lacking in the pretension, but I felt mesmerised by the composition and the action of his films, especially Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), which brought me a sort of “Ministry of Silly Walks” joy, through its exercise of futility, and Stamping in the Studio, which somehow kept me engaged, maybe because the idea of an over-intellectualized performance artist stamping around in a room devoid of others is a pleasing mental image. The aforementioned sound installation, Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room, was perhaps the most stimulating and interesting piece in the exhibition to me. A small room, constructed inside the gallery for the exhibition, containing only the sound of the artist repeating the title, just worked me over with that good mix of sensory deprivation and over-sensation that clicks the breakers on and off in your grey matter.
I somehow missed her show at ACE - I think I have some kind of moral repulsion to ACE that makes it hard for me to want to enter their building. I don’t know. I’ve made up for that lapse in art viewing, having seen her sculpture/installation Colony at BAM. This piece spoke directly to my little LEGO heart - it’s the kind of nano-scale thing I like to build on lazy Sundays - putting the real world aside. Colony consists of a sort of city sprawl in miniature, composed entirely of the sawn off back ends of pencils. This was the best thing I saw at the museum, and it occupied a lower level, concrete bound, project space that allowed it to be viewed both from a roped-off distance and an interesting overhead view. I still can’t decide if this was the best place for this piece to be, but I enjoyed it a great deal as the end of a surprisingly awesome first visit to the Berkeley Art Museum.
February 15th, 2007 at
[...] This building is still in my system, and I can’t stop being in love with it, so I’m getting it out of the way by listing it first. The BAM/PAF building demonstrates what’s best about Brutalism (my favourite style of architecture), by not forgetting to be inhabitable and usable. It echoes the geometric depth of a Gehry, but does so in a much more subdued and elegant way. I’ve always loved college campus architecture in general. If you want to read more about this guy, just check out my last post. [...]