Rust Belt Chic

© Hisao Suzuki

For their August issue, Architectural Record also sent me to review the Pierre Soulages Museum in Rodez, France, by RCR Architects. The link is here.

RCR (Ramón Vilalta, Carme Pigem and Rafael Aranda) is based in Olot, near the Pyrenees in Catalonia. This is their first museum, and perhaps their most prominent work to date, although they have been working, and publishing, for decades, mostly with houses and other small-scale projects in and around Olot. Their best-known project there is the restaurant Les Cols, which I wrote about in Record Interiors in 2003 (page 136).

From AR. © Pep Sau

I think their interest in thick steel plate comes from Richard Serra and Donald Judd, and an early stint in Japan has left its mark. But they have invented their own particular brand of minimalism, and always push that vision further.

The pictures so far don't really convey the experience of this work. Ramón is undertaking to take more, but the sequence of large independent white galleries embedded in a relatively open space of contrasting dark galleries, clad entirely in metal plate and with northern light, is hard to capture.

© Hisao Suzuki

Perhaps the plan gives a better idea.

From AR

The picture does convey something of the harmony between the architecture and Soulages' work. RCR are good dance partners, playing the perfect supporting role.


I was lucky enough to coincide in Rodex with my old friend Hisao Suzuki when he was taking these pictures, and we rode back together to Barcelona, crossing Foster's Milau Aqueduct on the way.

DC

Fade to Black 
Architectural Record
August. 2014

Update
For a more personal view of the Pierre Soulages Museum, I add some of my own photos. They are best for showing details and an idea of texture and the effects of reflected light on the metal surfaces.

Here for example is the entry canopy, seen from outside and in:

The entry to the restaurant was across this very Japanese reflecting pool, enclosed in a screen. The over-sized gravel is basalt:

Sidewalks are edged with a thick flange of steel plate:

The stair rails are composed of three solid tubular bars of steel fused together:

 Can you see that? It fits perfectly into the hand.

Window frames -actually working structurally as well- are formed by paired plates of 6mm steel separated by a reveal:

The all-metal galleries receive a full blast of northern light through screened windows with window seats between the deep flanges that separate each pane of glass:

From this space, the high, white galleries are alluring sanctuaries:

One small complaint: the architect-designed toilets. If you need a sign indicating where to flush, something is wrong. Flush button completely hidden when seat is up. Maybe there are some things architects should leave to the specialists:

Finally, it was hard to get a good general view of the building. Here's a distant approximation from the other side of the park, and from the rear:

Make it Simple

My article on this artist's studio outside Barcelona appears in the latest issue of architektur.aktuell, which is dedicated the theme "Plain and Pure."

" 'A temple' is what the artist Eduardo Arranz-Bravo calls his new painting studio. 'With this height and the light moving through, it's a temple of art,' he exclaims. The monumental impact of the space derives from its great simplicity, which amplifies the spatial tension generated by two or three formal moves – chiefly, the irregular pyramidal ceiling topped by an off-center skylight."

I must confess, however, that I was really taken by the artist's original house,which features tiers of open spaces around a descending staircase that follows the slope of the site. It was designed for living, not the concentration required for producing art and looking at it:

"The house was designed in 1991 by a friend, the Italian architect and art dealer Lanfranco Bombelli, but in a style and spirit that dates to the 1970s, when the two formed part of the vibrant cultural scene at the coastal resort town of Cadaqués, where Bombelli built many homes. With the simple, vernacular forms of its exterior and the open but cozy spaces inside, filled with artwork by friends and including a sunken, built-in seating area around the fireplace, the house is a testament to the vibrant lifestyle of Barcelona's cultural elite during that era."

The Bubble 
Garcés De Seta Bonet Architects
Jordi Garcés + Daria De Seta, Project Architects
Eduardo Arranz-Bravo Studio, Barcelona
architektur.aktuell 409
 Aprit 2014, pages 66 - 75, cover

Photos © Adrià Goula

What is Wrong with this Picture?

The headlines in The Guardian:

Miami painter thought $1m Ai Weiwei vase was Home Depot-style pot

• Maximo Caminero smashed Chinese artist’s vase at museum
• Act was ‘spontaneous protest’ in support of local Miami artists

The facts: 

Ai Weiwei shows, in the new Pérez Art Museum in Miami, a group of Han Dynasty vases, over 2000 years old, that he has painted in bright colors, i.e. defaced. They stand in front of a series of photographs showing him dropping another Han Dynasty vase and smashing it to bits. This is art.

Local artist Maximo Caminero sees the installation, picks up one of the vases, and smashes it. This is a crime. He goes to jail.

And Weiwei condemns him, because the vase "was not his property".

Richard Luscombe  
The Guardian
February 18, 2014 

Nick Madigan Ai Weiwei Vase Is Destroyed by a Protester at Miami Museum 
The New York Times 
February 18, 2014

Donald Judd Loft Update

Courtesy Judd Foundation © James Ewsing

I developed my blog entry on the opening of Donald Judd's loft to guided tours for the travel section of the El País newspaper.  It appeared on July 5th with the title Minimalismo al máximo. You can read it in full here (in Spanish).

"La cocina parece propia de una granja de Misuri, donde Judd nació en 1928. Al final de su vida, Nueva York le resultó demasiado pequeña, y volcó sus energías en transformar Marfa, un pueblo deshabitado de Texas, en su instalación permanente más ambiciosa, abarrotando sus casas y edificios con sus colecciones de muebles y con obras de arte concebidas para esos espacios por él mismo y sus invitados. Su modesta casa de Nueva York le sirvió como ensayo general para ese gran proyecto: un trozo del Lejano Oeste en el centro de la gran manzana."

Minimalismo al máximo
Donald Judd loft, 101 Spring Street, NY
El País, Friday July 5, 2013
Section El Viajero, Number 766, page 12

Donald Judd: The Birth of the Loft

Dining table. © Joshua White / Judd Foundation

One of the formative experiences of my student years or shortly thereafter was a visit to this building when Judd was still around (though mostly in Marfa then), thanks to Ron Bentley and Sal LaRosa and their friend and teacher, the late Lauretta Vinciarelli. (Sal introduced us to everything about downtown New York in those years). There was the cargo lift, and every floor was an open space dedicated to a single use, from the bedroom on top down to the living room and the country-style kitchen, organized around an enormous oak table.

Each floor was so down to nothing that the stereo and speakers were on the floor, with cables snaking about, and the bed too, on a low platform. The ground floor was a dusty private gallery that you could gawk at from the street. Every floor was about that run of windows on one side, leading you from the back, where the stairs and elevator were, into the space.

There was a memorable New Yorker cover with a drawing of the building in those years, which I saved. It caught the spirit of the building then better than the exterior shots I've seen recently:

The New Yorker, October 13, 1980

Read about the restoration of Judd's building here:

 Alice Rawsthorne
"Donald Judd and the Art of Living"
The New York Times, June 2, 2013

James S. Russell
"Donald Judd’s SoHo Loft Opens After $23 Million Makeover"
Bloomberg, June 1, 2013

Cifflord A. Pearson
"Judd Home and Studio"
Architectural Record, May 2013

Alexandra Lange
"Donald Judd's House"
The New Yorker Culture Desk, May 13. 2013

New Yorker cover courtesy http://cover.browser.com  

The Judd Foundation 

Update
See my blog entry of July 28th for my own story on the building published in El País, Minimalismo al máximo.

Peter Schjeldahl on Richard Artschwager

 Quote
A few lapidary phrases by art critic Peter Schjeldahl on the Richard Artschwager retrospective at the Whitney Museum last fall, in The New Yorker of November 26, 2012:

On the cynical, media-wise state of things:
"...in culture, successful hype is prophetic and fashion is destiny".

On Artschwager's late work:
"Like other boundary-breakers, Artschwager was reduced to seeking, in vain, rules not yet broken. The immense knowingness known as post-modernism erased the horizon of conceivable novelty."

On his early work:
"Artschwager's discovery of beauty in tacky industrial materials ratified the deep program of Pop art: reconciling Americans to American culture, as it happened to be."

Let's let that sink in a minute.

Now this:
"And his wizardly way with frames and framelike constructions distilled the minimalist vision of art works as internal framing devices for the space around them, displacing aesthetic experience from the object's glamor to the viewer's self-consciousness."

Few can burn things down to their pithy best better than Peter Schjeldahl.


 Photo:  
Richard Artschwager
'Table' 
(1964) 
Melamine laminate on plywood
Steven Sloman/Richard Artschwager/Whitney Museum of American Art, New York via Bloomberg

Winter Art Shows in Madrid

The ARCO Art Fair is coming up this month (February 13-17th), and with it there are some interesting shows in town, particularly at the Reina Sofía Museum of Contemporary Art.

Highlights so far:


Robert Adams, The Place We Live
Photographer of the American West
Reina Sofia Museum
January 16 - May 20

Print and web images can little convey the engraving-like detail and printing of these intimate, classic photos, with ideas from oriental art and Robert Frank but forged into something strong and personal.

Mira Schendel. Untitled, from the series Objetos gráficos.
1973. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection

Concrete Invention: Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
Geometric abstraction from South America
Reina Sofia Museum
January 23 - September 16

Follows closely on the 2011 show on the same subject at the Juan March Foundation, Cold America, but this is a different private collection. Museum Director Manuel Borja-Villel told me he is forging new strategic alliances with international private patrons, especially in South America, and this is one of the results.


Cristina Iglesias: Metonymy
Reina Sofia Museum
February 6- March 13

Link: Fietta Jarque interviews Cristina Iglesias in Babelia, El Pais. January 26, 2012



Miguel Barceló
Galería Elvira González
January 26 - March 27

Link: Barceló interviewed in El País, January 27, 2013

Taking on Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1947. Photo: Ben Richards
From Wikipedia

From the Archives
Especially revived for my friends of the Temenos Association at the Madrid School of Architecture, I've republished Exegesis, an essay I wrote in 1992 for an exhibition by my compañera de vida, Amelia Moreno and our good friend Rosa Gimeno.

For those working on the TGA or General Theory of Architecture and other adventures it will look like baby steps, but it was the first time I started to think seriously for myself about the problems and limits of logic and the structures of alternate ways of thinking.

I was annoyed at the time by people in the arts with a pseudo-scientific discourse and decided to outgun them with Wittgenstein, the presocratics and the rest, "for fun" and "so there," so please don't take the serious tone of the text or its resounding pronouncements too seriously. The pseudos were suitably impressed and no one else has called me on it for the simple reason that no one has seen it since.

The first lines:

 "The world is all that is the case," says Ludwig Wittgenstein in the first line of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. What then is "All that is not the case?"

EXEGESIS
Exhibition catalog text
Amelia Moreno - Rosa Gimeno
School of Applied Arts, Ávila, Spain
May 1992

Geometric Abstraction in Latin America

A landmark show, still on view through May 15: América Fría: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America (1934–1973) at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid.

Art over four decades from Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico and Cuba, and artists such as Joaquín Torres-García, who founded the Asociation of Constructivist Art in Montevideo in 1935; the Madí Group in Buenos Aires, founded in 1946 by Gyula Kosice, Carmelo Arden Quin, Rhod Rothfuss, Martín Blaszko, Diyi Laan); Lucio Fontana, who settled in Argentina in the same years and published the Manifiesto Blanco on spatialist art; Alejandro Otero, Carlos Cruz-Díez and Jesús Rafael Soto in Venezuela; the Brazilian geometric movement, etc. etc.

Also included are interesting cross-currents with artists who spent large periods in South America, including Calder, Josef Albers, Vasarely and  the great Spanish sculptor Jorge Oteiza.

Curated by Osabel Suárez.

Francisco Calvo Serraller reviews the show in El País:
El ardor artístico de la 'América fría'

"For the non-specialist, this exhibition demolishes the common notion that Latin American art stands out only for surrealism, Mexican muralism and the realisms of the inter-war period."

"...the artistic production of this fertile current of geometric art in Latin America was not at all limited to simply following the European vanguard, part of which moved to New York during the Second World War... Rather it made decisive and original contributions that reflect a local sensibility y and an extremely rich cultural tradition."

Translated by DC

Juan March Foundation
Castelló, 77
Madrid

Monday to Saturday 11.00 – 20.00 h.
Sunday and holidays 10.00 – 14.00 h.
CLOSED April 21-24 for Easter

Pictured above:
Lola Soldevilla
Carte Celeste en Amarillo Nº 1
1953
National Museum of Fine Arts, Cuba
From the Juan March Foundation web page

Mathias Goeritz

Works on Paper, Models & Sculpture. A rare show on a fascinating figure in Mexican art and architecture at the Caja Negra Gallery in Madrid through January 7, 2011. Goeritz was born in Danzig (today Gdansk) in 1915 and grew up in Berlin, where he studied art, philosophy and art history. He escaped from Germany during the War, traveling through Morocco (1941), Granada (1945) and Santilla del Mar, Spain (1948), where he participated in founding one of the first resuscitations of contemporary art in post-Civil War Spain, the Escuela de Altamira, a group that included Ángel Ferrant, Eduardo Westerdahl and Joan Miró. He was invited to teach architecture at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico in 1949, and settled there permanently. Among the works he created there are monumental sculptures designed with Luis Barragán, the Museo del Eco, restored and reopened in 2005, and the 1953 Manifiesto de la Arquitectura Emocional.

Mathias Goeritz
Works on Paper, Models & Sculpture
November 11, 2010  - January 7, 2011
La Caja Negra
Fernando VI 17, 2º l
28004 Madrid

Image from the Caja Negra web page.
News source: Tectónica Blog

Exegesis

Amelia Moreno Autorretrato - Self-Portrait 1992

Exhibition catalog text: Amelia Moreno - Rosa Gimeno (School of Applied Arts, Ávila, Spain, May 1992). © David Cohn. All rights reserved.


 "The world is all that is the case," says Ludwig Wittgenstein in the first line of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. What then is "All that is not the case?" At the end of his book, Wittgenstein describes his logical structure as a ladder, which once ascended should be kicked away behind us. Like a perfect sphere, his logical construction outlines in its perfection "all that cannot be said," all that lies outside it, all that logic cannot define.

How often a logical argument is used to cover an uncontrolled subjectivity, a primitive emotional development, a crude sensibility, ignorance, blindness, incomprehension -- as if the very logic of the argument gives license to the unstructured character of the emotions. If logic is not always truthful, could there be other forms of truth, where a rigorous subjectivity disciplines and hones the instincts?

Besides deductive reasoning, the other fundamental tool of thought is metaphor, systematic association, organizing subjectivity through the relation of "A" to "B". Even Wittgenstein resorts to metaphor as he steps off his ladder at he end of the Tractatus.

And if the products of deductive reasoning are facts, the products of metaphor are of a much more subtle character. Certain metaphors are descriptive, and one of metaphor's most powerful functions is to identify in a single image the common structures that underlie apparently dissimilar things. But when two artists portray themselves as saints and arrange an exhibition space as a church with chapels, it is clear that what they are talking about has nothing to do with "facts".

Perce Bysshe Shelley, English Romantic poet, died in self-exile in Italy at the age of 30, drowned in a careless accident with a small sailboat in a storm. His friends built a pyre on the beach and burned his corpse. Lord Byron reported that after the flames had consumed his body, his enormous heart was found intact among the ashes.

But this is a literary, not a visual metaphor. Until now, we have been discussing logic and metaphor as temporal rather than spatial, algebraic rather than geometric. As linear forms, they are transformational operations from "A" to "B".

Rosa Gimeno Autorretrato - Self-portrait 1992

It is possible to discuss the linear structure of a temporal language in space, as in Rosa Gimeno's installation --the keys and windows, opened and closed, or the eyes in the place of the stigmata on the hands of the self portrait-- sequences and substitutions that create narrative or metaphoric structure. But the linear structures here are static and fragmentary, even reflexive. And as visual representations, they point to an obvious question: in the path from "A" to "B", what is "A" and what is "B"?

In the two "X"s posed above the right hand of Amelia Moreno's self portrait, our fragile linear structure gives way entirely. If this were a metaphor, its structure would be something like "A" is like (blank) -- a puzzle for the logical, a mystery for the mystical. But there is no such order here. The image in its insularity structures itself around the associations it arouses in us -- an open, apparently indeterminate process from the point of view of linear thought. Its operation is polar rather than linear: the image acts like a magnetized pole, inserted in and influencing the oceanic currents of thought.

Or the reverse of this model is equally valid: the contemporary model for hormones and other molecular agents, freely circulating through the body but coded to trigger only certain designated receptors or targets. This structure of poles and currents, because of its lack of time, cannot strictly be called a language. It is more recognizable in mythic forms, in models of the cosmos or the Jungian subconscious, a form of thought eclipsed by deductive reasoning as it was laboriously conceived in the absurd logical exercises of the Presocratics. The potential power of this form of thought is remembered in the idea of metamorphosis -- the strange figure of Proteus in Homer's Odyssey, "the ancient one of the sea, to whom all the depths are known," transforming himself into lion, serpent, leopard, boar, water and tree under Meneleus' grasp -- another image of the artist and his work.