Visiting the Guggenheim

I probably shouldn't admit this, but until yesterday, I had never visited the Guggenheim. After nearly nine months of living near the city, it was becoming a scandalous omission in my rounds of museum visitations. Could I truly call myself a culture vulture without taking in this iconic temple to modern and contemporary art? I decided definitely not.

I also decided that given my limited free time, I should game the President's Day holiday; I combined my first visit to the Guggenheim with a blind date. Besides the obvious benefits of combining culture and love, a new friend and I decided (snottily and quite rightly) that museum dates were the best possible way to weed out a potential amour. Sure, you can generally figure out if you click with someone over coffee, but you can often waste several additional dates trying to suss out their erudition, cultural literacy, and true sense of humor. The Guggenheim, as luck would have it, is the best possible museum for this sort of first date crucible.

I knew my date--an actor in a Broadway musical--liked photography, so I lured him into accompanying me with one of the Guggenheim's current exhibitions Isamu Noguchi: The Bollingen Journey Photographs, 1949–56. While that exhibition was our stated goal for visiting, we decided to wander around first and talk. Rarely, have I been to a museum better designed for just walking--there were no dead ends, there were no decisions about going right or left. As we climbed the spiraling ramp, there was a constant stream of new sculptures to consider and small alcoves with installations to discover. The alcoves turned out to be delicious reprieves from the masses of people in the museum; in several, we found ourselves the sole viewers of a work of art for stretches of time. Were I the type to enjoy starting into someone's eyes, this would have been delightful for reasons other than the art, since I am not, I reveled in the opportunity to feel alone with a piece.

One alcove's photographic installation of an old growth forest evoked an almost Walden-like aloneness. The artist photographed individual, majestic, old trees in 8 x 10 segments. Each 8 x 10 was framed and stacked one on top of another. Each vertical row was one tree. Below the trees was a black shelf stocked with mason jars. Each jar held a specimen--a leaf, a cocooon, a pine cone, etc.--from the photographer's hike through the woods. The jars mitigated the sometimes distancing effect of photographs. The forest was both a representation and a tangible presence in the alcove. Lovely and powerful.

Alas, my silent communion with the piece couldn't last long, I did have that date to entertain. We wandered out of the alcove and back into the hustle and bustle. We stopped before a sculpture made of driftwood and I got a chance to see just what my date was made of. The sculpture provoked a story about his dad's home in Los Angeles and its modern aesthetic and his feelings about it. I happen to be reading The Fountainhead at the moment and asked my date if he was familiar with it. He wasn't and launched into a discussion of how he found the language and historical context needed to truly enjoy the classics off-putting, a barrier to accessibility. As his example he boasted he could never really enjoy Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest." Poor boy--on so many levels. Instead of setting him straight, I gently suggested we go find the Noguchi exhibition.

Here is where Frank Lloyd Wright, in his infinite wisdom, made some questionable architectural choices. It was nearly impossible to get to the basement where the exhibition was held. We tried taking elevators--the ones we got on didn't go to the basement. We walked all the way down to the lobby and tried to get to the basement from there, but we couldn't find an obvious staircase. We asked for directions; the guard told us to go to the second floor and turn left and go down the staircase to the basement. We followed the directions precisely and ended up in the lobby. Again. We got a map and studied the diagrammed elevators. We went up to the second floor, wandered into a gallery of impressionist paintings and bumbled our way to the back where there were a bank of elevators. Success, these we reached the basement at last.

I'd like to say that the Noguchi exhibition was worth the monumental effort to get to it, only it wasn't. The exhibition depended on the viewer's intrinsic interest in the personality behind the photographs to drive it. Because Noguchi was a sculptor, one might sustain an academic interest in how he captured Asia's monuments and architecture on film. Sadly, the photographs simply weren't that good--they felt like the rejects of a National Geographic article on Indonesia, nor did the curator, through the inclusion of objects or even label text, draw parallels between Noguchi's experience in SouthEast Asia and its subsequent effect on his artistic productions .

The exhibition was a bust, but the empty gallery allowed me to experience the most ridiculous line I've ever heard: "Wouldn't it be cool I asked you out on a second date?"

Wouldn't it be cool if I gave the Guggenheim another chance?