Since Frank Gehry's famously designed modern art facility, the Guggenheim Bilbao, is not too far from where we entered Spain (in Hondarribia), we decided to drive there and spend the afternoon checking out the museum and the town.
We had a little trouble actually finding our hotel which we booked the previous day. Marcus was able to reserve a room by phone in Spanish with me pointing to sentences in our phrase book. The hotel is in the old quarter which is mostly pedestrian zones and winding streets - we ended up having to park the car and find the hotel on foot ("Magde" our GPS seems to go a little berserk in the center of town just when we need her the most!). When we arrived we used a combination of the 10 Spanish words we know and sign language to get instructions, however, we were given two keys - one for the room and we still don't know the purpose of the second key.
By the way, I am not quite sure what Marcus has against the Ibis chain of hotels. They are equivalent to a Best Western. The good thing about them - they have parking!
The Guggenheim is a typical Frank Gehry building. I've (Kristine) been lucky enough to have been in two other of his buildings - one in Cleveland, Ohio and the Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA. All are impressive - he certainly has a unique design. (Gehry is designing the AGO in Toronto, but apparently he is not using his typical curving, shining metal structure. http://www.ago.net/transformation/gallery/). The curves of this building combined with the installation by Richard Serra of large scale curved sheet metal sculptures (that you can walk through), certainly provides a bodily experience - that is you can get a little nauseous. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:The_Matter_of_Time.jpg
The whole theme of the installations they've chosen to represent in the museum is about the relationship between the art and the you, the viewer.
An entire floor is dedicated to Spanish sculptor Juan Munoz (1953 - 2001). I had actually seen some of his "Conversation Place" figures outside of the Smithsonian in Washington and became quite enamored of them then, so it was really neat to see more of his work (and to make the connection to something I had seen before). Each floor had several large galleries and each gallery held only one installation. Such huge space for one piece! One curved room was empty except for two tiny figures sitting in the middle, their backs to the wall with a repetitive recording of a brief conversation "what, what did you say?" "I didn't say anything." "You never say anything" "And you keep asking."
We had audio guides to help interpret the installations. Afterwards Marcus said, "the people who write about wine are the same people who write about modern art installations"!!
No comments:
Post a Comment