Newggenheim Museum

The Newggenheim Museum in Second Life

2009-10-05T15:34:00.000-07:00

The Newggenheim Museum in Second Life

The Newggenheim Museum in Second Life opened October, 2007 in Nowhereville. A collaborative effort between Crap Mariner and freereed Freenote it was a modified build of the Guggenheim Museum NYC to answer the 1959 controversy “Wright vs. Painting”

"A war between architecture and painting, in which both come out badly maimed," Canaday, “Wright vs. Painting” NYT October 1959

“The Guggenheim Museum bearing so close a resemblance as the circular geography of hell.” John Canady, New York Times, August, 1962

At the time of the Guggenheim Museum’s opening in New York City 21 members of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York protested the museum’s opening because the design prohibited a fit place to hang paintings. The Guggenheim’s first director James Johnson Sweeney likewise quit in disgust after a year because the sloping walls and floors were impossible with which to feature paintings.

During that first build Crap and I battled the design specs with the need to display art to its best advantage. Crap said it was FLW’s huge spiraling Guggenheim way of saying “Screw you, New York!” while I saw it as a vast toilet bowl to flush down modern paintings.

The museum was named Newggenheim, rather than Guggenheim because:
“Unauthorized use of the name "Guggenheim," images of the Guggenheim Museum building, domain names, exhibition names, artwork, photographs, publications, or other proprietary content is unlawful and will be pursued with appropriate legal action.”

I corresponded by phone and by email with the woman at the Guggenheim Foundation in charge of licensing but I did not get that authorization… and so we went.

We modified the design, took out the ramps, lifted the ceilings, and made the railings glass to open up the space. Crap installed a fabulous circular elevator and topped it off with a cat weathervane. We had wonderful parties on the roof. We raised excellent money for charity and featured some great Second Life artists and musicians. Tuna Oddfellow did a magic show for that opening and Thumper Boucher played.

In spring of 2008 I bought a whole sim, Moondust, to house the Newggenheim Museum. The second build dated from June 2008. This one was based on actual architectural plans of the New York Museum. Dresden Dagger made an accurate and beautiful model of the museum. Made into a float this model won the Most Artistic prize at the Diegoland Parade July 2008. The museum opened with a Filthy Fluno one man show. More than 100 paintings covering a span of three years of his output, this was and continues to be the biggest collection of Fluno in Second Life.

More shows, more parties. A lot of work. Over its 22 months in existence the Newggenheim Museum cost me about $5000. We never got foundation or university backing. During the month of March 2009 we had a fundraiser to try to save the Museum that brought in $200.00. That was the only month in which the Museum paid for its tier. By February of 2009 I had gone broke.. by March I was in debt and unable to pay my medical insurance. Was it worth it? Well of course not@!

I hobbled on. I had the Museum sold twice. The first man made a deposit, initialed the sales agreement and cut out. The second man tendered good faith money. I made announcement to the Newggenheim Museum Group only after he and his director had gone over the wording so I made sure “The Newggenheim Museum has been sold…” was correct. Came the time he informed me there was no money. Clearly he didn’t know the meaning of “good faith money” or that “has been sold” does not mean “has been sold for no money”

Arranging to have the museum up for auction the sim crashed on the day. That was the last time the Newggenheim Museum has been seen in Second Life. I tried to find a home for it after that but I knew I would never be able to pay for it again. I also knew that, failing to find a permanent home for the museum, a similar one would rise in its place and that would be the end of the end of the Newggenheim.

It was a fine museum. It was a great build. We did good. We promoted a lot of Second Life artists. We raised good money for charity. We had a lot of swingin parties.

More than that it was a build conducive to the showing and appreciation of contemporary art. It was an answer to the controversy over Wright’s build of 1959. It answered the protests of those 21 Abstract Expressionist painters that the Guggenheim Museum NYC is not fit to hang paintings in.. For its nineteen month tenure we answered the essential problem with the architecture of Wright’s final monument: Architecture vs Art? In the Newggenheim Museum art won out.

freereed Freenote
October 5, 2009

see also:

`Wright versus Painting: The. Guggenheim Museum', New York Times, 21. October 1959; reprinted in Canaday, Embattled. Critic, pp. 200±203)

“But in the city he marked for destruction, Frank Lloyd Wright has built a final monument to his own idiosyncratic genius.” Last Monument: Time Magazine;

HEARTFELT THANKS TO:

CRAP MARINER
PB RECREANT
DRESDEN DAGGER
AUCTION HAMMERER
CHAMPION VALIANT RIP
BOARD MEMBERS
SITEARM MADONNA
ANONYMOUS
TRIXIE BUMBO
JAHMAN OCHS
RAZZAP SNOOKUMS
FILTHY FLUNO
CHROME UNDERWOOD
TUNA ODDFELLOW
FILTHY FLUNO
FROG FODEN
NENA JANUS
GRIFFIN GAFFER
AUTOPILOTPATTY POPPY
GRACIE KENDAL
DB BAILEY
MELANIE MUNRO
JEAN MUNRO
RED MOURNIER
KYLE BELTRAN
ANGELA LINDEN
SCOTT LINDEN
DEAN EBERHARDT
WELLINGTON BAHRAM
CRIGHTON JOHIN
CHER HARRINGTON
CALEBBULLEN BALUT
CARNIE BING
ADAGIO GREENWOOD
THUMPER BOUCHER
TONE URIZA
SPEELO SNOOK
CAITLIN MESSMER
ZEALOUS NITEFIRE
SIDNEY LATTE
POLLYWOG GARDENVALE
LYNDY LOCKWOOD
BACON HELLERSHANKS
BIG D FLANNAGAN
BILL MONDEGREEN
BLISSIE BOUCHER
BORDAY MOO
CATAPLEXIA NUMBERS
CLYNT EASTERWOOD
CRYSTALINE BOOKMITE
CS KEPPLER
DEESUE PARX
GANYMEDE COBERTS
JAZIME LACY
JULIAN THARNABY
KAMINI JEWEL
KIMMER JAMESON
LIZ HARLEY
JEN NOEL
LYTE QUANDRY
MALA FEGTE
MARXIE LOEB
MAXWELL GRAF
MIKKI FRESHCHI
MIKEY METALHEAD
MINISTER MILES
KAMILA BEAUMANT
PARKER JANICK
PARKY’S PUB
SAVOY JAZZ CLUB
WEKIR
THE OLIVE BISTRO
QUIET SINATRA
REVPAPERBOY BOOZEHOUND
RIGGS KARU
ROMAN AVRIL
SHIRA ZEPP
STRETCH EBERHARDT
SUZETTA MOONITES
TAAL TAUROG
TAYLOR KAMACHI
URSAMILES MORPORK
VERA IWISH
YNOT
BLUESMOKE HEXTAIL
RYAN ALLEN
ELKO SCHUFANG
ELROS TUOMINEN
DOUGLAS STOREY
DREAMINGEN WRITER
JAMES FRANCIS
SOWA MAI
ANNUTTE FRANKFURTER
AXI KERMIN

and the hundreds more visitors and patrons@!

A Magnificent Obsession

2009-01-15T22:42:00.001-08:00

freereed Freenote standing on model of Newggenheim built by Dresden Dagger. Photo of Guggenheim circa 1963.

The Guggenheim and Me

My senior year in high school I was living in a boarding house and hanging out with the Dartmouth press, covered an anti war demonstration at the Pentagon, and a lot of other interesting stuff….. but most interesting was my trip to New York City at age seventeen… on my own… to the Guggenheim Museum where I saw, for the first time, a Picasso close up… “Three Musicians, 1921” the version owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

That day changed my life. Seeing Picasso's six by six foot painting I had a "conversion experience." Although I had grown up with art and artists, this was the first time I experienced joy coming from a painting. I had to test it. I turned my back on the painting, I looked at it over my shoulder, looked at it with my good eye closed. Yep, it was real all right.

From there I quickly drew three conclusions:

1) It is possilbe for a painting to give off joy.
2) I am capable of receiving the joy that a painting gives off.
3) Therefore, I am capable of making a painting that gives off joy.

I decided to become a painter.

Howsoever…..

While my intent was to view the Picasso, the building in which it was temporarily lodged (on loan from Philadelphia) had a will of its own…. and the design of the building, rather than providing access to the painting… was instead preventing it.

First there were the ramps… an unsettling experience to be placed on a three degree slope when trying to observe a painting in a quiet, stable and meditative environment. Inside the Guggenheim was the story of bodies in motion.. .rarely bodies at rest. The dynamic of the ramps was propelling people past the art, most often down to the entrance below.

Second, the shallowness of the galleries themselves. The spot where I stood was about twenty two feet wide, with a ceiling that was bearing down at fifteen feet, I was in a small tilted box trying to see a great painting. Great paintings need space. There was inadequate space to take in the Picasso, so I ended up observing it askance from up ramp. A minor detail, but most important for painters, is that the tilt of the floor was in opposition to the square of the canvas… so introducing a tension that Picasso never intended for his painting. In a well built work of art, the introduction of an element at three degree slope will, emphasize WILL, throw off the whole balance of the picture.

Third, the railings siding the galleries were high… higher than normal.. no doubt to prevent children from falling over…. the combined tensions created by the shallow gallery, the low ceiling, the high railing and the three degree slope of the floor creates in the museum visitor the anxious feeling of an unwelcome guest… the sooner the ramps dispose of you on the street.. the better, while at the same time nullifying the intent of the painter by introducing tensions alien to the work.

Standing awkwardly in front of, or up ramp from Picasso’s Three Musicians I was of several minds. I had only an hour before the three and a half hour bus ride back to Boston and this was likely to be my only chance to see this painting for many years to come. but no matter how I positioned myself in front of, or to the side of this great painting my viewing experience was not going to improve. There, too, was the restless energy of bodies in motion all round me. I could not hold my position in the rushing stream of people moving past me. My relationship, emphasize RELATIONSHIP, with this great painting was not destined to be fulfilled, not in that place anyways.

A long long long time ago museums were meant to be places where one could go to be alone with one’s Muses. Then came the modern age, with critics accusing museums of being more like mausoleums than live spaces for living art to be experienced by live people. Frank Lloyd Wright had an answer to this charge that museums had become crypts for the art of the ages. Make the museum dynamic….. introduce a flow of energy into the building … to make the building itself a mammoth sculptural form, housing within its external membrane works of art dwarfed to insignificance by the huge gaping vacancy…. an empty circular space eighty feet in diameter at the core of the museum. The volume of this empty space is the raison d’etre of the design of the Guggenheim..

There is no way a relatively small square or rectangular work can compete with this huge void that is the core of the Guggenheim Museum. Need I mention that it is an acoustic nightmare??? Should a “visitor” blow his or her nose at the ground level, you will hear it on the fifth storey, in addition to the constant whoosh of people as they are moving past you in space -- spiraling, compressing, and descending like so many marbles in a child’s game. You, patient, stubborn viewer, attempting to hold your ground inside this dynamic building, have become the obstacle in this pinball game. The problem with this museum is not the architect.. the problem, the obstacle, or grit in the oyster… the foreign object unsettling the flow of the Guggenheim is, in fact, you… the visitor.

Form follows function. This statement by Frank Lloyd Wright’s “mentor” the architect Louis Sullivan is so old now we don’t need to put it in quotes any more. How does the Guggenheim Museum fulfill this dictum? The museum serves as a monument to its architect, and was his last. The museum has become the artwork, diminishing and at cross purposes to the art it houses. And the museum’s dynamic flowing ramp ejects visitors at a rate faster than that with which it drew them in to its low slung darkened entrance.

It is forty seven years since the New York Times art critic John Canaday published his review of the Guggenheim Museum, Architecture v. Art. “The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a war between architecture and painting in which both come out badly maimed.” It is forty seven years since twenty one painters, including Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell staged their revolt against this museum, writing letters of protest that the design of the building was antithetical to their work. Letter of Protest

It is eighteen years since the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission voted unanimously to designate the Guggenheim a New York City landmark. Eighteen years since Laurie Beckelmann, the commission’s chairwoman said: ''When it was first proposed, people were outraged by this provocative building,. 'But whatever people may feel about it, it is recognized around the world as one of the great monuments of New York.''

It is many years since I have visited this huge nautilus shell of a building at age seventeen. Many years since I made up my mind to be a painter on that anxious spot an eighth of a mile up that interminable ramp. And many many years since I decided that if I wanted to see Picasso’s “Three Musicians” properly, I would have to travel to the Museum of Modern Art, as the Guggenheim had not only prevented me from seeing it, but then unceremoniously booted me out into the street. I am still rubbing my backside and longing for the old fashioned temple of the Muses where one might in peace and tranquility sit on an old bench in front of the paintings of the Masters.

References:

Wright Vs. Painting; A Critique of Guggenheim Museum Finds Design Defeats Its Function; John Canaday, Art Critic, New York Times; October 21, 1959

Last Monument: "Frank has really done it," snapped one artist. "He has made painting absolutely unimportant." "Twenty-one artists signed a round-robin protest charging that Wright's scheme for hanging would throw their canvases askew and the sloping ramp (3%) would provide no level base board for reference." Time Magazine; November 2, 1959"

"Museum Director Solves Problem: Official Faces Troubles of Architecture" "No doubt there have been other sculpture exhibitions as large a this one, but never before has anybody faced the problem of installing such a show in a museum bearing so close a resmblance to the circular geography of hell." John Canaday, New York Times; August 17, 1962

Crap Mariner: "The design of the Guggenhiem.. the spiral, in my opinion, is symbolic of a screw. Frank Lloyd Wright pretty much telling the world, 'Screw New York!'"Crap Mariner

Wright made no secret of his disenchantment with Guggenheim's choice of New York for his museum: "I can think of several more desirable places in the world to build his great museum," Wright wrote in 1949 to Arthur Holden, "but we will have to try New York." To Wright, the city was overbuilt, overpopulated, and lacked architectural merit. Guggenheim.org, The Building