Explorations

 Monday I had a wonderful experience at the Guggenheim Museum. After a beautiful walk through Central Park, I just lost myself for a few hours within the ‘Gugg’. It was cool, and somewhat unusal to see exhibits that I’ve read about in The Times weeks ago.

Most interestingly I fell in love with Cai Guo-Qiang, and his exhibit ‘I want to Believe’. You enter the  central atrium of the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda, and find 9 identical and actual cars ‘falling’ through the space, simulating a car bombing, complete with flashing LED lights within and stretching out of the cars.  It was awe inspiring to see a visual of such a grand scale. This was a theme, I found that resonated within almost all of his work.  And I’m not alone in being swept away by this visual: Thomas Krens, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, says “[this]may be the best artistic transformation of the Frank Lloyd Wright space we’ve ever seen.”  It is beautiful, and everyone should go check it out. Cai Guo-Qiang also has a number of large pieces on exhibit that were created through gunpowder and explosions.  I was excited by this, but it wasn’t until I saw the video of him working did I really fall in love.  Looking at the final product(that measures up to 12 feet by 65 feet) his work seems so accidental, but looking at the artist work you find someone who has captured and plotted every single explosion and stroke. I really think that’s what pulled me in: the works ‘accidental’ qualities. Working with gunpowder is a really interestingmedium : “These practices integrate science and art in a process of creative destruction and reflect Cai’s philosophy that conflict and transformation are interdependent conditions of life, and hence art. At once intuitive and analytical, his gunpowder drawings and explosion events are intrepid, conceptual, site specific, ephemeral, time based, and interactive—performance art with a new matrix of cultural meaning.”

More info, pictures and video here: http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/exhibition_pages/cai.html

The Guggenheim was an experience. Simply a wonderful, rich, and silently beautiful experience. However, getting there was also an experience-a hilarious one.  Katie and myself set out, full of hope and good intentions, to where we thought the Guggenheim resided. We basically ended up in Soho and not quite near the Guggs, but we found a PinkBerry’s so the whole ordeal was pretty worthwhile. But the store front is green?

Note the disgruntled face. Yeah, it was good-but I could have used more pink, and apparently the store refuses to publish it’s nutritional value facts leading many to think it’s not actually ‘fro yo’. (Soylent Green is people…anyone, anyone?) There are a bunch of articles and blogs on the issue, such as this one:

 http://www.starling-fitness.com/archives/2007/05/08/is-pinkberry-really-frozen-yogurt/

Before we looked at a map, Katie and I relied on the kindness(and subsequent intelligence) of strangers. I’ve asked strangers literally hundreds of times over the course of my traveling life-and rarely do I get steered wrong. When Katie ran into a shoe store to snag us directions she was met with an interesting answer, ’I've never heard of the Guggenheim’.  The woman went on to explain there ‘were of a bunch of old buildings’ around the area and we should ‘check them out’.  Her advice wasn’t very informative or reassuring…and maybe the woman was just yanking our chain(I do love a good joke) but the exchange provided a lot of thinking material, specifically pertaining to my project. Did she really never hear of the Guggenheim? What types of artistic expression does she seek out to view, to experience, to create..? What and Why?  Katie reenacts the whole experience below; proving to us that the Guggenheim is sometimes a hard destination…even when you know it exists.