[BRIEF NOTE] "Art + Architecture"
Apr. 13th, 2006 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI visited the Art Gallery of Ontario this afternoon with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
larkvi, armed with tickets for the AGO's Frank Gehry exhibition, "Art + Architecture", that I'd managed to cadge from Starbucks. Although the exhibition has been extended by a month, its small size makes me wonder whether it really should have been extended. Featuring models of and videos relating to the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Chicago's Millennium Park, the MIT Stata Center in Boston, and the DZ Bank building in Berlin, "Art + Architecture" provides only a superficial overview of Gehry's career. Most critically, there was nothing on the famous Guggenheim Bilbao, while the only nod to Gehry's pop-culture heft came from a clip from The Simpsons episode "The Seven-Beer Snitch". We joked to each other about Gehry's predilections for terrifying non-Euclidean geometries perhaps not entirely like those of R'lyeh, prompted by Gehry's stated determination to engage in the "demolition of architecture as we know it" by introducing more organic curvilinear forms making use of the latest materials science into architecture. It is probably fair to say that, at its best, Gehry's architecture is human-friendly and if idiosyncratic necessarily so because of its novelty; in the video segment on the Stata Center, Gehry's statement about his projects that "I bring to it my language" was perhaps too glibly followed by the reporter's rejoinder that it was "one riddled with accents." Probably: There were some disturbing statements in that same report on the Stata Center talking about how MIT students and faculty stationed in this building are going to have to get used to the fact that the extensive use of common spaces and glass walls means that no one will have privacy, and that's alright.. I'm not altogether sure that Foucault was wrong about the panopticon.
Ultimately, "Art + Architecture" is best understood as some sort of propaganda action intended to sway public opinion around the perhaps controversial Transformation AGO program of reconstruction at the AGO, which has already closed down most of the AGO's galleries and will ultimately involve the replacement of the building's brick façade along Dundas Street with curved and perfectly transparent glass. I remain unconvinced in an open-minded way about the artistic merits of this plan, though I suspect that this construction project fits along with the newly-mooted compare/contrast pairing of Toronto and Chicago in the local press as an expression about Toronto's deep-seated insecurity about its status as a world city. The exhibition is worth catching though the $C12 admission price is a bit steep. I'd recommend that if you do, spend $C16 to see both "Art + Architecture" and the exhibition of David Milne's watercolours.
larkvi, armed with tickets for the AGO's Frank Gehry exhibition, "Art + Architecture", that I'd managed to cadge from Starbucks. Although the exhibition has been extended by a month, its small size makes me wonder whether it really should have been extended. Featuring models of and videos relating to the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Chicago's Millennium Park, the MIT Stata Center in Boston, and the DZ Bank building in Berlin, "Art + Architecture" provides only a superficial overview of Gehry's career. Most critically, there was nothing on the famous Guggenheim Bilbao, while the only nod to Gehry's pop-culture heft came from a clip from The Simpsons episode "The Seven-Beer Snitch". We joked to each other about Gehry's predilections for terrifying non-Euclidean geometries perhaps not entirely like those of R'lyeh, prompted by Gehry's stated determination to engage in the "demolition of architecture as we know it" by introducing more organic curvilinear forms making use of the latest materials science into architecture. It is probably fair to say that, at its best, Gehry's architecture is human-friendly and if idiosyncratic necessarily so because of its novelty; in the video segment on the Stata Center, Gehry's statement about his projects that "I bring to it my language" was perhaps too glibly followed by the reporter's rejoinder that it was "one riddled with accents." Probably: There were some disturbing statements in that same report on the Stata Center talking about how MIT students and faculty stationed in this building are going to have to get used to the fact that the extensive use of common spaces and glass walls means that no one will have privacy, and that's alright.. I'm not altogether sure that Foucault was wrong about the panopticon.Ultimately, "Art + Architecture" is best understood as some sort of propaganda action intended to sway public opinion around the perhaps controversial Transformation AGO program of reconstruction at the AGO, which has already closed down most of the AGO's galleries and will ultimately involve the replacement of the building's brick façade along Dundas Street with curved and perfectly transparent glass. I remain unconvinced in an open-minded way about the artistic merits of this plan, though I suspect that this construction project fits along with the newly-mooted compare/contrast pairing of Toronto and Chicago in the local press as an expression about Toronto's deep-seated insecurity about its status as a world city. The exhibition is worth catching though the $C12 admission price is a bit steep. I'd recommend that if you do, spend $C16 to see both "Art + Architecture" and the exhibition of David Milne's watercolours.
