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Make room. Sketches of Space at MUDAM

Luxembourg is showcasing the relationship between artists and museum spaces, a hugely topical subject after the Maxxi and Pompidou Metz opened. Text by Vincenzo Latronico.

 

Art

There is an anecdote saying that Peggy Guggenheim reacted with some surprise to Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the museum dedicated to her father. “But”, she apparently said, “how can we hang our picture collection on a curved wall?” “Oh”, the architect is said to have replied, “you will collect sculptures.” This anecdote is particularly relevant right now when the controversy surrounding Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI and the more recent one on the Pompidou Metz highlights the great debate on the balance of power between museums by starchitects and the works they contain. The anecdote is also particularly pertinent to “Sketches of Space”, a collective exhibition on at MUDAM, the contemporary art museum in Luxembourg, also designed by a big name – Ieoh Ming Pei.

The curators of “Sketches of Space” decided to focus on the questions raised on the relationship between artists and museum spaces. Although the latter should logically be considered closer to means than message and therefore a blank slate, a neutral box, a white cube, they have recently started demanding space and visibility, some say to the detriment of the works themselves. Seven international artists were asked to enter into a dialogue with Pei’s building by producing works – installations, sculptures and films, all environmental or on a very large scale – in a direct relationship with the museum’s architecture. A courageous decision that seems to confirm or clearly convey the excessive power handed over to architects designing museums. It is also an ironical decision because it appears to be showing its hand in a game in which all have the same cards and are keeping them hidden. It is looking for a fight.

On entering the museum, visitors are faced with what is probably the most powerful work: Second Life, by Simone Decker from Luxembourg. The artist amassed the storage cases of all the artworks shown at the previous MUDAM exhibition in the building’s grand hall and used them to build a tower-staircase that allows visitors to climb the top of the glass pyramid that serves as the museum’s roof and skylight –normally inaccessible. As well as giving visitors a truly breathtaking view of the surrounding valley, to all effects, Decker’s work, cancels and overturns Pei’s decision to allows visitors to guess at but have no access to a spectacular view. In such a way, they are prompted to doubt the sense of this decision and also to ‘thank’ the artist’s work for having made the architectural design more “human”.

A side space contains another of the exhibition’s most interesting works: Flip, an environmental installation by Michael Beutler. In it, some inner walls of the building are cut away (from ceiling to floor) and laid on what look like tilting trolleys that hold them in a horizontal position. Again, he – not metaphorically but literally – inverts the order of the space (first vertical, now horizontal) created by the architect and creates a mobile and surprising perspective of the surrounding environment.

“Sketches of Space” opened just two weeks after the architectural explosion of the MAXXI opening had been described by Frieze magazine as “an art fair on a sinking ship”, and a month before the just opened Pompidou Metz was dubbed “the flying saucer” by the local population. Suddenly, inside, Pei’s interfering, and highly visible, architecture became an invisible support for the exhibition it was housing: a white cube, but not a cube and not white. Peggy Guggenheim did not, of course, live long enough to visit “Sketches of Space” but I wonder, if she had, she might well have been surprised to find … not just sculptures.
Vincenzo Latronico