1 Contemporary Art Museums as Sculptures in the Field

Thomas Phifer's Glenstone addition stands as a number of off-white cubes in the rolling hills of Maryland.^A The winding approach, littered with sculptures that sit in expansive and expanded¹ fields (nearly 300 acres worth, they claim), slowly reveals Phifer's 'pavilions'. Each contains a gallery, most of which are dedicated to a single artist's installation. "Those must be the museum," I overhear a visitor ahead declare. But with all the sculptures that verge on architecture here — including three small, stone houses by Andy Goldsworthy — how can one be so sure?

^A
The pavilions as seen near their entrance. Photo by author.

¹ If you haven't read Rosalind Krauss' Sculpture in the Expanded Field — October 8 (Spring 1979), pp. 30–44 — please go do. My essay can wait.

White cubes have been synonymous with gallery spaces since the earliest days of the museum. Within, art pieces must speak for themselves: they've no context to lean on. A museum is an institution, so it follows that its artworks must be institutionalized. The phenomenon of the blank box, however, has kept for the most part to the inside of the museum. Le Corbusier, whose white cuboids persevere in the imagery of modern architecture, can offer at best a grey cuboid for a museum.² This continues through the postmodern canon despite the obvious duck-ness of the square, white-walled museum (and what's an institution without a couple quacks?). Here we are: contemporary art museums waddle to the rescue.³ Glenstone, SANAA's New Museum, Zumthor's Kunsthaus Bregenz and DS+R's The Broad all play off the archetypical gallery form.

² The National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, Japan provides the nearest white cuboid of the lot. Clad in grey concrete panels (more on this later), it floats above hardscape on signature pilotis. A white cuboid accompanies it, but houses the administrative portion of the museum. While the shade of grey alone discounts any white wall gallery interpretation, such archetypical exhibit spaces certainly don't float.

³ The text is unclear whether I mean contemporary art-museums or contemporary-art museums. Luckily the four contemporary art museums at hand presently are both.

But wait! What kind of white cubes are these? Why now return to a trope that exhibition design views as ancient? In fact, have architects not offered circles, spirals, flowers and sailboats in which artists may display their work? Sculpture may frequent architecture's spatial territory, but architecture almost always impedes on the performance, display or review of any artwork. This is nothing new, and contemporary art museums know so as they reemploy the white cube. At the New Museum, perforated aluminium mesh hangs with gaping corners over corrugated panels, a tactic that abstracts the austere stack into an abstruse act; with Zumthor, floating frosted glass overlaps gently off exposed interiors, creating an ephemeral mass; and at the Broad, well, enough said. Glenstone offers the cleanest cut cuboids of the four, but even it plays a few tricks. The large masonry of which the facades are comprised (alongside unbelievable panes of glass)⁴ is no masonry at all. Rather, polished precast concrete panels emulate cut stone by turning corners and forming quoins.^C,5 What appears as a sturdy cube of stone is no more than a rain screen. What comprises the cube in reality? Such sordid information is not on display at this refined institute. It's the concept that matters, not the execution.

⁴ I can't not go into the ludicrousness of the glass found throughout Phifer's addition. Each imported German pane measures 9' x 22'. They are found as windows both horizontally and vertically (at points switching from an internal window to an external railing on occupiable roofs) and are typically detailed to begin below the slab and end above the ceiling.^B The budget of this project is absurd, and the collection's value easily trumps it, but let's not allow this to become some Marxist diatribe.

^B
Unholy. Photo by author.

^C
Precast panels turn & form a false face at corners to appear as masonry. Photo by author.

⁵ We can now return to Corb's miscoloured concrete. Glenstone may share a material with the National Museum of Western Art, but the application does not even compare. Corb's panels are obviously panels: they are vertical, their aggregate is visible and on the corners...

Contemporary art is no longer modern art (can we still say it ever was?). Modern art grew up with and rebelled against the white wall gallery; contemporary art grew up with modern architecture. Modern art sought to blur boundaries, mix media and trash traditions; contemporary art inherits modern boundaries, media and traditions. The white cube of the modern era, scattered into fragments, becomes subject to its own criticality. Its narrative trembles. A loss of focus occurs, and contemporary art dances in those uncertain edges. The contemporary art museum offers a white cube as a gesture of good faith, of shared history and of shared contemporaneity.^D All four museums mentioned offer open, orthogonal, illuminated spaces. They don't all whitewash the walls (i.e. they don't rewrite the relationship of art and the museum), but they also don't advance their architecture into the art they contain. In short, their cubes are not cubes at all. They are fuzzy and confounding.^E They are flexible yet concrete.^F They are forms without confines.^G They are, firstly and finally, contemporary art museums.

^D
From a double-height ceiling, frosted, rectilinear lanterns pour soft light into the room-height, white-walled galleries below. Photo by author.

^E
But this is the roof, and the cubes are (mostly) empty skylights. Photo by author.

^F
As the rolling meadow becomes the building, the cubes announce a way to situate. Photo by author.

^G
The meadow and cubes reconcile in the courtyard — the meadow as the ambulatory spaces between the white-cube galleries. While they appeared so at odds at first, we understand them to be of one. Photo by author.