Here in Fort Worth on the prairie of North Texas stands a unique strand of rare architectural pearls. Three neighboring museums, each of which represents an architectural master's work. The first is Philip Johnson's Amon Carter Museum. Next, across its wide lawn is Louis Kahn's remarkable Kimbell Museum, itself soon to include a uniquely discreet and yet aesthetically audacious addition by Renzo Piano. Then, across a shaded street the third and to my taste most flawless pearl is Tadao Ando's remarkable vision housing The Modern Museum of Art in Fort Worth.
Recently I spent a wonderful afternoon in Ando's brilliantly conceived space that houses the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art. The Modern holds a somewhat dark, but extraordinary collection of top tier art. I had been invited by a dear friend, she of multi-layered and complex spirit with a deep love of art, to lead a tour through their collection and comment for her and several friends and then to visit three easel paintings across the street at The Kimbell; a Picasso, a Braque (both from 1911 that seem to affirm Arne Glimcher and Bernice Rose's delightful theory of cinema's influence on Picasso and Braque's simultaneous break from Cezanne's spacial reality to a full cubist expression of actual movement and light) and the remarkable "Torment of St Jerome" by a pubescent Michelangelo.
Tadao Ando is an admirer of Louis Kahn the fiery, tragic genius. Fitting in that Ando, a boxer, truck driver and self trained architect is so passionate about every aspect of his work that he would pummel a laborer for tossing a cigarette butt into a concrete-pour at one of his building sites.
For my part I see his conception of The Modern as the physical expression of the nexus of two remarkable literary works - one of history; Andre Malraux's "Voices of Silence" and the other a rich, complex homage to philosophy and the poetry of the expreince of space; Gaston Bachelard's "Poetics of Space."
Malraux gained fame as a French Resistence fighter and, later as brilliant first Minister of Cultural Affairs under de Gaulle. His writings in the 1950's on the founding and nature of committed "museums of art," then a history of scarcely 200 years, discuss the concrete and abstract influences museums have had from their inception on our perceptions of and the very appearance and development of art itself. Prior to the founding of the Louvre pieces in private collections, curiosity cabinets, scattered works in the church or civic art holdings represented independent, semi-solitary evolution of form and style beyond the reach of simultaneous influences. Word of new works and styles, usually far flung and difficult to reach, spread with glacial torpidity through spoken word, sketches, etching reproductions and tour diary descriptions.
To Malraux the most basic role of museums is of simple storehousing. However, museums are also academic politico-aesthetic machines managed and driven by committee, group-think, collective approbation. From their inception they simultaneously gathered together and isolated under-roof otherwise disparate works from varied regions, dates and movements. Thus is created, by virtue of sophistry and spacial association an implied, often non-existent evolutionary continuum. They draw artificial, imaginary connections between commingled works and movements plunked side by side in a tortuous timeline often without actual connections or contemporaneous artists' direct knowledge of each others' work. And further, collection criteria often involving direct manipulation of the style of currently working artists seeking acquisition. A notable example is the once absolute requisite Italianate drama topped with a slathered goop of mastic to make it shine....."not glassy, not classy," was once a strict rule held in long standing at the Louvre, manipulating from the earlest days what "counted" as art.
In "The Voices of Silence" Malraux expands the concept of fixed-structure museums as unnaturally limiting constructs to include a further unnatural expansion into what he calls "museums without walls." These museums without walls exist as a result of the explosion in personal mobility and rapid post-WWII explosion of inexpensive, mass market photo media. That combination's low cost and high production has exposed vast numbers of works, most previously alone, isolated and virtually unknown to the multitudes. It also absolutely alters them by presenting them in print, each of a relatively like-size and scale whether a Babylonian cylinder seal or massive tapestry, fresco, rosary window, canvas or sculpture, all are printed as neat, similar snapshots, usually several to a page. Again, as in the museum WITH walls, suggesting a false association between them within an artificial, limiting construct - flat pages of a book or portfolio. These multiple alterations and miss-associations reinforce the falacious perception of art as an unbroken "genetic," self-aware continuum and, so, further alter and warp the very evolution of intra-museum era and post 18th-21st century art itself. Further mal-association between works and movements is exacerbated by the current turbulent marketing through slick mags, taste-hucksters and turbid, trend-ravening galleries. "What's not sassy's not classy" the art-snob elitists' slogan today. I digress. (No apology)
Now, from Malraux to Gaston Bachelard's elegant, dense "Poetics of Space," a four dimensional exploration of the nature of our personal relationship to places and space itself taking the form of a repeating word-gyre. Similar to The Mahabharata in structure his composition is stated again and again in repeating, expanding word-thought-spirals. Starting again and again from the same point the gyre widens with each retelling adding more depth - space - expanding from the singularity to which each of us gives form and consciousness out to the endless cosmos. Then "Poetics of Space" upon closing, finally, remarkably does so not as book but as literal space of thought.
Bachelard begins his spiral literally from the cradle, the first space our consciousness embraces and from which we first begin to gauge comfort, place and our expanding sense of self, space, home, world, universe. He describes the first childhood house, revisited after decades and upon climbing the stairs again for the first time a particular stair still creaks as ever and immediately evokes a spontaneous wash of instant, intimate familiarity beyond words. These subliminal auto-responses, what he refers to as the daydreams of perception we walk in, are those from which poetry itself arises prior to conscious thought. These endless, interweaving and expanding daydreams are the turning resonances we carry of places, secret spaces, favorite cubby-holes, safety from the storm, of stairs that seem only to climb up to the attic or of those only down to the cellar. The intimate spaces made so by the enclosure they offer holding us safely from the vastness of "beyond." Bachelard posits that we constantly measure ourselves and our place in an ever widening spiral, we live our lives in endlessly turning, richening poetry defined by the daydreams spun by earlier turns of the gyre.
And so the two works - Malruax's and Bachelard's - come together in the vaulting, brilliant, moody intensity of Tada Ando's Modern. Alternately vast, cold and imperious and as small, warm and welcoming as childhood - Bachelard - the museum first stands as warehouse and safekeep to art the very essence of traditional museum with walls - Malraux. Space for work, a somewhat linear presentation of styles, movements and eras. The Modern's collection, rarely playful, slightly grim connected by the umbilicus of Malraux's "here becomes there, thus, this begat that" associations.
The architecture itself is very much in keeping with the pronounced affection the board feels for the wonderful, corrupted, Loki-esque work of Anselm Kiefer, held in multiple pieces by the collection. An exterior almost completely of ground to roof glass and water upon which the whole building seems to drift. Inside, vaulting spaces, a glowing round-walled apse, darkened tiny, dead-end bits of stair disappearing into titanic walls in a grand hall processional staircase of the gods that ascends to the "palace of the blessed art." The only disappointment was the abandonment of the originally planned solid glass roof over all, a sad, but sensible choice in a place where hail like grapefruit can thunder down from an unmannerly sky.
In keeping with my irascibility and iconoclasm I never go up this stairway. I prefer the more beautiful and somewhat threatening "cellar stairs" at the building's north side. There, much narrower stairs. Concrete walls on my left are cool, silken smooth - they, like the entire building were cast in massive moulds of buffed mahogany. On the right is a slender handrail between me and a deep void joining a soaring glass wall, Bachelard's fragile film of thought that seperates me from the danger of the world beyond and the daydream of comfort offered by the high wall I climb beside. The stairs land at the exit - my entrance - to a beautiful little gallery, a holy-of-holies. A vaulted, smallish room of incredible warmth and intimacy, childhoods sanctuary. For all the concrete's cool, hard mass and sharp angularity it is to me a place of happy ascent, a deeply comforting space worthy of solo display of the smallest, most important jewel of art conceivable.
Moving through the next galleries of varied size and configuration - some windowless, some jutting out in the vault of space facing those endless glass walls that overlook the water that the building floats upon, past the somewhat overly somber, mostly joyless and self-serious examples of all the best names of the 20th and 21st centuries we come to my second favorite place. My exit...."down the up staircase."
The stairs are glorious. Wide, grand, tiny niches undercut the walls causing the stairs to disappear, uselessly swallowed by the massive, angled walls above. And, just like the grand hall of the Wizard, there, at the top of the stairs gazing vapidly down on us all is a huge, emerald-city-green self portrait by Andy Warhall. The Wizard of Odd, himself. I always delight in turning my back on his pocked, gaunt, lamb-fleshed face and slowly descend, erasing him from my thoughts with the delicious touch, lust, of the perfect skin of Ando's walls. Finally, passing the glowing apse enclosing Kiefers tender leaden wings, re-entering the blazing, naturally lit great hall I face, far across the hall another Kiefer, his sardonic, taunting "Pope Alexander VI, the Golden Bull.
Fort Worth, as is any city, is often embroiled in the pathetic day to day nit-picking innate to modern city function. However, in the realm of art and its collection, housing and safekeeping for the ages Fort Worth on the prairie is a remarkable, enlightened and rarely equaled nonpareil of foresight, devotion and great worthiness. Go figure, Cowtown the nexus of Bachelard and Malreaux.
