Basque country travels: El Guggen Part1 (for Adrian)

[JohnM]

-- again if you click at the web site you'll see loadsa pix ---

El Guggen
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4. Lau

[The word 'zulo' means 'hole' in Euskara. Or in ancient
times, 'cave'. With the suffix -eta (which is used to denote
place in toponyms) it may well mean 'caveman' were called
Zuluetas - which became a common surname amongst Basques. Of
course, in the twilight cavemen would only be seen in
'zuloeta', or in French Basque silhouette - would they not ?]

Even great cities do not necessarily have immediately
distinguishable landmarks. London has its Big Ben, Paris its
Eiffel Tower, Rome its Colosseo, New York its Empire State
Building, Sydney its Opera House, Washington its White
House, San Francisco its Golden Gate Bridge, Athens its
Parthenon, Rio its Corcovado, Cape Town its Table Mountain,
but Tokyo ? Mexico City ? Vienna ? Chicago ?

Yet in a remarkable coup, beating competition from places
like Venice, Salzburg, Madrid and Tokyo a bleak industrial
city in the north of Spain managed to win the site for the
next Guggenheim museum, which was officially opened on
October 18th, 1997. This much was an achievement for the
city of Bilbao. But what no one reckoned with was that they
were going to be the first city in Spain to get a landmark.

No one who has seen even a picture of the Guggenheim museum
can fail to be astonished. The American architect Frank
Gehry has created a building which has been chosen as one of
the most representative of the 20th century. And this one,
is one people love. Prince Charles should be dragged
screaming and kicking to see it. Bilbainos and tourists
alike simply adore it. They have warmed up to it in a way
they have not to the Lloyds building, the Pompidou Centre or
the futuristic creations of La Defense. From afar, it
resembles a ship - to remind people of Bilbao's past - out
of which springs a flower: the future . It is made out of
concrete and titanium and is surrounded by a moat. It is
built next to the river, in the old docklands of
Abandoibarra and the empty spaces around it add to its
photogenic presence. There is nothing cluttering its
surroundings like many a city cathedral. It could not have
been built any other time; Frank Gehry utilised a computer
program which is normally used by NASA. Bilbao's Guggenheim
museum ('El Guggen' as the locals call it affectionately) is
a joint effort by man and computer. What better way to
define our fin de siècle ?

Alternatively, the mistrustful amongst you may want to come
and see it early, before it starts falling to bits like the
Grande Arche de la Defense (architect: Danish, builders:
French) . I hope it stays up intact longer than the T-shirt
I bought from its shop.

Famous though it may be, the Guggenheim museum is not the
only modern building of note in Bilbao. As a bonus, Frank
Gehry threw in a bridge: the Puente de la Salve, integrating
it with the museum. Then, there is the new metro designed by
our own Norman Foster: cement and steel, it is practical and
impressive at the same time. Its exits are funnels of glass
curving gracefully and ending in a series of circles forming
the Metro's logo: three circles rising.

And there is the footbridge of Zubi Zuri ('white bridge' in
Euskara) designed by the Valencian architect Santiago
Calatrava crossing the Rio Nervión; it is an elegant, dainty
structure unlike any other bridge I have seen. A long
incline walkway parallel to the riverbank leads up to the
bridge on either side. A single arch shoots up high
connecting the two banks; the bridge is suspended below held
by steel threads emanating from the main arch interlocking
at angles with each other. This is a bridge that thinks it's
a catwalk.

These three wonderful constructions are but the beginning of
a radical facelift that the mayor of Bilbao, Josu Ortuondo,
in conjunction with the Basque autonomous local government
intends to base a whole new town on. It is hard to believe
that the driving force behind this regeneration was only
first elected in 1991. He belongs to the mild nationalist
party PNV. In the 1990s the PNV was in power at the same
time in Bilbao and in the autonomous government of the
Basque country: they co-operated synergistically. The
Guggenheim museum was won with a grant of $1,500,000 by the
autonomous government and the granting of free land by the
city. Investment in infrastructure means jobs, means fewer
idle youths, means less support for extremist organisations.
Out goes old Bilbao the hotbed of revolutionary conflict,
unemployment, industrial decline and pollution; in comes the
superhigh-tech Bilbao Nuevo, a town to better Barcelona and
Madrid.

When all is over, the town will be barely recognisable in a
development second only to that of the London Docklands -
and it is in the equivalent Bilboan rotting warehouses and
quays that the construction is taking place. The metro will
reach the mouth of the river in both directions. Another
footbridge downstream of the museum will join the University
of Bilbao with new buildings on the opposite side. The Ría
shopping complex (our own Peter Coleman is the architect
there), is already functional before it is fully complete.
200,000 square meters of a new park will engulf one bank.
The culmination of the efforts will be a new Convention
Centre which will hopefully attract the business community.
A science park outside the town limits is being laid out in
Zamudio. And to top it all, there is the cleaning up of the
Rio Nervión.

Bilbao has been the port in a hinterland of iron and coal
mines. Iron is what made Bilbao powerful in the 19th century
and created the class conflicts that would turn it
revolutionary in a Marxist-textbook-case-kind-of-way. And
the resulting sludge has polluted the river in such an
extent that any careless stirring of the silt in its mouth
will have an adverse effect on marine life from Bordeaux to
La Coruña. Only by 2010 will the river breathe again.

In Spain they call it 'the Guggenheim effect' . In short,
one would call it, 'putting Bilbao on the map'. It has
succeeded. Bilbao has now the most visited museum in Spain -
and in a country that can boast the Prado, this is
something. In 1997 the airport (designed by Calatrava,
again, and extended to cope with ten million passengers by
2025, now that is what I call forward planning) registered
an increase of traffic of 30%. And, as I found out later,
the 1998 Bilbao Fiesta logged a 98% increase of foreign
tourists over the previous year. Hotels were reporting 100%
capacity for the whole week - all the way to the expensive
five-star ones. I got off lightly, it seems. And if you have
any doubts left about the Guggenheim effect, here's the
clincher: Marks and Spencer are opening a branch in its Gran
Via on October 1st 1998. WOW - not just on the culture map,
but on the shopping map as well, eh ? Just like Leeds's
claim as the shopping capital of the North was confirmed
when Harvey Nicks opened the only other store outside
London. I was there within the week; unfortunately the only
thing I could afford was some designer pasta. But I digress.
We were talking about art and urban reinvention.

The day I visited the Guggenheim museum, the queue to get in
stretched to 1000 people. My hung over spirit was not
broken, though, and as I was taking pictures around the
edifice, I spotted that the door which led to its shop was
unguarded. Undaunted, I slipped through; I can thus say that
I entered the Guggenheim museum from the rear - and jumped a
queue of 1000. Is that a record ?

The inside is as stunning as the outside. The Guggenheim
museum not only does it present its exhibits in a
magnificent manner - its 130m long and 30m wide ground floor
gallery allows exhibition of art works as huge as they come
- not only is the selection interesting and challenging, but
also you can not escape from the fact that you have entered
a piece of modern architecture unequalled this decade. In
that Frank Gehry has succeeded in combining the functional
with the spectacular. But people do get confused in a museum
of modern art. I saw someone thumbing his catalogue and
scratching his head looking at a seat.

So what was in there ?

There were two special exhibitions: one the works of Helen
Frankenthaler (1956-1959), but I don't go much for soak-and-
stain canvasses (too hippy and passé now) which make me
sometimes wonder about the sanity of New York critics. The
other was much more interesting: it was called 'China, 5000
years', which provided us with a massive overview of Chinese
art. Four coloured pillars in the huge atrium symbolised the
four directions. 'The East is blue, the West is white the
North is black and the South is red', as the poem says...

I am not a total ignoramus on Chinese art, although as far
as the Far East is concerned, although I am far more
fascinated with its Japanese counterpart. I mean I can
distinguish between Song, Qing and Ming porcelain
(monochrome, multicoloured and Blue Delft-like respectively
- there, its no big deal, you can do it, too) and I have
seen some famous jade and bronze Chinese art treasures in my
time, but I had never seen modern Chinese painting and this
is where the museum scored highly. Although there was some
lovely gohua (black and red ink on paper) sketches with 19th
century themes from the Shanghai school combining
traditional and Western influences, the section on
revolutionary painting, influenced by the Soviet Union, was
the one that drew the crowds. Socialist realism, being well,
realistic, allowed you to trace the increasing baldness of
Chairman Mao 1946-1976: young and with a full-head of hair
reporting on the Pacification of Hunan; in front of Mount
Jinggong (wider forehead, having a fag); receiving visitors
from Africa, Asia and Latin America (older and balder).
Sometimes socialist realism becomes socialist surrealism:
the absurd idealisation that wants everyone smiling,
corpulent and muscular ('In Front of Tiannanmen', 'Five
heroes at Mount Langya') really tests one's nerves. We are
even shown smiling patients operated on by doctors and
nurses - "Acupuncture Anaesthesia" Tang Muli (1972). (I said
somewhere the Chinese love operating on conscious people,
didn't I ?) Thematically, farcical though they may be, the
skill and the artistry of the canvases is undoubtable, and
one can not help by being drawn in the propaganda pondering
'How nice the world would be if only...'

The standard exhibition in the Guggenheim museum is also
very eclectic. There are two Warhols : the '150 faces of
Marilyn' (I can confirm that number) and the 'Many faces of
Chairman Mao' (440 - sad ain't I ?), two Roy Liechtensteins,
a labyrinth (20 minutes queue to enter the art, no thanks),
one of the gigantic ferrous sculptures by Richard Serra
called the Serpent (31 meters) better known in Britain for
his vertical three panels outside Liverpool Street Station,
and the famous Gilbert and George 'Waking', whose disguised
homoeroticism is intriguing. My own homeboy Yannis Kounelis
(big in the States) is represented with a set of ermm...
steel panels with coal and burlap sacks; there is also a
neon display of integers, which I immediately recognised as
a Fibonacci sequence (to 89) next to a stuffed crocodile -
who says modern art has no humour ?

There are the usual boring Brice Marden and Robert Ryman
empty squares and parallelograms and circles which, in my
opinion give modern art a bad name, but the most engaging
exhibit is audio-visual. It's by the Canadian artist Stan
Douglas, totally unknown to me till then. There are two dark
rooms with projections. One room shows a film of a naked man
immersed in water. It is in super slow motion with an
electronic experimental soundtrack as the camera slowly
zooms in to his face which only appears out of the water
after what seems an eternity (though most people leave after
we stop seeing the man's dick). Weird and up my street.

The other room is simply fantastic: a central projection
shows a low-resolution image of a landscape. Two
loudspeakers on either side of the room keep broadcasting
two voice-overs. One describing Nature, the other how the
artist furnished its home (yeah, well). The image of the
landscape then dissolves: one camera travels clockwise and
the other anticlockwise full circle, slowly, both projected
simultaneously. And then, suddenly, when they lock in again
to focus on the original landscape , the voice-overs also
merge, and they start reciting sombrely the same monologue.
It is difficult to say why, but when the audio and visual
items merge, the effect is electrifying; your senses delight
so much in the order that emerges and make your spine
tingle. Absolutely fabulous. In fact, the series should make
a one-off in the Guggenheim museum. Hell, this building was
made to measure for the backdrop to an episode, sweeties.

JohnM
--------------------- Football Comments # 70 ----------------------
"The crowd think that Todd handled the ball.... they must have seen
something that nobody else did" Barry Davies (1975)

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