Bilbao -- the Guggenheim, Richard Serra

After seeing many Guggenheim Bilbao photographs and the excellent documentary by Sydney Pollack, coming upon the massive silver-colored, fish-scale-covered sculpture of interconnecting shapes was familiar and exciting. However I did not understand the scope and the magical experience until I walked inside. In the soaring halls, every surface is curved in glass and tile, transparent in all directions, relating the city to the Nervon River, the parts of the building to one another, the individual to a sense of magnificence and intentional dynamic integration.

As the third floor was closed, between installations, admission was reduced and included an audio tour, which provided valuable insights to the architecture and exhibits.

But I didn’t need any explanations to experience Richard Serra’s freestanding giant steel sculptures that fill the enormous hangar-like gallery on the first floor. Vertiginously, each draws you in, through towering curved and variously tilted metal walls, like the alleys of an ancient city, deeper and deeper until you arrive at an open space, a center. The last one (of 7 or 8 experiential pieces) has right angles, forcing you to turn directly, in contrast to flowing into the space. At the center, the metal walls form the unexpected and sensual shape of a vagina.

In an adjoining room with scale models and photographs, Serra’s installation, titled “The Matter of Time,” is described as “based on the idea of multiple or layered temporalities. The obvious diversity of durations of time are activated and animated by the viewer’s movement.”

To further illuminate, I quote from the artist: “The torqued ellipses, spirals, spheres and toruses exist in the polarity between the downward force of gravity, their weightlessness and their upward rise in elevation which attempts to attain a condition of weightlessness.

“The sculptures are not objects separated in space but on the contrary engender the spatial continuum of their environment. They impart form to the entire space, they shape the space through axes, trajectories and passages between their solids and voids.

“Meaning occurs only through continuous movement, anticipation, observation and recollection. However, there is no prescribed view, no preferred sequence, no preferred succession of views. Each person will map the space differently. There is an unlimited range of individual experiences, but they all take place over time.
“When I talk about time I do not mean ‘real time,’ clock time. The perceptual or aesthetic, emotional or psychological time of the sculptural experience is quite different from ‘real time’. It is non-narrative, discontinuous, fragmented, de-centered, disorienting.”

It’s true. It’s amazing, mind-bending, life-altering to experience the disorienting and exhilarating sense of space and time while moving between two large sheets of rusty steel. It is incomprehensible without the experience. This, I think, is the genius of Richard Serra, and also of Juan Muñoz, who I’ll write about next...to engage us in the questions and discoveries of our world and our selves.

Bilbao, 18th September – Bellas Artes

Images from Bilbao


Everyone I’d met in the Basque country told me with great conviction that Bellas Artes, Bilbao’s “other” art museum, contains more interesting art than the Guggenheim. So I started there, in an unimpressive cubical building, a short walk from Frank Gehry’s looming and irresistible titanium ship.

What a classic museum like Bellas Artes presents is an insight into change over the centuries. I began with a special exhibit of 19th century painters and sculptors, particularly Spanish. These captured the ordinary life, and life was hard…working in fields and factories, kitchens and washrooms. The facial expressions were joyless, worn down by work. Even paintings of mothers with their children seemed sad, probably because the woman had a series of miscarriages and infant deaths. A few sculptures and paintings portrayed fabled romances, like Tristan and Isolde and Samson and Delilah -- the tragedy of passionate love. There was no happiness, that being, I’ve often been told, a “modern concept,” albeit still an elusive one in spite of – or perhaps because of – our elevated expectations.

In another temporary exhibit, of 20th art, I was enlightened to the fact that many Spanish artists created in cubist, surrealist ad abstract styles, not just the renowned like Picasso, Miro, Dali (all represented in this show), which is why such styles are considered “movements” (duh!). I saw an image of a cubist cow in a 1920’s painting that was exactly the same as Picasso’s tortured cow in “Guernika”, painted a decade later. Plagiarism, or influence, becomes apparent in such an exhibit.

As my purse had to be checked in at the reception desk, I did not have a pen and paper by which to make notes and therefore cannot recall specifics, but I was struck that in this era there were no representations, no effort to capture life as it is lived externally but, rather internally…in the abstract, the deconstructed, the provocative. But mostly, the swiggles and splashes of color seemed self-indulgent to me, without any concern for the viewer, for communication; except to express that the world is confusing and only the individual alone has significance.

I drank a café con leche on the patio, within the pleasant adjoining park, and wondered about new art: Was anyone expressing the connection between people, the possibilities of our post-modern age, the need for a message of hope and love and waking up to the crisis we’ve created on our Planet? If peace is not in our hearts, how can it be in the world?

We love those we love. We live the life we create, deciding if it’s “good” or “bad”, if we are content or not. With our thoughts we create our reality.

On to the Guggenheim…

Toledo Spain

I have tried to be sequential in this trip, but most-recent adventures tend to eclipse what happened last week, or yesterday, so I am taking the liberty to write without concern for actual dates...what difference does it make? It all happened and is now just a story anyway...a very good one.

There is an intensity in newness that must give way to familiarity and comfort in order for us to function. Such a pace as I've been on for more than 2 weeks is starting to feel exhausting. Originally, I planned to spend a week in Madrid and head out to Granada and on to Barcelona then up the Costa Brava and back to Toulouse in southern France to meet my flight back to the states on Oct. 7. But my experience in Madrid is so welcoming -- and I still haven't made it to the Prado! -- that I decided to go to Granada for the weekend as planned, and return to spend another week in Madrid. I will fly directly from here to Toulouse on Oct. 6.

TOLEDO

I enjoyed a beautiful blue-sky day in Toledo (Sunday, 22 Sept.) after a late start. It's difficult to get to sleep in a city where people begin dinner well after 10pm and normally turn in about 2 or 3 in the morning, but it's a rhythm that suits me fine. I hurried to catch a 12:20 train to Toledo but, in typical Spanish style, the vague instructions from the so-called Information booth put me in an hour-long line to buy a ticket for a 40-minute train ride. Oh well, standing in lines here is part of the culture... and now I know there are special fast lines for impending trains. In Spain, one has to discover these things for one's self.

After getting on the 1:50 train, I was met an hour later in the main plaza of Toledo by Professor Abdurrazzak Douhal, a famous nano-chemist from Morocco who I met on the train from Toledo to Madrid last November and he expedited my tightly-planned trip to the airport. He had said, "Next time you're in Toledo, I'll give you a tour of the university." I thought it a fat-chance that I'd ever be back in Toledo, but there I was again.

Toledo is an extraordinary city of tiny, steep and winding cobblestone streets; alleys actually, and its a sure bet that you will get lost in the maze, even after living there 25 years like Abdurrazzak. Actually, I think he has the worst sense of direction I've seen, and I seemed to know my way better than he after only spending 2 days there a year ago. We wandered, and in a delightful mix of Spanish and English, we talked about theoretical science and applied Life, like human nature and will and the magic of the moment when things shift; and they always shift in a moment.

We ate lunch (gaspacho and ensalada mixta) at a sidewalk cafe and visited one of the four Toledo campuses of the Universidad de La Mancha, which presents a good example of melding modern and ancient architecture; there is even an interior area of excavated Roman ruins. Because I was with a professor, we obtained a large iron key by which to visit a terrace which gives an elevated view over the river and crammed-together tile roofs (from the same era as those in Florence) under which dozens of generations have lived and died.

Every twisting street is a photo op of ancient stone and plaster buildings in a variety of colors -- yellow, pink, tan, blue -- with wrought-iron balconies and light fixtures, window boxes and shutters. We visited the huge cathedral, which I did not see last time. If you overlook the catholicism, it is pure art -- vast interior spaces with soaring columns and a plethora of compound arches between which are a myriad of paintings, bas relief sculptures (my favorite) and gold-encrusted designs that attest to Fibanacci series centuries before it was identified mathematically. The sheer size of it -- it felt at least 3 times bigger than Notre Dame in Paris -- was awesome.

There is so much more I could write about Toledo, having spent two days exploring it last November -- El Greco, the Sephardic Jewish community, the Moors, the Inquisition, the capital for a brief time of Isabel & Ferdinand's rule -- but it will have to be another time.

I took the last train back to Madrid at 20:30, the Metro three stops and then, within a block of the apartment I call home this week, I had to use my map to find Calle Relatores. The narrow street, one block long, is in the old part of Madrid, which is all angles and alleys and streets changing names at each intersection. I like it here, and plan to return for another week after this weekend in Granada. Granada! I have found, through www.craigslist.com, a room to rent at a woman writer's apartment nearby, in the old city. I will fly from Madrid to Toulouse Oct. 6, from where I'm ticketed to leave for the States on the morning of Oct. 7.

Lewallen Contemporary, at the forefront of change in Santa Fe

Our dear friends and neighbors, Ken Marvel and Bob Gardner, owners of the preeminent contemporary art gallery in Santa Fe, the Lewallen Contemporary gallery (http://www.lewallencontemporary.com/), were featured in a recent Wall Street Journal article about changes in Santa Fe. Please check it out:

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB122186392923158615-lMyQjAxMDI4MjIxMTgyNjEzWj.html

(The photo is of Bob, Ken and David on the beach at Barceloneta, a portside area of Barcelona, April 2006).

Cordes-sur-Ciel, a city in the sky (12 Sept, 2008)

Last September I made a pilgrimage, so to speak, to Mont Saint-Michel, a UNESCO World Heritage site which loomed large on my Life To-Do list. It is the most-visited abbey (3 hours west of Paris) and sits majestically on a rock, surrounded by volatile and impenetrable tides, at the border of Normandy and Brittany. David, his sister Jan, her husband Richard and I spent a night on the Mont, feeling as if we were the only people in this Medieval time warp.

Cordes-sur-Ciel, near Albi, is also a popular tourist site and evokes a similar sense of time/space discontinuum, but it is much larger, more of an actual living city and extremely well preserved. The cobblestone streets snake steeply up the hillsides, lined with luxurious 14th and 15th century homes decorated with sculptures and other architectural details. There are façades and remnants that date from the 13th century when the fortified village was founded by the Count of Toulouse in 1222 to protect the Cathars.

I did not get the "whole story" on the Cathars, but apparently they represented strong opposition to the corruption of the Catholic Church. Priests and Bishops were getting married, pilfering riches and otherwise undermining confidence of the people who decided to form a grassroots movement and demand adherence to the faith. They were, of course, condemned by the pope and sought out and destroyed in a crusade which began in 1209. There are numerous churches, ruins and museums that attest to the Cathars' resistance efforts.

Cordes-sur-Ceil was considered an alchemist's stronghold. I wish I had time to explore the remnants of them. Today it boasts a high concentration of craftspeople in glass, wood, canvas art, sculpture, fabric, ceramics and so on. The feel of the place was magical and the two hotels we previewed would be delightful to visit, overlooking the pastoral valleys and the ancient stone spires.

Albi, birthplace of Toulouse-Lautrec

Albi, on the banks of the Tarn, is famous for its two 13th-century landmarks: Sainte Cécile Cathedral and Palais de Berbie, which houses the largest public collection of works by hometown boy, Toulouse-Lautrec, born here in 1864. The cathedral, which has a very plain exterior, like a brick mill, is covered on all its interior walls by elaborate paintings, some of which -- like the geometric shapes in the photo -- seem remarkably modern. The architecturally-homogeneous historic center is full of half-timbered houses, cloisters, stone plazas and churches.

However, by Day 5 of the tour, and with our hotel being a disappointment, (3 stars and not worthy of 2), and a cold rain falling, I had hit a wall, overloaded with information and sight-seeing. The dinner, at Chateau du Vin (if memory serves), was odd by all estimations. The wine, which usually flowed freely, was meted out to us in small portions and the food, when it finally arrived, was a watery shrimp drink, salmon wrapped in nori on a stick and other inedibles. Clearly, the famous young chef was trying to impress us, and trying way too hard.

To further fuel my weariness, my favorite black jacket was lost. I could hear the houseboy in "Out of Africa" saying, "This jacket does not want to be with you." Indeed, it had tried to leave me the day before but a person from the restaurant where we lunched chased me down the street to return it. This time it had truly parted ways from me, and I hoped it found a good new home.

After another fairly sleepless night, we proceeded to the most fantastic town of Cord sur Ciel and a full-on last day in Toulouse.

Roquefort -- a Cheesy Place

Since 1863, Société has been making its smelly, moldy cheese in caves in the mountain town of Roquefort. Around that time, tunnels were discovered with a chartreuse-green mold, a form of penecillium, which is now cultivated in the caves. Mixed with goat milk, from a special local breed of ewes, the cheese "blooms" and is made into rounds by hard-working women and then placed on end, on wooden tables, and left to ripen for months under the supervision of "master ripeners."

There are seven producers in Roquefort but Société seems to be the largest, exporting about 25% of its production and making a name for itself on the tourism circuit. As the growing season is January to June, the factory was empty and in the places of thousands of rounds of cheese were plastic imitations, The dioramas and displays date from an earlier, pre-tech period and are, in a word, cheesy.