SEEING THROUGH LIGHT: THE PRE-OPENING OF THE GUGGENHEIM IN ABU DHABI
Dubai is often compared to Los Angeles (or Las Vegas more accurately), and Abu Dhabi to New York. The most densely populated city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Abu Dhabi makes up 90 percent of the population of the 7 Emirates. Yet it still looks vacant. As in Dubai, one wonders why they continue to build? Surely, the UAE are believers in the axiom, “build it and they will come”. Are their guests just late in arriving? No, this time it’s Abu Dhabi that has run late. Originally set to open in 2014, both the Louvre installation as well as the Guggenheim Museum has been delayed.
There is little at the entrance to Saadiyat Island other than construction. So new is the concept of a cultural district in Abu Dhabi that both the cab driver on the way there as well as the one on the way back declared it is their first visit to Manarat, the exhibit hall central to the Island.
Beyond the stories in the international press about labor disputes over wages and conditions, it’s not a surprise to the locals that there has been delay. “No one can work outside during the summer months for any stretch of time”, declares one of the many available and obsequious Indian or Pakistani attendants, who play the combined roles of tour guide, taxi dispatcher and security guard. “They work in the early morning and then as it approaches noontime they go home, they have to change (because they are soaked through), then they head back to the site around 1500 hours and work into the evening. All day they have to hydrate hydrate hydrate.”
Although the virtual pictures of the cultural district to come are stunning, amidst the construction one can barely imagine what the Frank Gehry building will look like. But one has only to recall his ship in Bilbao to know that he will make good on his promise. The Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi will look like a three dimensional George Braque painting with rectangles at different angles and glass covered cones jutting out of the earth, surrounded on three sides by water.
The museums have been paid for by the Abu Dhabi Government. The city which has only been under development for the past 56 years, since the discovery of oil in 1958, has decided to make itself into one of the World’s foremost cultural centers. In addition to the Guggenheim and the Louvre, Saadiyat Island will also house a New York University satellite school, as well as two luxury malls. One has only to peruse the list of malls and their features in the UAE to conclude that shopping has been elevated to an art form here too.
The pre-opening exhibit is free, no doubt to make up for the disappointment once in a lifetime travelers will feel at not getting to catch a true glimpse of what will be the famous architecture. The pre-opening advertisements have been so modest that they do not explain that there is a series of galleries selling works inside, as well as two restaurants, one with lovely garden tables, and a coffee bar open on the property. A large arena in the cultural center plays a video against the backdrop of well-appointed displays, advertising the existing amenities of Saadiyat Island; a marina, a beach club, as well as the St. Regis and the Park Hyatt Hotels. The video features a family in traditional Arab dress, a more common appearance in Abu Dhabi as compared to Dubai, enjoying the varied dimensions a holiday on the island has to offer.
The exhibit contains 19 works specifically acquired for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.
The pre-opening exhibit is intended to be the curatorial debut of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and announces a vision of art as “transcultural; reminding of that we are in an increasing interdependent, interconnected world”.
All the advertisements and the opening commentary to the exhibit explain: "Seeing through light examines light in its various iterations; activated, celestial, perceptual, reflected and transcendent. It explores light as a primary aesthetic principle.” Conceptually, the premise is a bit like splitting hairs. Light is the second most important principle in art after perception. Without perception there is no vision. Without light there is no contrast, no illumination, no insight. Perhaps color is the third principal, but color as a product of light some would conclude is not essential.
An article by Clare Thorp for local women’s magazine Stylist Arabia espouses that what is of interest at the exhibit is the works of four influential female artists. 85 year old Yayoi Kusama, famed for her indecent proposal to Richard Nixon in return for his stopping the Vietnam War and for her polka dotted Louis Vuitton campaign. Yayoi has voluntarily lived in a mental institution in Japan since 1973. 90 year old Iranian born Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian who was forced to leave Iran in 1979 and who was friend to Pollack, De Kooning and Warhol. 45 year old British-Indian Bharti Kher, who make arts from bindis, the dot decoration for women’s foreheads. And, 48 year old Canadian, Angela Bulloch, best known for her use of LED panels.
But there is something much more to offer here then the pondering of light or the vision of these four woman. So what is really being penetrated here? The show ultimately exudes a distinctly Middle Eastern perspective. And yes, of course it’s about the women. For a woman traveling in the Middle East, it is all about the question of oppression versus expression, and the interplay between the two.
The show opened on November 5, with attendance a disappointment but related gallery sales robust. The most intriguing of which was Irman Qureshi’s “You who are My Love and My Life’s Enemy Too” which sold for $48,000. Red paint spattered liked blood on gold leafed canvas; arguably a picture of domestic violence. Who bought it?
The Guggenheim Art starts outside the entrance with a white by day neon by night sign against the sky in a distinctly female cursive. “Today will end.” India’s Shilpa Gupta’s declaration fills one with both relief and dread. Neurosis, defined by Freud as the fear of living and the fear of dying is the flag Abu Dhabi is flying. No wonder it’s so often is compared to New York.
In front of the entry are two statues, vaguely reminiscent of the Brooklyn Museum show Sensations, which 2 years before 9/11 made Mayor Giuliani an international figure for his threats to close the show for indecency, amidst National Endowments for the Arts threats to withdraw funding. That exhibit featured Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a crucifix in a specimen tube of urine and cow blood, and Chris Ollif’s Holy Virgin Mary, a black Madonna decorated with elephant dung.
Not as controversial the statues outside the Guggenheim equally convey the sacred and the profane. A large onyx bust of a female representation of Christ, beard intact, across from a white fiberglass sculpture of a woman sitting on a bench looking bored. Tunisian Artist Feryel Lakdar’s woman has such rounded features any specific ethnic association is blurred. But her expression and posture make it look like she should be seated on a toilet bowl.
Inside, the exhibit entrance is Robert Irwin’s untitled white disk with a clear horizontal slit in the middle of it. Projected from the wall by clear Plexiglas, it magnifies the green dot on the wall behind it creating the illusion of an eye in the slit. Two lights projected onto the disk making it look like 5 eyes. One is reminded immediately of the Islamic women covered completely in black who only show their eyes. And, how it evokes the endless question against the sturdy iconic exterior; what’s going on in there?
It should be noted that visitors are stopped from taking pictures of the 5 eyed Cyclops at the entrance so as not to change the shadow effect of the piece, but can photograph the remainder of the show.
Doug Weber’s exhibit room to the right requires one to put blue plastic booties on, so as not to mar the white powdery floor. On the furthest most wall of the dark room is a grey square with faint white light emanating from the sides. Only up close can one discern that it is a light box on the wall. The light creates an illusion against the soft white curved walls of being in a dust storm. The attendant asks on the way out: how does it make you feel? “Lost, happily, like being in a cloud”.
Initially, the Donald Flavin and Angela Bulloch’s pieces seemed too literal, but upon re-approach, there relevance is revealed. Flavin’s white box room, resembles a stone house. One side radiates boundless yellow light, almost more beautiful then the sun. Inside a white vertical light curtain is banded with a vertical strip of light blue. On the other side of the box, the curtain radiates boundless green light. The white vertical light curtain is banded on that side with a vertical strip of orange. Together they symbolize the sky and the earth, the ephemeral and the grounded; home.
Black boxes form colored cubes of light in Bulloch’s 6 chains. Each string on the floor becoming a link larger. It is as if the black box contains and supports and allows the color, offering contrast and containment. Do the chains that bind enable one to find true freedom. Do the black robes actually enhance ones inward expression?
In the center of the room, Heinz Molia’s clear plexi-glass tall thin clear boxes on a base of white stones filled with folded foil recreate the skyline of the oddly shaped and enchanting buildings of the UAE.
Against the wall is Rachid Koraichi’s Le Chemin des Roses (the path of roses); unrecognizable black iron roses in rows and columns, like hammered nails in the wall, or hooks for laundry. The rose, the signature flower of the Middle East, fragrant, and beautiful, traditional, and perhaps best described as utilitarian, like the women of the Middle East.
Otto Peine’s mirrored disco ball hanging from a swinging pendulum with a light radiating from the inside creates star like spiders crawling along the walls, while the Dom Tak Tak Dom Tak soundtrack by Hassan Khan plays. Six musicians recorded to the beat and neither could hear the others.
In “Redemption is not the only reason to lookup at the stars in the night” Bharta Kher has created an Arabian night stars scape, making patterns like Van Gogh’s starry night from Bindis on broken glass.
“The words I love” strings together Gladys Amer’s Arabic to create a black iron globe.
Amer’s piece conveys that language creates the world but thankfully it is penetrable.
It sits against the back drop of Diamonds in the Sky; mirrors in a patterned stamp against white lacquer. “The glass broke in transit so the artist improvised”, explains the Malaysian Docent, “see behind the pattern, the universal sign of the circle. The octagon shapes overlaying it are the foot print of the twin towers here in Abu Dhabi.” It resembles more the signature symbol of a designer, not unlike Tory Burch’s.
Moving along, Song Dong’s “Catching Moonbeams in Water”, is a cartoon like documentary that features cupped hands of water, the futility slipping through them.
And the finale, Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room: Filled with the Brilliance of Life”. Again, a black box; mirrored walls with a sleek black tile path creating a Z surrounded by water, with little round globe lights that change colors hanging from the ceiling at different lengths. The attendant warns you to stay on the path, lest you fall in the water. At timed intervals, the lights change colors. Sometimes multi-colored like a Christmas tree. When all green or all red, the viewer’s image of herself in the mirror is annihilated; subsumed by anger, subsumed by life. Going completely black in between sets, one freezes and momentarily is frightened. And, when a thousand points of lights are pink and blue and white, it creates a black line vortex in the middle of the horizon; the perception of infinity. One can clearly see oneself in the center of the vortex but the surrounding women who are all in black make hollow frames in the landscape.
Out of the black slit of perception at the Guggenheim in the Middle Eastern grows the woman; powdered cloud, plastic see through facade, rose covered disco queen Scheherazade, hips swinging dom taka taka dom with 6 chains around her waist, diamond in the night, filled with the brilliance of life; master of seeing through the light.
Fall 2014