Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Vacation, part one: YCBA

Speaking of the Pups, which I know you were, I finally got to the Yale Center for British Art. The collection was worth the trip; it starts early and ends late, and there’s fine pieces from every conceivable period, including a spectacular Whistler (yeah, he’s only sort of half-British, but I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on their “The guy hung out there for a while” approach), some fine PRBs, a few fairly cow-free Constables that improved him quite a bit in my estimation (usually I find his work a cacophony of deciduous jungle plants with no beginning, middle or end, interrupted by cud-chewers), decent Turners, plus a few discoveries, at least for me.

I’m less than taken by the building, though. The gallery spaces were pretty good, actually, although occasionally one could get lost, and since the main collection is thematically chronological, getting lost was not a good thing. It is a challenge for an architect to design a space that is open and inviting and inductive to contemplation that nonetheless moves you from one place to another in a logical fashion. The NYC Guggenheim is a good example of directed movement: you start at one end of the spiral and have to alternative but to end up at the other end, short of jumping off the edge. Not necessarily contemplative, though. Big rooms where you can step back and look at works from a distance, or up close, and sit maybe for a while, are what you get at the Met, but their special exhibition spaces are usually cramped and overcrowded (unless it’s a show no one wants to see, but there’s not much point in that). Aside from special shows, one easily gets lost at the Met; one never gets lost at the Guggenheim. One occasionally gets lost at YCBA. Not a terrible position on the spectrum, overall.

But I withhold approval of the two giant open spaces, which the literature of the place refers to as courtyards. The first of these is the entrance. It’s like walking into a vast open castle tower, albeit squared off. You look up and see…nothing. You look around and see…nothing. Just big empty space. Now this can be inviting (q.v. the upgrade of the Morgan library in NYC, with its wide open entryway that I love), but this one is just…nothing. Nothing to see, nothing to make you feel welcome at having come through the door. At the end of the space is the entry into the gallery, which is shrunken down from the vast scale of the entrance, so it’s like entering a little cave passage out of a big open cavern. It’s like a scene out of TLOTR. The building wants to swallow you up, and you don’t feel happy about it; even the stairs are weird. But if you take the elevator up to the top, you’re fine, and then you get very nicely lighted galleries and decent enough viewing scenarios. On the utilitarian side, at least, you’re getting what you paid for, most of the time.

But then there’s a second courtyard duplicating the entrance. This one’s on the other side of the building. It’s done up like an Adventurers’ Club with no roof, four stories high, with a layer of Stubbs (and others’) assorted wildlife paintings at eye level, and what looks like the laird’s relatives on a layer above them, all grand and big and overpowering. You get to sit on a nice leather couch and take a little nap (Stubbs will do that to you, unless you’re especially an equinophile). But you’re at the bottom of this well, with a disturbing shell of that bizarre staircase to one side, and people regularly sticking their heads out through the open spaces above you wondering, from their perspective, what the hell this is all about, and it just doesn’t seem right. Now if they put in an audioanimatronic Major and sold a few Kungaloosh coctails, things might be different…

The building across the street was one of the architect’s (Louis I. Kahn) first works; this was one of his last. When I’m up for the Pups next month, I’ll try to check out the early building for comparison purposes. Needless to say, the things I don’t like about YCBA are the things the literature touts. What a shock.

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