El Gringoqueño

I’m not sure just how much you know about this magnificent building, but it was recently finished under much international pomp and circumstance. The Guggenheim in New York sought and found a city that would undertake the newest task of supplying a location worthy of housing the greatest modern art treasures of the world.

That city was Bilbo, Euskadi (BILL-bo, eww-SKA-dee) (Basque spelling of "Bilbao" (BILL-bow) as in bow wow (dog bark)). In a city still trying to overcome the difficult times of industrialization and civil war, civil strife, and national identity, it is difficult to imagine what the Guggenheim means to them. It is certainly a mark of national pride. Critics in the community of Basque artists are quick to point out that the museum is nothing more than an American icon dropped like a big golden arch on top of an already repressed culture… call it McArt.

Whatever the case, it has brought a lot of attention to a city that is trying to define itself apart from Spain and Spanish notoriety. They have done it by building the building that was said to be unbuildable. Basque engineers and contractors designed many firsts, from types of I-beams to special suspension techniques to pull off a great coup for the Basque People.

So we went through the galleries, as of now not that great a collection, but it’s getting there. Once they (Guggenheim) get beyond the dumping of art from their basement in New York to fill space here, and start putting together a unique collection that has a personality all of its own, then we’ll see some great things from Bilbao. I have to say that among all the works in the Museum, I enjoyed the most the works of contemporary Basque sculptors and painters. In all honesty, I found their work more relevant than most other things, like American pop icon Andy Warhol, and some of the various modern art competing for eyeballs alongside fire extinguishers, hoses, and stairwell exits. I swear one time I actually mistook a fire hose connector as a piece of art. It was placed at the same eye level as the rest of the works, and when I didn’t see a placard next to it, I figured out what it was. I had a good chuckle about that one. There are other pieces worth mentioning too (if only for their irrelevance), a teenager’s room enclosed in glass with books and clothes strewn over an unmade bed, to the giant billboard sized (actually about three stories) that had was just one word. You know, I can’t even remember what it said… it was nothing important, even though it was trying so hard to keep everyone’s eyeballs. There was the ballpark style billboard with the rotating shutters that had three messages. First a picture of a jar of Vaseline and a cucumber, later the words "the problem with relationships" and later a peach and a hammer. I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t make much sense. It seems out of place in most settings excluding any California art school.

There were the paintings that were only white, there were painting that were only red, there were paintings that were only blue. Notice a trend. I wonder if it’s patriotic brainwashing or something. Anyway, they are mostly about color, attempting to understand art and the world better through only one color. What is red, yada yada yada. We’ve been through it folks. How much merit does it have. I don’t think they built the Guggenheim to house canvases of red, white, and blue on a McSesame McBun.

Of course there were bright spots. Laura loves Joan Miró for his abstracted language, use of symbols, and extremely empathetic portrayal of the dark years in Spain this century (during the civil war and under Franco). For many he was a voice… er rather gave voice to the emotions and the tearing and confusion that existed at that time. It was his art that better than any other served as the hieroglyphs of the middle portion of this century, what we felt, who we were, and where we were going. Andy Warhol by comparison was but fifteen minutes of that time, perhaps while Miró was on the toilet or something.

It’s worth a visit if you get a chance to go by there sometime. I’d like to take another look in a few years to see how it’s developing.

From the New to the Ancient

We went to some ancient caves in the country. We witnessed what few have seen, paintings that were over 12,000 years old, charcoal and iron oxide drawings of horses, deer, bear, fish, goats, and cows. They were so remarkable because they signify that humans have been living in this area for… well a very long time. This particular cave was basically in someone’s back yard, protected by an iron gate. Years ago it may have been the summer hunting home of our human ancestors as they sought game and enjoyed the valley of plenty.

Some of the drawings were simple outlines, themselves sophisticated abstractions of the 3d world. Others were fully colored with rust and have withstood over 120 centuries in that still cave. I stood there before those simple scratches on the caves trying to imagine this person there, with stick in hand, under torchlight, depicting something. Why did they do it? I tried hard to see that person. I squinted through the battery powered halogen lights until I swear I could see it, there in the dark, an arm reaching out with a stick rendering immortality.

They may have believed that by drawing these animals they might render them more vulnerable, perhaps they would be able to hunt easier, like capturing their soul, their spirit.

And then a thought popped into my head, something that Tom had said to me while we were playing basketball the day before. "Visualize your shot." I swear I could sometimes see that ball make the arch and drop, swish, before I shot it.

Maybe that’s it, perhaps what I could begin to see through the dark was something familiar, something that even through 12,000 years of separation, felt close, felt familiar, more than just an old scribble that invokes more questions than answers. Archaeologists and scientists study those drawings wondering why most of them point to the back of the cave (or was it out), why they drew so many horses, but really only ate deer. What did they signify? Why did they do them?

Maybe they were visualizing their shots, learning more about these animals that lived with them. An art teacher once told me that drawing was 99% observation. I fully believe that, and I think that intuitively ancient man without written language to communicate, realized that rendering by drawing was the beginning to understanding better the world they lived in. By recreating creation in abstracted forms, we can begin to make sense, grasp the truth from a different perspective, understand it in a new way. The ancient humans were no different then we, they were not as unsophisticated as we would like to believe, silly, superstitious people who thought that by drawing animals they would be able to hunt them better. What is that? Magic? How silly.

Maybe what’s silly is how quickly we dismiss those old lessons, the first lessons. "My God, that really captured the spirit of the moment!" we exclaim. "How well you’ve captured her spirit in that photo!" "That song really takes me back." "I cried during Titanic." "She has her mother’s spirit." "I feel the anguish in Picasso’s ‘Gernika’."

We’ve been learning that lesson throughout the centuries as artists seek out new abstractions, new ways of looking at reality.

Isn’t if funny how we’re still drawing on walls? Why do we do it, what does it mean? In the end I can only say that I believe it is representative of our struggle to understand ourselves and to communicate what we understand to others. If my trip from some of the newest to some of the oldest has taught me anything, it has only let me know that we share more in common with our ancestors than I thought. Rather than primitive savages running around in a fog of barely conscious sentience, scared of everything, and fearful of their surroundings, struggling to separate themselves from the animal kingdom, I see them as sophisticated, intelligent, aware, emotional human beings who knew there were things they did not know and sought them out.