I finally had a chance to visit the new Art Gallery of Ontario this weekend to have a look at the new Frank Gehry addition. After an unfortunately not entirely positive reaction to the other big-name archi-revamp in Toronto, the ROM Crystal by Daniel Libeskind, I confess I was braced for the worst. I visited under the best possible conditions. I had arrived in Toronto on Friday, sans gaggle of offspring, avec lovely partner in crime where we lolled around in the cavernous bar at the Intercontinental (gotta love Hotwire) deconstructing the perfect martini. There was nothing on the slate for Saturday other than feeding ourselves delicious things, visiting the gallery, and hunting down some good music. I can't remember the last time my agenda looked like that. Anyway...my mind is now wandering space and time...so back to the AGO.
I'm not going to rabbit on here about Gehry's beautiful sinuous curves, the astonishing masses of Douglas Fir, or the clever staircases. Others have poured heart and soul into that effort. I'm actually more interested in how people move through spaces and how they feel as they do so. The attentive reader might have already noticed this about me.
First, art galleries in general: for people interested in space and movement, they're the perfect kinds of spaces. Unlike spaces such as shopping malls, libraries, casinos, offices, hospitals, or government buildings, there's really only one reason we visit a gallery: to look. My old friend Thomas Seebohm used to describe galleries as the "teapots of architecture". What he meant by this might only be obvious to those readers who know something about computer graphics. A classic reference object for computer graphic modeling and rendering of three-dimensional objects has been the teapot. If you can render its surfaces, curves and reflections in a convincing manner, then you've got a good 3-d model. In the same way, if you can make a gallery work, then you've got a good space.
That's how I approached the new AGO. Where did I want to go, and how did I feel when I got there? As we passed through the entryway, craning our heads to take in as much of the complex, curvy organic warmth of the wood as we could (but I won't go there), I immediately began to feel a bit of rising tension. The source of it, I think, was a greedy concern that I not miss anything. Where's the contemporary stuff? Where's the Impressionism? What new Canadian art is here? Are there some traveling exhibits that I won't be able to see next time I visit? This slight art-angst (where's the Munch?) was probably exacerbated by the fact that this AGO was an entirely new version of an old gallery that I have been visiting on a regular basis for about 40 years (more about this in a moment). Suddenly, a space that I have known pretty well for a long time has been reorganized, but it retains many of the old objects that I've grown to know over much of my life. It didn't take me very long at all to discover that what the transformation is all about is breaking down those kinds of traditional approaches to a gallery space by refusing to categorize art in the conventional manner. Instead, pieces have been put together to stimulate thought about art, rather than to encourage visitors to go look for their favourite iconic artworks so they can tick them off a mental list like birders going after the rare Black-Faced Spoonbill. So for example, one of the most brilliant spaces for me was one in which one wall was literally plastered with a large number of well-known and much loved paintings hung Academy style, while the wall facing it was carefully arranged with a sparse collection of beautiful Impressionist paintings. At the same time we're admiring the pictures, we're confronted with an interesting epoch in art history. What does the contrast mean? What do the changes in the ways that we present art have to say about how we feel about art?
Another example: In the contemporary galleries, pieces are arranged chronologically. As we walk through the collections, we move through time, make connections with the context in which the art was being made. Instead of looking for common uses of materials, techniques and methods, we're looking for repeating ideas and themes.
As a repeat visitor to the gallery, and one who can connect much personal history to the space (everything from grade school excursions, bus rides from hell, illicit cigarettes sneaked outside the back door to visits with wan and willowy young companions when I was a pretentious university student wearing a safety pin in my ear), I was fascinated by the fact that re-arrangement according to new devices, new categories of thought shook loose all of these memories, separated the personal context of my viewing from the work itself in a wonderfully jarring way, and stimulated thought.
But beyond the personal, I loved the fact that what the AGO has done is to make the arrangement of spaces and the objects that it contains into a series of pieces of conceptual art. Even though I've spent a decent amount of time talking to curators, and have at least a rudimentary understanding of how the process works, it was a deep epiphany for me to see curation as such a fundamental and transformative creative act. The curation has actually changed the art. That's what Gehry has unleashed here.
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