Bilbao Diaries: What are you looking at?

Modern art, guff, and big flower dogs at the Guggenheim

A quick bit of housekeeping before we start today. I’d like to tell you about The Musette, my new cycling Substack. Even if cycling isn’t for you, it’s written with my usual snark and sarcasm, so if you like that, you’ll like The Musette. I’d be really grateful if you checked it out.

Now, to Bilbao.

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A building and not a crashed spaceship.

Once when I was 18 I found myself in Florence, and because I was 18 and cheap and impatient I did not visit the Uffizi. Instead, I visited a modern art gallery in a large building off a square that has stayed with me far longer than my much later visit to the Uffizi on my second time in Florence.

The first room I wandered into in the modern art museum, save the foyer, was almost completely empty. All that sat in it were three metal poles leaned against a wall. “Oh, this must be a storeroom,” I said to my friend, and turned to leave, only to spot next to the three metal poles a little plaque with a name on it and some bits of information. Ah. The three metal poles were art.

They didn’t look like art, obviously, but then not a lot in a modern art museum does. Not art in the self-portrait, still-life, bucolic landscape sort of way, anyway. Modern art is the sort of art that makes people say, “well, I could have done that.”

And that’s if it’s art that looks like it took at least a little bit of skill to make it. Skill or at least a tin of paint, a canvas and the conviction to fill the oodles of time clearly on the hands of the creator. The even simpler looking modern art usually gets an even more damning assessment: “well, my four-year-old could have done that.”

When it comes to art I am as skilled as a grasshopper trying to tie a pair of shoelaces. So, I do not often stand in front of a piece of art, even of the modern persuasion, and say, “well, I could have done that.”

Because even if (and I have seen this, back in that museum in Florence) the art in question is a canvas painted entirely red, with a little neon sign stuck on it that says “red,” I can tell you with complete conviction that I absolutely could not do that.

My problem with art such as the red canvas or the three poles leaning against a wall is the guff that accompanies them. The plaques that explain the meaning of the piece often give a paragraph of complete nonsense that could have been automatically generated. I’d be willing to bet if you swapped some of the plaques around it’d take a couple of days before anybody noticed.

I shouldn’t have to read the guff on the plaque to know whether I should be feeling happy, sad, angry or like I’ve just been robbed of fifteen euro.

So, that’s modern art covered. I’ll get off my soapbox, put away my high horse, and tell you what I thought of the Guggenheim Bilbao. As a building, it’s a surprise. Firstly, that it should be in Bilbao at all, a cool city in northern Spain but hardly a mecca of the arts before this whole thing turned up. And secondly, well, just look at it.

The Guggenheim Bilbao looks less like an art museum and more like a spaceship that’s crash landed. Even the museum’s website describes the building itself as a sculpture. The first piece of modern art you see isn’t inside but is the building itself.

That is if you haven’t seen the dog first, which you may well have since it’s massive. If the building doesn’t do it for you then there’s a 20-foot tall dog made entirely of flowers standing outside. This flower dog is the sort of thing that makes me rethink my whole opinion of modern art. The soapbox is gone, the high horse is back in the stables. It may just be a dog made of flowers but I think it’s fantastic.

Big flower dog!

You could look at a load of modern art and not even set foot in the building. In fact that’s where some of the best stuff is. Round the back there’s a big old spider. There’s not a lot else I can say about it other than it really is a big old spider made of metal. I’m sure there’s some symbolism I’m missing, but, as you will have no doubt gathered by now, this is not an arts blog.

Do go inside the Guggenheim though. Not just because there’s cool art, but because coming to Bilbao and not going to the Guggenheim would be, well, not like going to Paris and not going to Louvre. Because who’s got the time to stand in that queue for hours just to look at a woman who might not be smiling. But not coming would be a mistake.

Tulips!

Unlike Paris which has the Orsay and Versailles and all the rest Bilbao has the Guggenheim and when it comes to art that’s about it. What’s the point in competing with an entire Guggenheim foundation?

It does also have works by Jeff Koons (such as Tulips, as well as the aforementioned massive flower dog), Andy Warhol and Mark Rothko. There’s an artwork called Installation for Bilbao (catchy) by Jenny Holzer that features aphorisms travelling up and down huge thin screens that is cool to look at until all of a sudden it makes your eyes melt.

Illustration for Bilbao, or, as I would call it, Migraine Fuel.

There’s The Matter of Time by Richard Serra, huge pieces of weathered steel that have turned a perfectly good piece of gallery into a maze that doesn’t really have a start or an end. Of course that’s not what we’re told about it. What we’re told is “The Matter of Time allows the viewer to perceive the evolution of the artist’s sculptural forms, from the relative simplicity of a double ellipse to the complexity of a spiral. The last two pieces of this sculpture are created from sections of toruses and spheres that produce different effects on the movement and perception of the viewer.”

Tell me that’s not guff.

There is, as you can see, lots to divert you. I come away from the Guggenheim not knowing any more about what makes modern art art but certainly pleased that people make it. I don’t understand it but I like it. Well, most of it.

What there aren’t in the Guggenheim Bilbao, and I did a particularly thorough check, are three poles leaned up against a wall. And that’s for the best, I think.