Pressing “rewind” and “forward” to negotiate a transcultural position

The transcultural artistic strategies formulated in the Fluxus network during the 1960s, spanning Europe, East Asia, and the USA, are an important reference when searching for ways how to write art history in a global way. These strategies challenged national framings of art informed by the Eurocentric legacy of modernism. In this paper, I focus on Nam June Paik’s (self)positioning in negotiation with the taxonomic mechanisms of the Guggenheim Museum New York in 1994. I will analyze the conditions and limits of his cultural mediation. The first part of my chapter shows how Paik drew a fine-grained picture of Japanese experimental art as a Korean who had studied in Tokyo during the 1950s and then re-visited in the 1960s. In his version, Paik employs transcultural discursive strategies directed towards rewriting art history in ways that take account of multiple agencies and cultural entanglements. The second part of my study analyzes the resulting institutional conflict between Paik and Guggenheim’s Japanese survey show, Scream against the sky, to which he contributed an essay but declined to participate with his work. This paper articulates the transcultural (counter-) potential of artists who work(ed) across borders, especially at moments when Western canonization was a double-edged sword.

Learning from Failures: Reflections on the Role of Project Design and Design Management in the Procurement of Non-Standard Buildings

The opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 1997 heralded the beginning of an era in world architecture defined by iconic buildings underpinned by mediatic exposure and the belief in the power of design to leverage urban conditions. Today, a conspicuous number of such buildings featuring non-standard geometries are experiencing accelerated forms of decay with the emergence of construction defects. This study compares the type of problems encountered in the Jubilee Church in Rome (1996–2003), analysed in previous studies, with the failures of other two contemporary buildings of analogous features, namely: the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia (1996–2005) and the Museum of the Arts of the XXI Century in Rome (1998–2010). The findings of the study show that the accelerated decay of the three buildings shares familiar features and common challenges: geometry of the façade, local environmental factors, labour organisation, and limited regard of maintenance principles. Building on the patterns identified here, the paper suggests structural reasons for their emergence and speculates on the potential benefits deriving from the amplification of the design function.

‘Vacant Geelong’ and its lingering industrial architecture

Once a prosperous manufacturing town, Geelong in Victoria, Australia is undergoing a process of deindustrialisation, and in turn, redefining its identity to better retain viability in a globalised world. For instance, the town bid to host a Guggenheim museum on its Eastern Beach shore at the turn of the millennium, and has recently become a UNESCO City of Design (2017). Like so many declining regional industrial towns, Geelong has been undercut by the new economic forces, and has sought a new identity in cultural economies. The ‘Vacant Geelong’ project, which began at Deakin University in 2015 and is ongoing, evolved as a response to vacant industrial architecture in Geelong. Major industries including Ford (vehicles), Alcoa (aluminium), timber sawmills, wool mills, Pilkington Glass, cement works, and the oil refinery once defined the town and its history as an industrial architectural landscape.1 Major industries transformed the architectural and cultural terrain. Despite these cycles of transformation and erasure, and counter to a progressive and chronological approach to change, the ‘Vacant Geelong’ project explored this vacancy of industrial operation, yet presence of industrial architecture. Through inscriptions – artworks, design projects, creative research, installations, texts – it addressed those material realities that did not leave, the industrial structures – silos, ducts, chimneys, warehouses – that give Geelong its continuing industrial architectural character.

The Guggenheim Museum Helsinki Plan as a Media Debate

In connection with today’s competition between cities to portray an alluring image of economic and cultural success, the City of Helsinki and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation put forward a plan to establish a Guggenheim museum in Helsinki, Finland. Following the plan’s release, a heated public debate emerged in the media. The present article analyzes this debate as a mediatized conflict and aims to show in what ways the debate on the Guggenheim report affected the decision-making process concerning the Helsinki Guggenheim museum. This debate is analyzed within the framework of current discussions on the culture-led development of cities, by applying a methodological tool inspired by Luc Boltanski’s and Laurent Thévenot’s theory of critical judgement to analyze the various justifications that the different actors used during the debate. Further, the article interprets why the museum plan was rejected in the first deliberation. It was found that the distance between different actors grew so wide that it could not be reconciled, especially with the effect of social media. Because the City did not encourage a discussion and communication with the art world was neglected at first, during the debate it proved impossible to convince the art world of the benefits a Guggenheim might bring to other art institutions or artists. Guggenheim Helsinki was planned for a small capital in northern Europe, and yet it is linked to current European politics affected by nationalistic ideology and the question of preserving local cultures in the face of a globally shared culture. The article ends with a discussion on what can be learned from the failure of the Guggenheim Helsinki.

At Home in the World — the Architecture and Life of Frank Lloyd Wright

This article shows how the enduring admiration people have for the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) is explained by this principle of Aesthetic Realism, stated by the founder of this philosophy, the great American poet and critic, Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Scholars have written of Wright’s contradictions: his charm and his arrogance, the warmth of his interior designs and his coldness to persons near to him. The authors show that like people everywhere, Wright was trying in his life to put together opposites in himself, including the same opposites he was able to compose magnificently in his best architectural work: most particularly, the opposites of inside and outside, “the snug and exterior.” Two early examples discussed are his 1893 Gale House and the Heurtley House of 1902. Wright’s love of nature led to his concept of organic architecture: buildings inspired by, and at one with, their environment. A masterful example discussed in detail is his 1935 house design Fallingwater, built dramatically above a waterfall. The authors also show how two works from very different points in Wrightʼs long career — the 1904 Unity Temple, and the Guggenheim Museum, completed in 1960 — are opportunities for people to know ourselves better now. The explanation lies in the beautiful way each structure puts opposites together.

HOMO FABER: COME I METALLI HANNO SEGNATO E SEGNANO ANCHE OGGI LA CIVILTÀ DELL’UOMO

The succession of various ages, from those of copper to that of bronze, then iron and so on, is dictated by the chemical properties of the various metals and, ultimately, by the periodic table of the elements. The capacity expressed by the homo faber to extract and work the different metals, have marked technological developments so radical as to be chosen by historians to designate real civilizations. Gold was the first metal used by man, although it could not be used either as a tool or as a weapon. More than any other ancient element, gold has always been associated with a timeless charm. None of the chemical elements discovered by modern science has been able to overcome its supremacy. Since the time of its discovery, gold has been used for ornamental purposes and only with technological development has it been used also for technical and scientific purposes. For titanium, however, the reverse path was verified, from its essentially technological use it then moved on to the artistic one. Starting in the 1960s, when titanium became available even for non-military uses, its applications have done nothing but grow and diversify. His artistic fame is unquestionably linked to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao designed by the architect Frank Gehry in 1997, while in Pedeferri’s titanochromies we have the combination of art and technology.

Art and the Structuralist Perspective

Introducing Structuralism and theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss to American audiences in a 1970 lecture at the Guggenheim Museum, Annette Michelson stresses the importance of the linguistic mode for structuralist analysis and examines the nature and limits of its consequences for art and aesthetics. Structuralist anthropology, the author argues, is fundamentally rationalist in approach, proposing an intelligibility of the universe through the organization of differences into overarching schema; it is the relationship between signs, rather than the nature of the individual signs themselves, that determines meaning. Michelson concludes that while such a method may seem applicable to contemporary art, the radically rational stance of Structuralism inhibits our understanding of it. Rather than serving a semantic function, one that could be elucidated through structural analysis, art informs us of the nature of consciousness itself.