The Guggenheim Circular Takes on "Time"

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, known for its famous spiraling central gallery, faced some challenges of recent events as other museums, galleries, and institutions. The Guggenheim Circular is the museum’s new online series that reviews themes gaining attention because of the relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic such as time, home, embrace, and community. This platform of the circular presents artworks and resources from the museum’s collection and its previous exhibitions to bring new interpretations and connections to the work. Presented in an easy to follow and accessible format, the Museum has made up for the hiatus in foot traffic up their circular ramps.

Time is the Circular’s most recent edition, featuring sixteen still images of artworks that relate to the “nature of time” and question time standardization and its fluidity. Included are pieces of varying media like video, photography, objects, and installation images. All of these pieces were presented as images that could be enlarged accompanied with a description. For an exhibition that reflects time so mcuh, the viewer cannot fully embrace the time aspect of certain media like such as Marina Abramovic’s performance Cleaning The Mirror #1, a film duration just shy of 15 hours. The Guggenheim Circular is a great tool for reviewing pieces in the collection, but fully experiencing the artwork requires a physical visit to the museum. The Guggenheim Museum is set to reopen October 3, 2020. The online platform is enough to help us get by, but the full experience is still in the museum.

"How Can We Think of Art at a Time Like This?" Exhibition Review

                                                        LuYang Delusional Mandala (2015)

 “How Can We Think of Art at a Time Like This?” is an ongoing online exhibition which was conceived during the Coronavirus pandemic. Its intention is to challenge its titular question: how can we think of art at a time like this? 2020 has housed a number of historical events aside from the pandemic, such as the BLM movement, a presidential race, and more. The more than 70 artists involved in this project are contemporary thinkers and futuristic challengers whose work resonates with the feeling of “what now?” - a feeling 2020 has instilled in many. 

Lu Yang is one artist whose piece responds to the pandemic. They discuss their struggle with mortality, and how the virus has amplified their fear of death and dying through a series of digital renderings, all which depict their take on the future of Artificial Intelligence. With robots, cyborgs, and so on, this series is intended to reject mortality; Artificial Intelligence can never die, it is immortal and immune to all disease and despair i.e the repercussions of the coronavirus.

 By allowing serious conversation about the reality of today's world for both its artists and its viewers,  “How Can We Think of Art at a Time Like This?” is a place of refuge for those overwhelmed by current events - its vast body of work takes a nosedive into the most important questions of our time and leaves one with a different perspective from which they came.

"How Can we Think of Art at a Time Like This?" Exhibition Review

    

Sucker: from the Liz Taylor Series, 1994. Acrylic, marbled paper, oxygen mask on paper. 60 x 40 inches. Collection Gert and Liliane Boudry

A Distorted Reality is Now A Necessity To Be Free, 2019. Acrylic on canvas. 84 x 108 inches (213 x 457 cm)

   How Can We Think of Art at a Time Like This? is an online exhibition co-curated by Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen featuring eighty artists’ interpretations of crisis.  The exhibit seeks to promote a dialogue and sense of community in a time of socially-distancing.  Suffer: From the Liz Taylor Series by Kathe Burkhart takes new meaning in light of today’s coronavirus pandemic in its 60 by 40 inch depiction in acrylic and marbled paper of a woman with a gas mask glued to her face and “Sucker” written across the bottom. Originally a response to the HIV crisis, the work intimates the victimhood of the multitude infected with COVID-19.  A Distorted Reality is Now a Necessity to be Free by Amir H. Fallah speaks to the desire to hide.  The 84 x 108 inch acrylic painting on stretched canvas portrays two figures holding hands while facing opposite directions with covered faces.  Though surrounded by familiar cultural items, of both sentiment and oppression, they are shrouded.  The show is presented using an image-based interface reminiscent of Instagram.  The number of works and varied interpretations invites a response from a wide audience.  However, the amount of images can overwhelm viewers by creating a conversation with too many voices rather than a clear statement.

The Guggenheim Circular: Paul Ramírez Jonas’s "Another Day"

 

Paul Ramírez Jonas’s Another Day, 2003, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

    The Guggenheim Circular, the Guggenheim’s online exhibition,  features Paul Ramírez Jonas’s Another Day as an addition to its “Time” module. This collection is centered around the fluidity of time that caused by the world’s current pandemic, forcing masses into isolation and dramatically altering routines of daily life. This unpredictability of time is reflected in Jonas’s piece, featuring three television screens that reflect a countdown to sunrise in ninety different cities. This contingency of time is reminiscent of departure times in airport and train stations, and evokes a sense of circularity.  As a part of the mid-pandemic online exhibition, Jonas’s work Another Day, forces the audience to recollect moments of travel in which the wait to depart seemed endless. Now, in a time where most travel is at a halt, we look back on these times where we felt these in actuality short waits were long ones. What was arduous then is an eternity now. The work’s emphasis on geographical difference also alludes to the fact that regions across the globe may be at different stages of recovery but, in the end, we are all waiting for our “sunrise”.

The Guggenheim Circular: Tayeba Begum Lipi’s Love Bed

    The Guggenheim Circular’s online exhibit “Home” is a collection of works that explores the domestic space’s varying meanings and endless contradictions. In it, artists address the home as a site of heritage, relationships, and memory. One such work is Love Bed (2012), in which artist Tayeba Begum Lipi used metal razor blades to construct an ersatz bed, a piece of furniture associated with the intimate space of the home, thereby transforming a functional object into a site of charged psychological reality. Through the material, Lipi brings an everyday household object under scrutiny, highlighting our relationship to the objects around us, especially within the home where these objects reside in close proximity to us and signify our roles within the space through memory association. The artist not only illuminates the dynamic between humans and the objects around them, but also addresses the domestic space as a site of human interaction in which objects, such as the bed, become a mediator or site of interaction. By re-imagining the bed as a dangerous object made with razor blades, Lipi references the gendered violence that occurs in domestic spaces, forcing the viewer to confront this violence by giving the experience physical form, an attribute that makes Love Bed so visceral.

Tayeba Begum Lipi, Love Bed (2012), stainless steel, 31 1/4 x 72 3/4 x 87 inches, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York