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.