A-Voidance

The hollow that exists in the upside-down vanilla soft-serve that is the Guggenheim is getting filled up and topped for the building’s 50th birthday. In the artistic imagination, that is. Just under two hundred artists, architects and designers have rendered their visions for the space for the exhibit “Contempating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum.” There’s a full online component to contemplate the contemplation.

Some proposals inhabit the entire space (quite literally in Luzinterruptus’ “A Museum Inhabited 24 Hrs.”) or permeate it with nothing more than a single beam of light (IwamotoScott Architecture’s “LightCone”) or distort the collapsible-cup shape itself (Jurgen Mayer’s “Conspiracy”). Maybe because my first memory of the Guggenheim is of my father making a seat out of his arms so that two-year-old me could get a front-row view of the art in its airy aerie, but my favorite is Pierre Huyghe’s “Proposal for One-Year Parade” that imagines an annual-length parade wending its way from the top down.

As imaginative as the visions are, I have to say I’m glad that Frank Lloyd Wright’s positive negativity is what stands. If that void didn’t exist, after all, there’d be only one possibility to contemplate, not infinite ones.

“Contempating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum” is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through April 28.


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