The Blanton Museum/Austin, TX

Nothing like a bomb threat to liven up a museum visit.

There we were, at 12:30 pm, passing the Attic pottery and entering Modern and Contemporary Art in the new home of the Blanton Museum in Austin, Tex., when a young polo-shirted, chino'd musem guard asked us to calmly exit the building. Most of the guards were, or professed to be, clueless about why the museum was suddenly closing, but one guard said there'd been a bomb threat that had apparently been found to not be credible. I guess protocol had to be followed. So out we went and across the street, vouchers for a return visit in hand. Happily nothing came of the threat that I could tell.

After years of controversy, the museum has emerged to be a good looking, but not very remarkable addition to the UT campus. (The photo above, by the way, shows a lamppost outside the Blanton where everyone seems to deposit their entrance stickers, as well as those from the Texas State History Museum.) The design of the museum doesn't make much of a statement, but its limestone facade and white, open interior with diagonal skylights is pleasant, if not wildly interesting. It was supposed to be designed by modernist architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, whose projects include the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London, but the UT System Board of Regents didn't think the design fit with the surrounding architecture--too bold, accounts have said.

The UT Master Plan calls for building in the Spanish Renaissance style, using red-tiled roofs and limestone (given that, why ask minimalist-minded modernist superstars to design your building?). After the architects and the board when back and forth, the architects quit in 1999. There's a very telling back and forth between one member of the Board of Regents and Herzog here. One of my favorite points Herzog makes is that "universities should be places that encourage change and that value innovation more than imitation." The member of the Board of Regents, who clearly hates the modern buildings already on UT's campus, replies, "We are not willing to turn our campus into a proving ground for experimental modern design." There's a good Austin Chronicle article on the controversy here. The Dean of the Architecture school resigned in protest over the whole mess (though he's still on the faculty, just not the dean anymore). The Board of Regents went with the Boston firm of Kallmann McKinnell and Wood instead.

While the style of the building may be conservative, it has some very cool and very thought-provoking art installations. There's an amazing one by Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles, called "Missao/Missoes (How to Build a Cathedral)." (His other work is worth checking out on google images.)













It is composed of a black-veiled area that you enter to look up at a ceiling of 2000 hanging cow bones with a string of 800 communion wafers stretching down from the middle and connecting the bones with 600,000 bright copper pennies.

A fascinating bit of information found on the web (you can find the post here, but this is basically it): "Built in 1987...the artwork is unique in the fact that it changes wherever it goes. The artwork is a floating piece and the coins are the smallest denomination that the country it is shown in has. In the Blanton, where the piece is currently showing, pennies are used for the coins. In another country, however, the coins may be silver or gold colored instead of copper. Cildo Meireles illustrates this cathedral as a combination of the coins representing wealth, agriculture represented by the bones, and religion represented by the wafers. "The installation draws attention to the fact that the conquest of the Americas was as much about economics as it was about religion or saving souls" (Blanton)."

Another very cool installation is one called "From Texas with love 2002." It's by Emily Jacir, who was born in Amman, Jordan. (Good article about her recent project on a very interesting blog here.) She asked Palestinians living in Israel what they would choose to listen to if they could get into a car and drive for an hour without being stopped at checkpoints (what seems so easy to us is such an impossibility for them). There's a monitor showing video footage of a vast expanse of West Texas desert through a car's windshield, and a few iPods at the monitor play the songs the Palestinians chose. These are some of them; I focused on the Western songs, which made up a decent chunk of the choices:
-"Freedom," by Jimi Hendrix
-"The Thrill is Gone," by B.B. King
-"Ishta tellak" (sorry, can't get the right accents in there) by Fairuz (Fairuz was very popular)
-"Wild World," by Cat Stevens
-"Fly Me to the Moon," by Frank Sinatra
-"Patria," by Ruben Blades
-"Autumn Leaves," by Tony Bennett
-"Get Out The Map," Indigo Girls
-"I Can See Clearly Now," Drifters
-"Message to Love," Hendrix
-"Biladi Biladi" by Sayed Darwish
-"Material Girl," by Madonna

Both of these installations are part of the museum's great Modern and Contemporary Art collection, which features a lot of paintings from the Suida-Manning collection (formed by a family of art historians). The Blanton takes a very interesting approach in mixing its Americas in an "exploration of the frontier and historic notions of what 'American' means." (Interesting article on that here.)

Here's how they do that, in a nutshell: After a gallery of works depicting the American West, complete with Frederick Remington paintings and sculptures, and some incredibly realistic paintings by Henry F. Farny, like "Council of the Chiefs" (which is not the one shown here, by the way) you move into the America/Americas permanent exhibit, which examines "how Latin American and American artists responded to and incorporated European strains of modernism in the early 20th Century." It presents a work by Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia near a work by Arshile Gorky, and a Mark Rothko work (I had no idea that he was born in Dvinsk, Russia) by a David Alfaro Siqueiros painting of the torture of Cuauhtemoc (sp??), with the red and yellow fire painted in thick industrial paint that reaches out of the canvas. The painting tags tell you when and where the person was born, where they lived and worked for what period, when they died and where. My only wish: I'd like to know what the museum paid for each piece.

My wonderful 12-year-old nephew, Liam, had a favorite at the show, this painting by Kazuya Sakai, called "Filles de Kilimanjaro III (Miles Davis)". (I have to check with my equally wonderful niece, Jessie, to find out her favorite.) The painting is mentioned in this article, which notes that "It’s hard to get more international than Sakai, who was born to Japanese parents in Buenos Aires and lived in Mexico for a decade before the university invited him to teach as a visiting artist. He never returned to Argentina and died in Dallas. He is a Latin American artist of Japanese heritage painting a piece for an American jazz musician."

One quirky thing the museum does in its free audio guide is have Austin business owners (as well as UT professors, who make insightful comments) comment on paintings. So while you're looking at Domenico Paola's "Allegory of Youth" you're hearing the owner of Austin hair salon Anew comment on the woman in the painting and the symbolism of the hourglass. For him, the hairstyling client is the canvas, we learn, and God's gift to us is that he lets our eyesight get worse as we grow older so we can't see our decay so clearly, ha ha ha. He shows up again later, commenting on the subject's dress in "Portrait of a Man," by Nicolas de Largilliere. His focus here is on the "incredible center part" in the man's hair, and how it centers you, the viewer, with the person's body and face. O-kay. Thanks for that.

We also get a local landscape designer commenting on the flowers in Sebastiano Ricci's "Flora." "That's a yadda yadda flower, native to yadda yadda," etc. I like the attempt to connect the local community with the art in such a direct way, but the comments were not enlightening. Maybe a better idea would be to have a two-tier audio, where pressing No. 1 gets you the curator/expert's comments and then pressing No. 1a gets you the local businessperson's additional comments. Of course, here I am, blathering on about my views on art and I'm no expert, but people who are reading this have actively chosen to read it (perhaps with my prodding, but nevertheless!).

Additional stray Blanton info:

Right across the street is the Bob Bullock (yes, Sandra is related to him, or so someone told me) Texas State History Museum. You can also walk to the Ransom Center, which is another good UT art collection. And the State Capital is nearby.

There will be more Blanton to love soon: Once an adjoining building that will house a museum store, cafe, auditorium, classrooms and office space is completed in 2007, the Blanton complex will top Harvard as the largest university art complex, at some 180,000 square feet. Right now, it has more than 17,000 works of art in its collection. The museum site tells us that "In 1988, the Blanton established the first full-time curatorship in Latin American art in the country. The move solidified the role of the art of Latin America in the collection, and the collection continues to draw significant gifts to this day." The writer James Michener and his wife Mari have been big art contributors and financial supporters of the museum for decades.