Gagosian in Athens.

Gagosian in Athens.

Work from "Three notes from Salalah" by Cy Twombly, inaugural exhibition, Gagosian Rome

Via Art in America (http://tinyurl.com/my5p7f) Gagosian is planning on opening up a new gallery in Athens, Greece. An exhibition entitled "Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves" by Cy Twombly will open on September 25.

Does anyone remember this happening in Rome? A space at Via Francesco Crispi 16 opened an exhibition of Cy Twombly's works, entitled "Three Notes from Salalah," on December 15, 2007. The building, a neoclassical structure made up of the ground and mezzanine levels of a former bank, built in 1921, is an imposing mix of grand vertical columns and impressive facade with bare, white cube galleries on the interior. The atmosphere seems fitting for the emperor of contemporary art.

But where's Gogo going with this? Is he not satisfied to be king of New York and London? Does he crave some classical propaganda, long the crutch of despots? After all, endless monarchs and rulers have copied classical architecture to give themselves some street cred with the peasants. "Look at us!" the buildings say, "we reach back to the Roman empire! Check the dome! Don't we look powerful!?"


Charlemagne did it at Aachen:


So what is Larry up to, conquering the ancient world city by city with new outposts of his contemporary art empire? I can't find the source, but I remember reading around the time of the Rome gallery opening an article that proposed Gogo had opened the space simply to secure the legacy of Cy Twombly, to placate the artist and make sure Twombly knew Gogo was committed. I wouldn't be terribly surprised. Twombly is an artist eminently familiar with the classical, with antiquity, and with his own place in the scope of art history. He has taken inspiration and quotes from Greek and Roman poets and the epics of wars and warriors of the time. See Gogo's description of the Athens show for a soundbite:

"The group of four canvases that comprises the Athens exhibition is inspired by a quote from the 7th century B.C. choral lyric poet Alkman."

Twombly certainly deserves to be shown in context with antiquity, and Rome would be the perfect place to do it. The atmosphere seems poetically perfect for Twombly's re-energized visions of legend. On the other hand, the Rome gallery has already played host to a few other important shows and events, including a Lawrence Weiner exhibition and a much-publicized GREED, A New Fragrance by Francesco Vezzoli. Rome's a rising star in the contemporary art world and Italian contemporary artists are long overdue to rise again from their 70s arte povera hangover.

But Athens!? And another Twombly show!?

I dunno, it seems like it might be a fetish, a power play, inaugurating classical spaces with the contemporary master of the ancient world. Maybe Gogo is a kind of performance artist, excorcising the ancient demons, fighting the aura of myth and the contemporary ennui of these places, using Twombly as a charm as Twombly digests the ghosts and puts them into paintings.

Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves (III), 2009

So on the jumping off point of Larry Gagosian as performance artist conquering his way through antiquity with his artist-warriors: how does art conquer space? How does the inherent aura of a space with thousands of years of history get confronted by the contemporary art within the Rome/Athens galleries? What happens? In my mind Gagosian is appropriating these spaces into the greater historical narrative of his own contemporary art power. Cy Twombly is appropriating antiquity, ancient emotion, into his own paintings. The combination seems pretty striking.

What I love about art so much is that it presents this continuous narrative, an ongoing rush of ideas and aesthetics and work and life. The meta-works by Gogo and Twombly, the reliquary galleries, containers of ancient space that hold new works referencing antiquity, are perfect. They encounter the past and digest it, they encounter the contemporary art world and conquer it. Most of all, it's just badass. Gagosian as spatial architect, gesamptkunstwerk maker.

I'm looking forward to standing in one of these spaces and seeing if I can feel anything struggling in the air around me.

The Bird's Nest.

The Bird’s Nest.

Visiting the Olympic Garden in the Northern part of Beijing these days is a little bit like going to a mausoleum. The park, contrary to its present lack of TV coverage, still exists, scattered with the enormous remains of this year’s Games. The newly opened subway lines, in place to ferry guests back and forth between venues, are newly closed. There are no more reporters, no more athletes, no more photo finishes, no more medals to be awarded, so what’s left? For one thing, there are more fences.

But if you had to choose one building to symbolize the voracious energy of this year’s Olympics, set in a country trying desperately to prove itself to the world, you could do worse than the Bird’s Nest. I would be willing to guess that the majority of people on the planet have seen it at least once, a latticework of steel beams, graphic and iconic, with a characteristic dimpled top.

Countless wide-eyed critics have noted the building’s embrace of “openness”, the way it allows the eye to travel from the exterior to the interior and back freely, a consequence of its exuberant yet simple façade. They cite the fact that the Chinese government consented to this design as a symbol of China’s own increasing “openness”, openness to the West, openness in an economic sense, openness in a social sense. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t take them at their word. There are times when it pays to look a little deeper into the context of such a place instead of linking the façade, literally and figuratively, to the changing ideology of the country it’s built in.

Still, the Bird’s Nest is undeniably a loose building. It’s a little shaky, a little more of a laugh than a frown. The photos that have been widely published, a far off perspective, a wide-angle lens, don’t do the building’s spirit justice. The Bird’s Nest dances around you as you walk through it. A few steps into the stadium, the geometric flatness of the façade becomes a riot of crisscrossing lines going everywhere in all 3 dimensions, a Dr. Suess landscape in a metallic future.


The color palate of the building, a fitting deep red mixed with the gray of steel, also enlivens the interior stadium. A surprisingly small playing field surrounded by seats colored the same deep red, the space doesn’t quite match the epic scale it had on the television screen. More than color though, what brings the Bird’s Nest its exuberance is the slicing interplay between light and shade just inside the façade. The shadows are sharp enough to cut yourself on, and the patches of light beam down in heptagons.

The rhythms play themselves like a symphony of synthesizers.


The Bird’s Nest is a great piece of architecture. Still, we don’t have to take this postmodern smiley face at first blush. The team that designed the stadium is a bit of a surprise: the always great, always willing to embrace the new, architectural firm of Herzog and De Meuron, working with the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a known provocateur who once filmed himself dropping Ming Dynasty vases onto his studio floor, smashing them into pieces. In this more civilized role, he was labeled a 'design consultant'.

The two have worthy reputations as artists, and it’s a credit to the Chinese government that they were willing to support the team in building such an avant garde structure. And yet, looking a little deeper still: in the process of building, Ai Weiwei renounced any involvement with the project, reviling his involvement with the Chinese government and loudly criticizing China’s continued human rights problems.

Herzog and De Meuron haven’t commented apart from reaffirming that Ai Weiwei was an incredible help and influence on the project. Architects are said to be colorless in the face of such international politics as long as the money is there, and many have faced criticism for building in Communist China.


And then there are the fences. The Olympic park is now crisscrossed with high white fences, blocking off the natural flow of people in and around the mammoth structures. A ticket to get into the Bird’s Nest is 50 RMB, about 8 USD, which doesn’t sound like much, but for an afternoon outing it really is prohibitively expensive for a lot of Chinese. Across from the Bird’s Nest is the Water Cube, another 30RMB to even get close to; the fences start 100 feet away.


The problems, the political flashpoints and the are still there, they’re just not immediately clear. The Bird’s Nest is an incredible experience for those that can get in. It’s a shame that some of the artistry and the public accomplishment of the Olympic venues have been lost to politics and profit.

But still, the taste the stadium leaves in your mouth is like skittles.


PS: Hiroshi Sugimoto is my best friend.