Rembrandt Peale
George Washington c.a. 1854
de Young museum, from my phone
Ray Beldner
E Plurbus Unum (after Rembrandt Peale George Washington c.a. 1854)
de Yong museum, from my phone
This afternoon I took a trip to the Herzog and DeMeuron
designed de Yong museum. The kind lady at the admissions informed me that if I waited 15 minutes, I could avoid the $10 charge.
She suggested I visit the tower, a kind of squared-off cork screw. I was instantly reminded of recent models I have seen while working out of Fernando Romero’s LAR. In particular, the twisted tower seems to evoke Romero’s design for Carlos Slim’s sumaya museum.
So I took her advice, took the elevator with strangers, and was given a beautiful panorama to appreciate a remarkable city.
I had time to reflect as I waited to see the permanent exhibit. I thought about the beauty of nature, about the possibilities that cities offer to negotiate spaces at different times, on different scales. And mostly, I thought about the people that were in the tower, in that museum.
They weren’t there to make money. They didn’t care about red states or blue states. They were there to be open to new experiences, to listen, as it were, to the works. That struck me, perhaps because outside of New York, the art scene seems slightly less capitalized.
The space and building evoked a sense of turning, perhaps turning on its head, or turning and twisting to see or look in new directions. Or, as happened to me, to turn and look at the people that surround me in the United States of America.
As I looked at George Washington made of dollar bills, I had to ask, is this work a tribute to the power and potential of this system? Or is it a stern warning: that if we do not begin to separate the extreme flow of large corporate private interest in structures and frameworks, we will be left with nothing but crushing “freedom towers” fed by silverstieinian and SOM greed, powered by nationalist sentiments like Palin’s, celebrated in Speerian fashion.
