Sherri Geldin, Director, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio
I am delighted to be here not only to join this array of distinguished colleagues and experts in the field, but also because Katharine has been such a wonderful museum colleague for so many years, and it is an honor to be invited to comment on this process. I think most of you know that the Wexner Center for the Arts, unlike most of the institutions being discussed here today, is a multidisciplinary institution-one in which the visual arts are not privileged over performing art, film, video, architecture, and design. So we really are something of a one-stop "cultural shop," at least as we like to describe it.
Just a few weeks ago, we gave our annual Wexner Prize to the architect Renzo Piano, whose work I am sure that many of you are familiar with. Renzo joined a group of very distinguished previous recipients, ranging from Louise Bourgeois to Martin Scorcese to John Cage and Merce Cunningham. The occasion of his visit to Wexner Center, which was his first visit to Columbus, allowed me to reflect a bit on my own relationship to architecture throughout my career. And, it is fair to say that when it comes to the world of architecture, I have led an impossibly charmed life. My entire professional career has been spent in exceptional buildings by extraordinary architects, beginning with Frank Gehry's Temporary Contemporary to Arata Isozaki's Museum of Contemporary Art building in Los Angeles, and now, of course, Peter Eisenman's Wexner Center. So, in a way, I don't what it means to professionally inhabit a prosaic space.
I am really delighted to be able to say that. I think throughout those many years of working with truly amazing talents in the world of architecture and also being able to program the spaces they create, I have developed a particular respect for the challenges that architects face-alongside, of course, those of their museum clients-in not only responding to programmatic and functional needs as articulated by museum staffs and boards, but also in being able to envision not necessarily future decades or centuries, but certainly the next ten minutes along with the last ten minutes. What I would like to spend a few minutes doing is to look at some slides of the Wexner Center, primarily focusing on the exhibition spaces, for this audience and for this particular subject, perhaps dispelling a few myths that might exist out there about the idiosyncratic Peter Eisenman building and its many challenges. I'd also like to simply encourage everybody involved in the process here to allow for the surprises, to allow for those things that you can't possibly imagine at the outset of a project like this, but which throughout the flow of communication between architect and client, and through the kinds of discoveries that you make together, can actually create a result that no one could have anticipated.
This is the exterior view of the Wexner Center for those of you who haven't been there. It sits on a hallowed space at The Ohio State University, known as The Oval, a central campus gathering spot. To the right, the rather large stone building is the Mershon Auditorium, which predates the Wexner Center by some four decades but which is now under our programmatic and administrative auspices. It houses a 2,500-seat theater. Between that building and the School of Music, which you don't see in this picture, Peter Eisenman wedged the Wexner Center-in some respects a ghost-like reference back to the building that once upon a time occupied the site of the Wexner Center, which was in fact an armory building that was very much in the guise of a medieval fortress. So, contrary to the kind of references that Fred Wilson talked about, about the royal aspirations of some museums, this design was really meant to recall the prior architectural iteration on this site.
The armory burned down in the late 1950s. I should say here that the Wexner Center was Peter Eisenman's first publicly scaled building; he had done houses and some other small-scale projects prior to this commission, but when the Wexner Center opened in 1989 it was certainly his largest commission to date. And, as many of you know, Peter is someone who is as intellectually and cerebrally driven as he is aesthetically driven. He was intrigued that the campus planning grid and the city planning grid converged at a 12¼-degree angle, which was thereafter echoed in every aspect of the Wexner Center's design, and also by the combination of past and present-symbolized in the references to the fortress-like façade at one elevation, and in the Sol Lewitt-like scaffolding structure that runs the length of the building's east façade. That is how Peter chose to evoke an institution which is always in the process of evolving and emerging, and certainly that's appropriate for an institution of contemporary art which is meant not only to house existing work, but also to be a place where artists residencies allow for new work as well.
Because Peter invited that kind of dialogue between art and architecture, one of the first commissions that the Wexner Center undertook was this piece by Chris Burden, whose response to the Eisenman building was to make it even more fortress-like by adding crenellations at the top and turning it into much more of a medieval castle. More recently, in fact just last week, we opened an exhibition called As Painting, which brings together the work of 26 European and American artists exploring painting in all of its guises. And here is a commission done by Daniel Buren, who is most known over the past decades for his striped interventions in all manner of places. So the fact is that while we consider this a landmark building, and one we are very proud of, we consider ourselves a contemporary arts center where what we do is precious, rather than holding the building sacred and untouchable.
Now we delve into the gallery spaces, those famous (or infamous) spaces that both Fred Wilson and I fully expected on our first visits to find perplexing. I will say that when I first came to Columbus to interview for my position, having spent all of my time in Isozaki's and Frank Gehry's spaces, it was slightly dizzying and disorienting. But the fact is that over the last many years, the center's curatorial staff-alongside the artists with whom we have worked so closely-have found ways to really spar with Peter's design, and have come to have enormous respect for the kind of potential that he embedded in the building. This slide is of a wallpaper show that we did, and this particular room is by Robert Gober. What follows takes you through a few different kinds of exhibitions. This is a recent exhibition from a whole series called Suite Fantastique. This slide shows a portion of Perfect Acts of Architecture, an architectural drawing show. Interspersed in the galleries were furniture pieces by Scott Burton. Here again are examples of ways in which we really allow the building to be not just a neutral backdrop-because, of course, nobody could claim the Eisenman building a neutral backdrop-but one in which artists are encouraged to really take the building on, and respond to it. This is another shot of the larger gallery where Perfect Acts of Architecture was installed. As you can see, these are not rectilinear spaces. They have flooring materials that change midstream, and not a single right angle to be found anywhere. There is an entire curtain wall running the full length of the building. But we have simply found a way to use the building in its raw state when appropriate, and to build more traditional gallery spaces within it to hang what might be termed more conventional exhibitions. This is a shot from the current exhibition As Painting.
This isn't our café. This is yet another gallery installation, by Thai artist Rikrit Tiravanija, who you may know, likes to merge art and life in his ongoing project. This was actually an installation in which, among other things, on select days of the week the artist and his assistants cooked curry in the galleries and visitors were invited to get a bowl, sit down, and talk. And then in that very space, in a completely different iteration, was the Julie Taymor exhibition, which we did on the occasion of the center's tenth anniversary as a means of underscoring its multidisciplinary nature. Julie Taymor is a designer and director of theater, opera, and film, perhaps known most notably for her triumphant work on Broadway with The Lion King. But this was a tableau to illustrate an opera that very few people have seen-her rendition of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. As you can see, the galleries allowed for a kind of theatrical set to be created that was perfectly suited to an ambitious installation of this type. And we have found over and over again that in fact the gallery spaces, although at first glance somewhat daunting, and definitely idiosyncratic, have really inspired all of us who work in them to come up with ever more creative solutions. We learn new things about the building all the time.
In closing, I would like to both echo and respond to a few comments that have been made earlier today. I think it is fair to say that while there is no one ideal gallery space -- every institution has particular needs and particular works that it wants to showcase -- all galleries should have a distinct presence. Various kinds of collections demand various kinds of viewing experiences. Peter Marzio and John Walsh and many other museum directors over the past two decades in this boom of museum construction have endlessly debated all of the possibilities for creating appropriate spaces that are welcoming to visitors, that aren't fatiguing and imposing but rather exhilarating. That doesn't, however, mean passive and neutral spaces are the only option. In fact, bold design should be encouraged. I think what I took most to heart from Ada Louise Huxtable is the fact that there is, as we speak, so much extraordinary creativity in the architectural community. Each architect on your list will take you on a very different kind of adventure. I don't think we have been invited here to rally for any particular candidate, but rather to encourage all of you to allow for all of those unexpected moments that might occur as you go through this process. If you need to be careful what you ask for, you also need to be careful about what you don't ask for. I think strong communication between architect and client is the most important aspect of all this. It should also be a huge amount of fun, no matter how challenging and exhausting. You all have an opportunity here, because of the extraordinary resources that the museum currently has. I couldn't agree more with Peter's comments about celebrating what you already have and not trying to obliterate it. I also think it's crucial to identify someone who can work with you not just as an architect but also as a master-planner-someone who can help you conceive of this as a total project that is both respectful of what's here but also radical in its potential for the future, because that is what the times require.