Bilbao Guggenheim: The Silver Dream Machine

Never mind photographs of Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim. Often gorgeous, they are always hapless, retailing information without truth. The truth is that you have to be there both to see what the building is and to start conjuring with its world-changing portent. Especially if you are an artist, you must go. Find a way. New artists who will matter ten years from now will have been to Bilbao, which awaits their eventual works impatiently. Today's art looks fine there - Gehry's heartfelt solicitude toward artworks singling him out among star-quality modern museum architects, Frank Lloyd Wright emphatically included - but cannot help falling short of the building's significance. The art was conceived before the building had set a new standard of aesthetic possibility. Gehry gets one thinking subversively: Why must things be only okay, at best, as a matter of course? Why can't things be great as a matter of course? Bilbao whispers that contemporary greatness isn't so hard. Out loud, it says that we are out from under past types of greatness and ready for our own type. Go.

The building engulfs even from afar. The experience centres not in the eyes and mind, which are kept in states of incessant and fairly hilarious befuddlement, but in the body. Move a few steps in any direction and you will have created a whole other edifice, almost another world. The building won't have done this, because the building just sits there, a made thing preoccupied with joys of making. (It gives me fond thoughts for the first person who set one stone upon another, inventing a job for Frank Gehry.) You make the Bilbao Guggenheim happen. It is wholly present and active at every point and along every vector. It may yield a gawky impression now and then (I endorse Gehry's publicly stated regret of the cute, lopsided little control-tower-like skylight on top), but never a dull one. You always behold the totality, which is only yours. No one else can guess it until you vacate the spot where you stand. The space of the building is at one with time. It unreels like an epic movie, looped. You are a Movieola.

There is nothing essentially new about body-addressed and time-sensitive, processional architecture, definitive of the Baroque and, in our time, a vernacular principle of shopping malls, airports, and casinos. Before Bilbao, I deemed the better sin bins of Las Vegas the most advanced architecture in the world - unless one counts the intended Postmodern trump card of Peter Eisenman's Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, which is a nightmare of uniformly gawky aspects and, as such, a kind of touchstone. Both Caesar's Palace and the Wexner keep a visitor resolutely centred amid outlandish complexities, though for shallow purposes in the former case and for none at all, except self-celebration of the architect, in the latter. On the whole, architecture keeps lagging behind the artistic movements - Minimalism and Postminimalism, debouching in the immense range of current installational practice - that displace the focus of three-dimensional meaning from object to subject. In Bilbao, architecture catches up and zooms ahead.

Usually one can count on a Richard Serra sculpture, say, to palpate the lurking rigidity and timidity of any architectural setting in which it is placed. Now, for the price of a ticket to Bilbao, one gets to see a colossal Serra, titled Snake (1997), as disarmed as a pet that rolls over to have its tummy rubbed. It's not that the much more colossal space of the museum's West wing (the single biggest gallery in the world, reportedly) dwarfs the Serra, which in its looming involvement of the viewer's body remains perfectly gigantic. It's that the space's enchantingly asymmetrical floor plan and concerto of overhead articulations overlap the Serra's intention like a master teacher smiling down on a promising pupil. The Gehry knows what the Serra knows and then some. With no ambient regularity to work against, but only a superior irregularity, Postminimalism here ends its long march through the institutions. It is ratified and eclipsed. Snake comes off sweet.

As for the interests of old-fangled painting, my lifelong favourite art, I went to Bilbao with dread that fought my knowledge of Gehry's art-reverent soul (long nourished by friendship with hedonistic LA abstractionists like Ed Moses and Charles Arnoldi). Except by the awkward insertion of scale-busting suites of small rooms, how could so Pharaonic a palace fail to mug painting? Not to fret. Gehry finessed the problem in the top three of six over-and-under, classically proportioned rectangular galleries. The vast bottom three, dedicated to Abstract-Expressionist-sized canvases that can survive in them, have big square holes in their ceilings that admit daylight from above. Ascending to the top floor, we find the holes framed, chimney-fashion, by walls that stop short of skylights in vaulted ceilings whose arcs make a downward, protective gesture. Thus, each room is shaped from the middle into four confluent spaces amenable to normal pictures.

Improvisation is in the nature of a contrapuntal scheme with two contradictory major themes and many minor ones (such as continual skirmishing between glass and steel, which chase each other around the place like Tom & Jerry). The dominant motifs, as seen from outside, are free-form in titanium and rectilinear in limestone. These abstractions of irresistible force and immovable object hint variously at collision, stand-off, and weird copulation. Inside (largely faced with suave plaster), the formal schemes interpenetrate and work out their differences. A space may be sober at floor level and bizarre overhead, or vice versa. Organic shape dominates in zones of passage, geometric in places self-hushed for contemplation. There is poise in movement and animation in stillness, with, overall, the gravely unfolding, contained excitement - and the tingling sexiness - of a great adagio pas-de-deux.

In a terrific article in The New York Sunday Times Magazine, architecture critic Herbert Muschamp compared the Bilbao Guggenheim to Marilyn Monroe. I second the antic motion, which evokes a legendary American sexual style: exuberant and pragmatic, ingenuously defiant, anti-mysterious, polar opposite of, for example, Jeanne Moreau. Think of the Monroe nude calendar: optimum T & A crisply lit from all sides on red velvet. The image's efficiency implies an exacting ethic: deliver. The Bilbao Guggenheim is similarly disciplined in its abandon and similarly generous, giving its all everywhere all the time. It isn't exhibitionistic, but performative. It is on. It wouldn't dream of posturing to be admired in a diva way. That would be too scary. What if somebody went away unsatisfied? (If this sounds like an attitude you could condescend to, go to Bilbao and take your best shot. The joint'll murder you.)

Besides post-photographic, the Bilbao Guggenheim is post-metaphorical. Ignore the banal imagery that has sprung up already - 'ship' and 'fish' and 'metallic flower' - to comfort those who, threatened by their own physical senses, use such caricature to retreat into their heads. This building forfends headiness. It is purely actual, all shaped stuff, vamped light, and negative space that rings like bells. Go ahead and play at eidetic fantasy, as with summer clouds, but don't expect the building to be impressed. At the same time, the building is loaded with personality: multiple selves, a kaleidoscope of miens that demand to be identified - not with anything else, but strictly as themselves. It's like when a stranger intrigues you and you yearn to know the arbitrary syllables of his or her name, as if they could tell you anything important. Which of course they can.

I found myself assigning Christian names to particular external views of the building that seem to resolve into complete expressions. Take the following list along as a walking guide when you visit Bilbao, or don't. (It's your trip and, in a fundamental way, your building.)

Emerging from the Calle de Iparraguirre, which for blocks framed a titanium bouquet, I met Tip or Nancy, the nice building. It is lively in its variegated shapes, yes, and eager with enticing options of access - shop and restaurant to the left, administration to the right, and the museum proper a central, dramatic plunge down a narrowing flight of stairs - but timorously modest in scale. It defers to nearby Bilbao buildings as if they were aristocrats, rather than the ho-hum turn-of-the- century bourgeois that they are. This was my first view of the Bilbao Guggenheim. My heart sank a little.

Then I walked to the right, up the slope of a loud, quaking highway bridge that shears over and practically through the building. I saw, below, the railroad yard that burrows underneath and, ahead, the river, toward which the building precipitates from its clifftop street level. I almost fell down. Hello, Heathcliff or Cathy. Wildness occurs. Also hugeness. On the right is the split phallus of a soaring limestone tower (which from downriver cranes out around a curve of the stream like a beckoning arm). To the left are folds and swellings like ecstatic flesh. The bridge appears attacked by the protuburant maw of a titanium-clad, vast, dark window. Looking into it, I recalled the mouth of the whale in Disney's Pinnochio.

I paused every few steps, on the bridge, to look back at the building's unclenching riverfront grandeur, which attains full Beethoven from directly across. (Alas, this viewpoint brings one close to Bilbao's filthy river, a briny tidal slosh in which I saw things floating that I would tell you about except that it would entail having to remember them.) Rex or Gloria, of course.

Keep strolling upriver toward the distant Deusto Bridge and watch the building unravel. From a point short of the bridge, metal and stone elements sprawl apart in mutually ennervating equipoise. Herman or Magda, I presume.

The museum's funniest face addresses the middle of the Deusto Bridge: Stan or Betty, to me. Here four-square stone components stand forth as if they were the building and all that metal folderol were a decorative backdrop. I think of stolid citizens posing for snapshots at a carnival.The Bilbao Guggenheim brings building - but not really architecture, that ancient pursuit - totally into the computer age. Gehry is a traditional designer, doing his thinking in sketches and models. What he exploits in the computer to an unprecedented degree is its capacity to translate any shape at all, according to any structural system at all, into material specifications. I was told that, of some 300,000 structural steel members in the building, roughly 200,000 are unique. Their dimensions and configuration were beamed by Gehry's computer to the fabricator's computer. Arriving on site, the pieces popped together with, I'm also told, a maximum discrepant error of an eighth of an inch. (Old-time draftsmen with sliderules, labouring 20 years, might be expected to get such a blizzard of measurements 20 percent off.) It's not just that Gehry is imaginative. He understands that today's know-how removes practical obstacles to imagination. Why not go fantastic? With the right software, it's no big deal.

Still, genius helps, perhaps especially when technical resources are extreme. Among hindrances to greatness that Gehry eludes is one that technology itself has made ubiquitous in high-toned architecture lately: fetishistic engineering of minutiae, such as every sort of joinery and seam. Oh sure, God is in the details, but what sort of God? Neo-Miesians suggest a tightassed Jehovah. Gehry projects a good-hearted, merciful divinity concerned only that things not leak or collapse. The building's elements of metal, stone, and glass conjoin in ways that are delightful in their nonchalance, like the 'likes' and 'y'knows' of slangy speech. One thing leaves off where another picks up, any old way. Note how the front panes of projecting windows overlap their frames, as if shy of too much precision. To advertise perfection is beneath Gehry's love of imperfect humanity.

As for the titanium, it is a swanky-sounding idea that yields an unassuming reality: loosely interlocked, subtly rumpled sheets with the reflectiveness, as Muschamp notes, of the dull side of tinfoil. Dazzling but not blinding in full sun, the stuff goes moody in any lesser light and, at night, takes on the blacknesses of candle soot and hard coal. Meanwhile, the orangeish, marble-like limestone is straightforwardly lovely, like good manners. Then there is the museum's rather prosaic administrative wing, a half-cylinder in California-ish, deep blue stucco with platitudinously postmodernistic, squarish window treatments (made mildly fetching by Gehry's taste for heavily varnished, yacht-type wood carpentry). It disappointed me at first. But then, what can - or should - anyone do to lyricise bureaucracy? Gehry has set its container off to one side where it can function sensibly without raising overwrought hopes of inspired programming.

The programme of this museum, like its basic conception, will of course belong to Guggenheim fuhrer Thomas Krens and his crew, whose deal with the Basque Country advances Krens' dream of making his institution a high-cultural auxiliary of multinational corporatism. Both parties gambled that Gehry's masterpiece could glamourise a poky city that reminds me of Pittsburgh, another spectacularly sited and economically marginalised town with florid century-old architecture and a downriver plume of world-class industrial ruins. Success seems possible. (Only, they must do something about that awful river.) Among other incidentals, success for the museum will require a steady turnover of displayed art that is good enough. With Krens determining, this means a near-future diet of Postminimal usual suspects: Serra, Mario Merz, Richard Long, Claes Oldenberg, Sol LeWitt, et al. (with the odd inexplicable peccadillo, such as Krens' weakness for Jim Dine). But the building's romance will exacerbate boredom with that old stuff and help to bring about marvellous new stuff soon. Stand in the atrium of the Bilbao Guggenheim, a space of monumental proportions as intimate as a hand, and try to tell me it isn't so.

_{Main image: Guggenheim Bilbao. Courtesy: Getty Images}