#rem koolhas

And print!

De Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2013 by OMA

CCTV Building Section

TAKE ME HOME

Countryside: The Future, on view now at the Guggenheim, doesn’t feel like an exhibition. It feels like a textbook projected onto the museum’s iconic curving surfaces.

Working with graphic designer Irma Bloom, curators AMO, Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal have taken many bytes of research, analysis and opinion, and printed it on curtains hanging along the museum’s outer wall, and, directly, in vinyl text running along its ceiling and guardrails. It’s a whole lot of data and a whole lot of Helvetica.

Typically visiting the gallery on a Friday evening is the perfect dinner party pre-game; the scene is chic, poised, knowing. Last week the crowd, diminished by pandemic restrictions, was listless, reading wall texts dutifully, but ultimately, as they reached the top, worn out. They wanted a show and got a lecture.

True confession: I didn’t read everything, I didn’t even look at everything. But what was apparent was a nostalgia for the pre-digital and pre-technological. The first wall text, at the base of the ramp, juxtaposes a photo of three rosy-cheeked teenage Russian farm girls from 1905, standing and offering plates of food, with another of contemporary workers inside an industrial hothouse. It reads: The countryside is a stable environment where everyone—man, woman, child—knows their place. There is a pride in costume and products. . . The sentiment is comically retrograde. One of the last images of the show, at the top of the ramp, is a poster of Koolhaas standing with group of men and women in dark suits, surveying an enormous spread of farmland, possibly pitching ideas. It’s a tired image of the modern architect as cultural savior, particularly sad because Koolhaas has the power to subvert it.

The strongest shows at the Guggenheim engage the sculptural drama of the architecture. Giacometti’s figures, Frank Gehry’s architectural models, and Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture all shone within the gallery’s curving walls and tilted floors. At Countryside there are some small objects on stands along the ramp but almost all the material is, both literally and metaphorically flat; it doesn’t provoke. There are some small objects (a drone, a satellite, and bale of hay) hung in a single cable above the ground floor pool, but they’re swallowed by the monumental space. If Rem Koolhaas wants to turn back to a world that is more primal and richly physical, why didn’t he give us an exhibit that is?