Dog and Spider: two sides of contemporary art in two massive sculptures
The Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, the industrious heart of the Biscay region in Spain’s Basque Country, is a funny building. It appeared suddenly, like a futuristic spacecraft, as a ploy to revitalise the city. To this end it has succeeded: Bilbao is now an essential stop in the north of Spain and a major creative city. However, this luminous structure is less a reflection of the local art scene than a vessel filled with big name international contemporary art.
You don’t even need to enter the building to see its contents. At its entrance is a 12.4m West Highland Terrier sculpture, Puppy, an unusual work that changes with the seasons. By that I mean the flowers are swapped out every six months by technicians. The sculpture is entirely organic, aside from the steel skeleton and irrigation system, which the Guggenheim museum, its owner, asked for donations to repair a few years ago.
The creator is Jeff Koons, that American artist with the impish grin of somebody who makes millions selling giant stainless steel balloon animals to the kind of people who would have room in their own mega-mansions for such kitsch monstrosities.
Koons is the living definition of a big name contemporary artist, whose works were destined to fill the walls of contemporary galleries. His art is gaudy, sometimes atrocious, almost always in bad-taste. There is little spiritual about his art, unless you conflate capitalism with the divine (as he clearly does). He began his career by putting vacuum-cleaners in fluorescently-lit boxes — I’m sure he will end it in a coffin fashioned into the likeness of a ferrari, while a chrome-plated King Kong gnaws at the rear. But before that audacious finale, at which point we can expect him to be catapulted into Warhol-like postmodern saintdom, we will have to tolerate the flesh and blood Koons — if, indeed, he is not made of perspex and flax wool.
Criticising his work becomes a slippery game, because it can sound like broadly denouncing features of contemporary art. On the flipside, you couldn’t argue that Koons’ interests — consumerism, mass media and pop culture — aren’t relevant.
This is all subjective anyway. While postmodern art has its critics, it often seems to attract large audiences and — in the case of Koons — even that illusive non-art crowd. Even if you argued it was tacky and impersonal, it would be hard to ignore the popularity of the artworks. This is why it’s so hard to pin down postmodernists for their crimes against art: the very way we consume art, like we consume all media, is postmodern. We can accept that art is a product for the masses and it is still art. We can even accept that art doesn’t need to be material, in the case of light and video installations, and the short-lived NFTs.
I posit that when we are disgusted and annoyed by postmodern art it is not because we are intolerant and backwards thinking, but because we have recognised our worsed instincts in it. Thankfully not all creative human expression has been eclipsed by giant chrome tulips. Just behind Bilbao’s Guggenheim is a sculpture that is both achingly tender and terrifying. Louise Bourgeois’ Maman is a 30 foot tall spider of steel and bronze, certainly not the first thing that comes to mind at the word ‘mother’. Despite its scale, Bourgeois’ sculpture is worlds away from some of the gaudy and lifeless works found inside the museum.
Finding the vocabulary to describe why one work of art is meaningful, and another is annoying, is not always straightfoward. Looking at the artists themselves can help. Koons is a enfant terrible who made his name by shocking the art establishment, capturing the explosion of media and consumerism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He has been successful: everything he makes is a product, to the extent that he now delegates the actual construction of his pieces to other people. There is a charm to this playfulness, this idea that art can just be brash and fun, while being tongue in cheek about what it means. But it wears off quickly. Even Puppy is just a gimmick, a manipulative appeal to things nobody can resist: puppies and flowers. It seems almost laughable that this piece was inspired by the structure of cathedrals.
Bourgeois’ works are also easily recongisable, and certainly something to marvel at. But there are no tricks. She tells us a story about human nature, and it’s not one that depends on vague, self-satisfied commentary. Her story is personal. The arc of her development as an artist reflects her own life — even when dissonant, it is true. Maman reflects Bourgeois’ relationship with her mother, a weaver in the family’s tapestry buisness and formidable figure in her life, who died when the artist was 20. While rich with symbolism, the work doesn’t need context to have an emotional impact on the viewer.
A flat categorisation of all contemporary art as unuanced and lazy is an extreme position, and often based on a lack of understanding between the distinction of modernist and postmodern art. These movements are very different, however they share a rejection of classicalism. Modernism deliberately tried to explore new forms of expression in art, but postmodernism has gone a step further, by challenging the very idea of art as expression. This shift in interests in maintstream art has perhaps negatively effected how the general populace regard any artworks from the mid 20th century onwards. There is an undue burden on viewers to ‘get’ what they are seeing, which can ultimately cement conservative views about art.
Bourgeois is more closely associated with Modernism than perhaps any other movement, but this doesn’t mean we should see her through the lens of the other (mainly male) artists of that art period. She is a reminder that artists can challenge form without being needlessly provocative. Allow yourself to emotionally connect with her pieces and you probably will — even if your feeling is fear and disgust.
Walking around the Guggenheim, a building whose entrances and exits are ambiguous, the dog and spider are a startling contrast. Both sculptures have appeared outside museums around the world: only in Bilbao do they have a dialogue, and it’s not particularly harmonious.
